Unscripted Small Business Podcast

Influencer Pre-Flight SOP: Fix Your Site Before the Creator Posts

Influencer Pre-Flight SOP: Fix Your Site Before the Creator Posts

This is a Small Business SOP — a free, do-this-today standard operating procedure pulled from a real operator on the Unscripted Small Business podcast. This one comes from Sherri Langburt of BabbleBoxx, the bootstrapped founder of an influencer marketing agency that has been running creator campaigns since before the word “influencer” existed.

It is the checklist she runs before a single creator posts — the one that catches the empty shelf, the dead landing page and the discount code that does not exist while you can still fix them. Run it this week.

Sherri Langburt quote card: If it's happening to the influencer, it's happening to the consumer.

The Play — One Line
Walk your own campaign the way the creator will — criteria, inventory, geos, landing pages, promo, and the search result — before anybody posts. Every point of friction the influencer hits is a point of friction your customer is about to hit.

Why this matters

Sherri’s rule is the whole SOP compressed into one sentence: “If it’s happening to the influencer, it’s happening to the consumer.”

She was describing a failure she sees constantly. “The brand says, it’s available in these 10 stores in this geo. And the influencers are… going from place to place to place.” The creators you paid are not marketing assets. They are your first cohort of real customers — and they walk into the broken experience days before your paying customers do, while there is still time to fix it. Treat every complaint from a creator as a live QA ticket on the customer journey, not as a creator being difficult.

The failure case — told by host Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy brought this one to the conversation from a talk he saw at MozCon, the SEO conference in Seattle. A brand “hired… a dozen influencers to promote these pink pants. The problem was that the e-commerce site wasn’t ready and they ran out of pink pants in the first 10 minutes. And so Google delisted their e-commerce listing and popped up their competitors because they were out of stock.”

A multi-million-dollar campaign generated exactly the demand it was supposed to generate — and then handed a large slice of that demand to its competitors. The creators did their job. Nobody pre-flighted the store.

The numbers behind the play

Everything that went wrong with the pink pants was knowable in advance. That is what makes it a checklist and not a postmortem.

12
creators already live when the site broke
10 min
how long the inventory lasted
10
stores in a geo claim nobody had verified
6
checks that would have caught it

When to run it

Once per campaign, in the window between signing the creators and the first post going live — ideally five to seven days out, while inventory, pages and promo codes can still be changed. Re-run steps 3, 4 and 6 on the morning of launch. This is not a quarterly audit. It is a checklist one named person completes and dates, once, before you let go of the rope.

Have these in hand before you start: the creator brief (every claim, code and URL it tells creators to say), store-level inventory for every geo named in that brief, the promo calendar, the product rollout calendar, and a phone — because a phone is what your customer is going to use.

The 6 Steps

1
Name your criteria before you name a creator
Write down what this campaign is actually for: sales, ratings and reviews, or awareness. Each one implies a different creator and a different measurement, and Sherri notes there are “a lot of nuances with ratings and reviews” specifically. Do this first and you cannot let “it went well” get defined after the fact.
“I think the first thing is really realizing your criteria and understanding what your criteria are.”
2
Match the creator to the purchase, then ask for the sales data
Some creators are pure awareness and top-of-funnel and will never move a unit — “and it’s not going to move a sale, and some people is going to move a sale.” If the sale is your metric, ask a creator directly whether they have trackable data on sales before you sign. A long-consideration purchase needs a different creator, and a different expectation, than an impulse buy.
“Selling a pool is a lot harder than selling mascara.”
3
Verify inventory and geos store by store
Pull real, store-level stock for every location named in the brief — not a distribution list, not last quarter’s planogram. Sherri’s recurring nightmare is exactly this: a brand claims ten stores in a geo, and the creators drive place to place finding nothing. If that is the creator’s afternoon, it is about to be your customer’s afternoon.
“So understanding where your inventory is based… making sure that the geos are correct.”
4
Open every landing page in the brief yourself
Click every URL the brief hands to creators, on a phone, as a consumer. Confirm the page exists, the product is in stock, and the page says the same thing the creator is about to say. One dead or off-message page quietly converts everything you paid for into a bounce.
“Making sure that all of your landing pages are correct.”
5
Make the promo identical everywhere
The discount the creator announces has to be the discount the consumer finds — on the site, in the store, in email, in the app. A promo that only exists inside the brief does not read to a customer as a mix-up. It reads as a bait and switch, and it costs you the trust the creator just lent you.
“The influencers are here talking about this and there’s a discount, and then consumers go somewhere else and there’s no discount.”
6
Get the internal teams talking — then go check the search result
Put the product rollout calendar, the promo calendar and the creator brief side by side so they physically cannot contradict each other. Sherri’s other failure mode is a new product rolling out here while the creators are talking about something else entirely.
Then add the step most brands skip. Social gives your audience no hard URL to click, so they go and search for the thing the creator was wearing — which makes your organic result the silent dependency of the entire campaign. Search the product yourself, on a clean browser, and make sure what comes back is you, in stock, at the right price.
“Any groups that need to be talking to each other are talking to each other to make sure it’s all cohesive.” — Sherri Langburt“On TikTok… you can’t have hard URLs there, you know, so people are Googling to find the pants that so-and-so wore.” — Jeremy Rivera

Take the whole SOP with you

Two printable pages: the play, the failure case, all six checks, and a fill-in pre-flight checklist. No email required.

📥 Download the Influencer Pre-Flight SOP (PDF)

Listen & watch

This SOP is distilled from Sherri Langburt’s episode on the Unscripted Small Business podcast — which also covers why small local brands have the biggest influencer opportunity, why an AI-generated creator is “just an ad unit,” and the channels nobody books:

More operator SOPs, every week.

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