Jibran Malek — March 2, 2018 — March 2, 2018
There’s more hype surrounding YouTube Influencer Marketing than ever. Even though collaborations with creators on social media have driven results, Influencer Marketing is still a young industry with rapidly shifting benchmarks: especially when it comes to compensating creators for the work they do.
At the end of the day, it’s always a negotiation between brand/agency and creator. However, here are some helpful tips that will help you and the influencer you’re building a relationship with leave the negotiation table on good footing:
Step 1: Find a Baseline: Views vs. Reach
Reach
First, figure out what you want: do you want to reach, do you want views, or do you want both?
Influencers determine their monetary worth based on their subscriber count or the views they get. Expect to pay about $ 1,000 USD for every 100,000 subscribers an influencer has on YouTube.
Source: Grapevine 2017 Benchmarks Report
A good rule of thumb to abide by as you do your influencer research is to take a look at how many views on average an influencer’s videos are getting. If you see that views on a creator’s content — on average — represent roughly 20% or more of the total subscriber count — then you can safely assume that their subscribers are real and the content isn’t stale.
Don’t feel any pressure to go big either. Try booking a diverse portfolio of creators and test what works best for your brand. As we’ve seen through hundreds of campaigns on the Grapevine Influencer Marketing platform, micro-influencers yield increased engagement.
Views
If you’re leveraging an Influencer Marketing Platform, you should be able to access insights to metrics such as clicks, click through rates (CTR), cost-per-view (CPV), and more. These are additional tools to help you negotiate for better pricing.
Source: Grapevine 2017 Benchmarks Report
Take a look at the performance of influencers with similar follower counts that work in the same industry and base expectations and benchmarks from there. There is a strong correlation between view count and cost. For example, breaking 100,000 views costs $ 3,000 USD. Expect to see creators negotiate up based on their views. Likewise, you can use view counts to negotiate down if you need to.
Whether it be views or reach, it really all comes down to how well your targeted influencer can sell. If a video gets 10,000 views but yields 500 conversions, then that’s a success! This is only the beginning of your negotiation process. It’s critical that you use this step as only a baseline for your booking process. The best marketers do their due diligence to ensure that these influencers actually drive a return on your investment.
Step 2: Negotiate Content
Have a clear idea or vision of what kind of content you want the targeted influencer to share. Do you want just a shout out at the beginning of a video or something more integrated? This impacts how much compensation a creator might ask for to promote your campaign, product, or brand. If you need conversions: be sure to equip the creator exclusive (and maybe even generous) offer to help drive more leads.
Give yourself a ample production time as you start planning your influencer marketing content.
If you want to build a successful collaboration: give yourself and the creator some time to volley back and forth between ideas to ensure that your content actually resonates. Influencers are busy and the best ones usually have packed content calendars. Build campaigns around a 4-6 week buffer before content actually starts being published. This is especially important to keep in mind if you’re creating campaigns based on holidays or special events.
Step 3: Track and Test
If you thought booking and scheduling content was the end of your negotiation process: you thought wrong! Assign an internal champion on your team to keep close track of the engagement your collaboration is driving with a close eye on clicks and click-through-rate.
If it’s not driving the engagement you need, it might be worth re-negotiating with the influencer, finding someone new, or adjusting your offer/content produced.
Step 4: Collaborate Again
When you work with an influencer you are also building a relationship with someone that could potentially even be a brand ambassador. Think of how some NBA players are either fiercely loyal to Adidas or Nike. That’s all because of the relationships they’ve built with their contacts at those organizations.
When an influencer feels like they are a legitimate voice for your brand’s values and aspirations, then they are more than willing to produce content at a dramatically lower rate. This holds especially true if you worked with an influencer before they “make it big” and experience a jump in subscribers.
Follow these four steps when you negotiate with creators for your influencer marketing campaign and you should achieve results every time.
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