Momfluencers With Chelsea Clark

Mom Creators, Brand Campaigns, and the Truth About Influencer Marketing with Chelsea Clark of Momfluence

Think influencer marketing is only for brands with big budgets and creators with massive followings? Chelsea Clark is here to change your mind — and she’s got the receipts.

Meet Chelsea Clark, Founder and CEO of Momfluence

Chelsea Clark is the founder and CEO of Momfluence, a leading influencer marketing agency specializing in mom creator-led campaigns for family, lifestyle, and consumer brands. With a deep understanding of the modern mom consumer, Chelsea helps brands build trust, relevance, and measurable growth through authentic partnerships with top mom creators across North America.

A former hospitality entrepreneur, Chelsea built Momfluence to bridge the gap between brands and real-life storytellers who influence purchasing decisions every day. Under her leadership, the agency has managed thousands of creator campaigns for major brands, delivering high-performing content across Instagram and TikTok. She is passionate about helping brands move beyond ads and into culture through the power of creator communities.

On this episode of the Redefine Business Podcast, Brittni sits down with Chelsea to pull back the curtain on how influencer marketing actually works — for brands, for creators just getting started, and for everyone in between.

The “Cilantro” of Professions

Right out of the gate, Chelsea nails something that anyone who has spent time in the marketing space already knows: the word “influencer” is polarizing. You either love it or you roll your eyes. But whether or not the label resonates, the reality is hard to argue with. Traditional advertising has fundamentally shifted. People are watching less linear TV, skipping ads, and turning to social media for recommendations, entertainment, and education. For brands that want to be seen, showing up in that space — through creators who have already built trust with their audience — is no longer optional.

What Chelsea is quick to point out, though, is that the creators she works with often don’t even want the influencer label themselves. They think of themselves as content creators: people who are good at making engaging videos and building communities around things they genuinely care about. That distinction matters, because authenticity is the whole game.

How Momfluence Works: The Middleman Model

At its core, Momfluence operates as a managed marketplace between brands and mom creators. A brand comes to Chelsea with a goal — say, promoting a new jacket, launching a product, or building awareness in a specific category — and Momfluence handles everything from campaign strategy to creator recruitment, communication, follow-up, and final delivery.

With a network of roughly 9,000 mom creators, the agency sends campaign opportunities out to their community and manages the process from start to finish. That end-to-end management is the real value proposition, because as Chelsea explains, working with a large group of independent creators — who are often juggling 20 to 30 campaigns simultaneously on top of, you know, actually being moms — requires a serious amount of coordination. Brands get the content they need without the operational headache, and creators get matched with campaigns that fit their niche.

The range of clients is wide. Chelsea works with both major brands and small businesses, though she admits some of the most fun campaigns come from the smaller companies finding their footing.

From Restaurants to Costa Rica to Creator Marketing

Chelsea’s path to founding Momfluence is anything but linear, which makes it all the more interesting. After more than a decade in the restaurant industry — including selling house-made salads and wraps in grocery and health food stores — she sold her restaurants and moved her family to Costa Rica. Needing remote work that could generate real income, she pivoted into distributing kids’ products to retailers in Toronto.

Through that work, she kept running into the same problem: her small business clients needed help connecting with influencers, but everything available was either too expensive or not the right fit. So she decided to build the solution herself — even though she had no Instagram account at the time and freely admits she wasn’t tuned into the influencer world at all. What she did have was a love of being the behind-the-scenes operator, a knack for organization, and a genuine fascination with how brands convince people to buy things in an impossibly competitive marketplace.

That combination turned out to be exactly the right foundation.

You Don’t Need a Huge Following to Get Paid

One of the most important things Chelsea covers in this episode is a misconception that holds a lot of aspiring creators back: the idea that you need a massive following to make money. The reality is much more accessible than that.

The entry point for most new creators is UGC — user generated content, or more accurately, creator-generated content made for brands. In this model, brands aren’t paying for your reach. They’re paying for your content. Think of it as replacing a traditional photo or video shoot with something more authentic and far more affordable. A creator with 500 followers who can produce a compelling, well-lit, natural-feeling product video is genuinely valuable to a brand that needs content for ads, their website, or social channels.

Chelsea’s network includes creators ranging from a few hundred followers all the way up to 300,000 or 500,000. The key takeaway is that you can start building a paid content career at virtually any size, as long as your content quality is there.

Where to Start: Chelsea’s Honest Platform Advice

When it comes to platform strategy, Chelsea doesn’t sugarcoat it. If she were starting from scratch today with the goal of making money as a creator, she would go straight to TikTok — and specifically TikTok Shop’s affiliate program. The reason is simple: TikTok’s algorithm is far more likely to surface content from new or small accounts than Instagram’s, and the TikTok Shop affiliate model allows creators to earn commissions on products they feature without needing a brand deal or a big audience. The main caveat is that you do need to build to around 1,000 followers before accessing the affiliate features, but the path there is more achievable on TikTok than on Instagram.

For brands, though, Instagram is still the more reliable and polished environment. So the advice really does depend on which side of the equation you’re on.

The conversation also touched on something Brittni is passionate about: the importance of building an email list alongside any social presence. Social platforms change, algorithms shift, and audiences can disappear overnight — but an email list is something you own. It’s a point Chelsea seconds immediately.

AI, Authenticity, and the Current State of Marketing

No marketing conversation in 2024 is complete without talking about AI, and this one is no exception. Chelsea shares that she spent years doing heavy outbound email outreach — at one point sending 300 emails a day with three people dedicated to the effort — but in the past several months, inbound inquiries have picked up dramatically. She attributes a significant part of that shift to AI-powered search tools like Google’s Gemini surfacing Momfluence in summaries and recommendations.

Both Chelsea and Brittni agree that AI is a powerful tool, but it doesn’t replace your voice or your brand. Chelsea uses ChatGPT for personal tasks and Claude for business, but is careful to rewrite and personalize anything AI generates. The tell? Those suspiciously perfect em-dashes and overly polished comma usage that signal a post was written straight out of a prompt without any human editing. The lesson is one worth repeating: AI is a research and drafting tool, not a ghostwriter.

How to Work with Momfluence

Whether you’re a brand looking to run a creator campaign or a mom interested in getting started as a content creator, here’s how to connect with Chelsea and her team:

Creators can apply to join the Momfluence network at any follower count. There’s no fee to join — the agency takes 5% only when a creator gets paid, which keeps the barrier to entry low and the risk essentially zero. If you’re just starting out and unsure what to charge or how to position yourself, the Momfluence Instagram is a great place to start, with content and ideas specifically geared toward budding creators. You can also DM the team or reach Chelsea directly on LinkedIn.

For brands, Momfluence handles the full campaign lifecycle — from sourcing and vetting creators to managing communication and delivering final content.

Connect with Chelsea and Momfluence

Ready to explore influencer marketing from either side of the equation? Find Chelsea and the Momfluence team here:

• Instagram: @momfluence (reach out via DM with questions)
• LinkedIn: Chelsea Clark
• Email: Available through the Momfluence website