How do you avoid paying too much for influencer marketing campaigns?

A detailed background check is critical when working with any talent - ensuring that they are an authentic fit to partner with your brand but also share values in their day-to-day lives that you believe will align to your customers. Researching is critical and multiple PR agencies/tools will be able to provide detailed insights into conversations, partnerships and events that talent has been a part of in the past - if investment/budget is an issue here, manually check social media accounts and spend time conversing with the talent/their agent to ensure that you are comfortable prior to moving forward. Consider at this stage what your 'plan B' could be if something does emerge post live - what steps could you take to best protect the brand?

When considering which influencers are right for your brand start with their level of influence and authentic fit with your brand. An influential influencer has found their voice and ignites action in their audience. To determine authentic fit, think about a natural fit, would your brand fit naturally into their conversation? An influencer will work best in your long term strategy as action and trust take time.

One piece a lot of small businesses don’t consider is the local community. Regardless of what you are selling I am willing to bet you have at least a handful of local people who have solid followings in your community and even beyond. Don’t forget to consider them when thinking about influencer campaigns!

One thing I've learnt while negotiating with creators and influencers is to offer value to them, the value they want to see/have when collaborating. For some it is money and for some it is brand partnership itself. Influencer marketing is growing at a phenomenal pace and brands are willing to pay, but only creators whose data show high engagement rate and quality, only they should be paid generously. As influencer marketers, it is our responsibility to know how to measure the value we can provide to creators and leverage that into negotiating and getting the cost down. Each creator is unique and has different motivations when collaborating, hence use that when collaborating.

I agree with most of the great comments — Although brand partnership must include payment. Without this key element how can “influencers” afford to work with the brand. In addition I think running some paid ads targeted to your ideal audience is extremely important to maximise reach.

You have to treat this as a partnership. Work together to ascertain what is both feasible and achievable. At the end of the day you both need positive results and the definition of results has to be defined.

Whether it's through payment, provision of gifts or exposure - this is a business partnership and thus clear, achievable goals and metrics must be set and agreed upon before any work commences. Ensure that a written, signed contract is exchanged between both parties that clearly explains what the expectations are and for how long it will last - when considering social media marketing, ensure that you have agreed usage rights whether this is indefinite use or for a specific time period. Take a step back and ensure that your goals are delivering rewards and consider adding additional SMART targets with incentives should your talent desire to go 'the extra mile' to deliver even greater benefits across the partnership agreed.

In addition to setting SMART goals, it's important to choose the right metrics to track your performance. Metrics such as impressions, reach, clicks, conversions, or ROI can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign.

As mentioned in Section 2, setting clear expectations that are SMART is key to avoid upsetting/disappointing situations. Consider embedding into your agreement time with your brand manager to ensure that education is provided around tone of voice, brand guidelines and to reiterate the expectations of the partnership with the talent. Perhaps you agree to build in a specific number of 'amends' that can be made prior to posting? This will ensure that your brand image is best protected and minimizes risk by giving you an opportunity to feedback to the talent prior to content being published. It is important to remember however that we should empower talent to tackle briefs in their own way, enabling them to be creative and innovative!

Long term partnerships have several benefits, but my favorite is creative trust. By having the brand and creator committing to an agreement, they have more room to create ideas, test new verticals, and work closely to find innovative ways to accomplish your collective goals. It’s like magic. If you have established trust, you will have some of the most talented people on the planet presenting you ideas for creative content, providing reasons they think it would work, and an outline of how they can execute it with you. I’ve worked with creators and helped manage these partnerships for the past six years. It creates real magic when done right! Finding the right creator is the tricky part, but once you do, hold on to them.

Long-term partnerships are also a great way to be efficient with your budget. Most influencers prefer to work with brands on a longer-term basis. They often lower their rates if they know they will have multiple opportunities to partner with you (and multiple payments coming in) throughout the year.

Agreed— but effectively using all platforms vs only focusing on where your audience is, is still limiting reach because: Content that performs poorly on one platform may explode elsewhere — metrics for “viral” differ per platform. TikTok uses “creates per day” while Meta considers an audio to be trending if one reel sees dramatic spike in engagement. 90% of TikTok followers don’t follow you elsewhere, so (at least in a short form content focused influencer campaign) seeding to all outlets and ultimately cross promoting to combine audiences will drive engagement and growth on all platforms, especially the ones that were counted out with the notion that that’s not “where your audience is.”

Remember that if you want to work with a specific influencer it's because something about them caught your eye. You absolutely have to be clear on guidelines, but at the end of the day they know what will work best for their audience, so leave room for them to take lead on what they're creating so that you get the best results for your brand.