Marketing Predictions Won’t Help. These Will.

When it comes to influencer marketing, you don’t need predictions to supercharge your results.?

What you need is to see the gaps that may be hiding in your knowledge of this highly effective—yet challenging—marketing tactic.?

That way, you can make educated decisions about how to set up campaigns and run them properly.?

Plus you can head off potential problems before they start to impact your outcomes.

I’m sharing my top 6 insights about the influencer industry for 2023, so that you can deploy your programs quickly and with confidence that you know how to maximize your investment.

1. Budget an extra 30-50% for influencer fees on top of what you were planning, especially for video.??

Yes, I went right to the money question first.?

We all know that the budget will determine whether your campaign will even happen, let alone succeed.?

It's an easy metric: do you have the money to run a campaign or don't you? (We'll talk about stakeholder support to run a campaign separately, because that's a whole different ball of yarn.)

If you don't know that, press pause until you do. Every action you take before this decision is made will be wasted energy if you end up lacking funds to follow through.

Back to influencer fees...

Whether due to inflation, supply chain issues, gas prices, or something else, cost of doing business for influencers is increasing at a rapid pace, and they are already passing those increases on to clients in the form of higher fees.?

The first of the year brings updated influencer rate sheets.?

Not only will today’s rates be higher than just a few weeks ago, but rates will continue to go up from here.?

PRO TIP: Locking influencers in early in the year may save you money in the long run, especially for a Q3 or Q4 campaign (the holiday season is notoriously expensive).? If that’s not possible, be sure to bake in ample wiggle room for rates to be higher in Q4 than when you finalize the creative brief next month.?

2. Prepare to adjust the scope and deliverables of your planned campaign.?

Be flexible in these areas, or you’re sure to miss one of the biggest benefits of influencer marketing altogether and you may even harm your brand.?

Here’s why:

• Influencers are more than “outlets” and “platforms” to broadcast your brand message. They know what works to move consumers to action. Expand your thinking to see them as experts at consumer engagement (which they are!). Then, you’ll begin to see why embracing flexibility in your program will give you an advantage, as you’ll be able to capitalize on that expertise in ways you might not have envisioned.
• Influencers are human beings, not clones. No one influencer will bring to the table *exactly* what another influencer brings. Use creative thinking when crafting campaign deliverables so that they can reflect the strengths of each individual player.?

Lack of willingness to negotiate in this area will not just slow you down, it will also damage your influencer relationships. This is never more clear than when brands invite influencers to promote their products FOR FREE, leading those influencers to push back and inquire about budget for compensation. This should be the beginning of an on-going conversation. However, if your approach doesn’t include flexibility, your brand’s rigidity will alienate those influencers who ask for alternate options for working together. (We see this happen way too often.)

This also goes hand in hand with my earlier post about money. You can accommodate rigidity in your campaign budget by adding flexibility with your scope and/or deliverables.

PRO TIP: Have a small range of deliverables listed on the creative brief that can be included in the influencer negotiation process. Be prepared to ask influencers what is possible—and listen to their answers!?

3. Make sure your influencer partners “opt in” to work with you, each and every time you hire them.

Finding influencers to work with is a “push-pull” exercise.?

You’ll be researching and reaching out, and they will also be researching and reaching out (or responding to your outreach).

Use that process to your advantage: set up your communications flow so that influencers must make the case for why they are a perfect fit for each specific campaign (not just your brand as a whole).?

Side note: this means your creative brief must be tight! If you’re not clear from the start, how can the right influencers know they are the perfect fit for the project?

Focus on eliminating surprises, which will benefit your relationship-building in the long term.

Avoid happy ears (on your part and theirs) by being direct about your expectations and the terms of the program. You only want to enlist enthusiastic advocates, not influencers begrudgingly phoning in their work because you hesitated to be clear at the start.?

This includes clarity about where you do and don’t have wiggle room in the program fees or deliverables. (See above.)

Then, when you offer them the chance to opt in and educate you on why they are a good fit, you’ll easily recognize when there is a deep alignment of values (rather than alignment around surface metrics like number of followers and engagement rate).

PRO TIP: Create a system around discovering and vetting influencers that includes an opt-in step, so that you can implement this system for each program you run.

4. Women make up nearly 90% of the influencer community.?

Craft your creative brief with that in mind.

Why?

Studies show that women will only apply to a job when they feel their skillset is a 100% match with that opportunity.?

Think through how that will impact who applies to your campaign. Will the KPIs listed on your creative brief be so narrowly defined that women influencers pass it by when they would otherwise be a good fit?

In other words: lower your standards! Because women will count themselves out of a campaign that is otherwise perfect for them.

PRO TIP: Write a description of your ideal influencer profile/avatar in list form. In a second column, imagine what “better” would be in each area. Use this to adjust—downward—your program specs. Then, expect your final talent pool to blow you away.?

5. Do not mess with an influencer’s editorial calendar.?

While you need to remain flexible, it is a deal-breaker to expect your influencer partners to be, especially when it comes to their inventory.

Weeks, months, years of planning go into their editorial calendars and publishing process.?

Those calendars are their bread and butter (through sponsored content, ad revenue, and affiliate links).?

Those calendars have also been painstakingly designed to maximize their inventory in just the right way to grow their audience.?

When you ask an influencer to change publication dates, they will not be able to fill that (now empty) slot in their inventory. So they will lose momentum in growing their audience and affiliated revenue (e.g. from digital ads)—or worse: the potential revenue from another sponsored post.?

It is a huge mistake to be casual about publication dates. Lock those in and adhere to them like it’s the 11th commandment.?

PRO TIP: Before committing your influencers to any specific dates for publication, pore over your calendar with an eye toward any obstacles to publishing.?

Prepare ALL of your stakeholders (e.g. anyone who could delay your project at ANY point) that it will be expensive to change once your influencers have committed to participating and agreed to a publication timeline. Give them actual monetary impact in dollars you will spend to reschedule (50% more on top of the negotiated influencer fees or the cost of a project that languishes).

6. When in doubt, ask.?

When it comes to uncertainty around fees, licensing, social media, even contract terms, be in conversation with your influencer partners.?

They don’t bite, and often you’ll come away with a fresh perspective on best practices when you maintain an open dialogue.?

Adhering to best practices is critical for your brand’s success. Best practices are in place because they work! They keep your campaigns dialed in. They keep your brand out of harm's way.

There's literally no better way to fine tune your understanding of best practices than on the front lines while working with influencers directly.

But you MUST be willing to learn.

PRO TIP: go into each partnership with influencers and each influencer campaign with a goal of learning about and updating at least one or two “absolutes” that you have in your process.

Then watch your brand campaigns outperform your competitor's campaigns.

What other sticking points have you run into in your influencer marketing practice (or heard about in your professional circles)??

Share below in the comments. I’m sure in our 13 years focusing on influencer marketing, we’ve run into something similar, and I have a good solution I can share!

Casey Benedict has been at the leading edge of influencer marketing since 2010, when she founded Maverick Mindshare.

An expert in global consumer engagement, Casey is never satisfied with the status quo, never willing to rest on yesterday’s wins. She leads with innovation and leverages the power of community across the global stage.

She is an opportunity hawk, a fierce advocate for her whip-smart women executive clients, making sure they never again have to settle for half-baked strategy, mediocre implementation, or indecipherable data.

She holds her BA from the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) and her MFA from Emerson College.