How can you incentivize influencers to promote your brand on YouTube without appearing salesy?

Creator-sourcing tools are wonderful, but I will always believe in old-fashioned scrolling. There's a two-fold benefit in this, you'll find creators that are already speaking about your product/niche and you'll see how they are speaking about it. Creators can look good on paper, but seeing their content allows you to see a broader picture of who they are as a creator and that's how they interacting with ads on the platform (what brands are they working with?), how they're treating their viewers in the comment section or in the video, and how they're feed appears on the platform. Also, it allows me to pitch them better because I know what they're about. I've found this makes the negotiation process go so much more smoothly.

Finding creators that work well with your brand, are authentic, and are choosy with who they work with. Create a lasting and trusting relationship with the creators for a long relationship instead of just paying many and getting poor quality back.

As marketers, we need to remember that creators understand their audience better than we do. The content they create is authentically themselves therefore if we don't allow them to have creative freedom (within reason!) then the audience will see right through this. When creating the brief for an influencer campaign, I do share a few speaking points but clarify that these are suggestions and should not be used word-for-word.

Bullet points are an excellent tool to encourage a creator to use a their authentic voice. I typically like to include 3-4 bullet points within each activation and ask influencers to pick at least one to talk about in their own words. I find this approach does 2 things: 1) Creators do what they do best- speak to their audience rather than read to script. I love seeing creators take a prompt and make it their own! 2) Provides different approaches to help each influencer post feel unique (even when they’re talking about the same thing). This helps with ad targeting because you can serve up videos that have the same goal without boring the user scrolling.

We often run campaigns as a mix of upfront payments with affiliate bonuses. This provides the best balance of compensating creators for their time and value while also creating accountability to deliver. Additionally, brands can add an incentive to align the goals of both brands and creators. Additionally, adding multiple opportunities upon the execution of a successful initial campaign has been a great carrot to incentivize creators to perform their best.

Avoid selecting influencers solely based on their community size, instead focus on identifying real ambassadors. Ideally, you want to ensure that they genuinely like your product/service. If they have a good understanding of your brand, it will be easy for them to communicate this to their audience in a natural way.