How to Negotiate with Influencers: 5 Tips for Your Marketing Campaigns

Influencer marketing has become one of the most popular ways to reach potential customers. This form of digital marketing involves collaborating with so-called influencers across multiple platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Brands can leverage these social creators’ influence on social media to advertise brands’ products and services. 

The Influencer Marketing Platform Market Size was valued at $148.04 Mn in 2019 and is anticipated to reach $337.74 Mn by 2027, with a 13.4% CAGR growth rate from 2020 to 2027, according to Insight Partner. It indicates that brands’ demands in working with social influencers are expanding.

Influencer marketing has numerous benefits, such as enabling brands to access a whole new audience in a direct way. Niche influencers are followed by niche customers, who are exactly the target audience of brands.

However, more and more creators have realized the monetization opportunities of influencer marketing. They start continually increasing collaboration prices, which results in higher costs for brands and marketers to do social media promotion. 

Thus, price negotiation is necessary before collaborating. Negotiating with influencers takes time, effort, and practice if you want to do so successfully. In this blog post, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about influencer marketing and 5 tips on how to negotiate with Influencers when collaborating with them.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of marketing that leverages the influence of content creators on social media platforms. By partnering with social media personalities to create content around the brand or product, brands can get more impressions through influencers’ visibility on social media platforms. In general speaking, this form of marketing is not limited to social media. Influencer marketing also covers a variety of other channels, such as blogs, podcasts, and other platforms to connect to potential customers. 

Influencer marketing is mainly used in the fashion, technology, travel and tourism, and health industries. Social e-commerce is partly based on influencer marketing, such as live streaming commerce. 

It can also be used in conjunction with other forms of marketing such as paid advertising, email marketing, and word of mouth. When collaborating with influencers, brands often create contracts that state the general terms of the partnership. These include details like the type of post the influencer will publish, the length of the campaign, and how the partnership will be tracked. Contracts also detail how payments will be made by the brand to the influencer.

5 Tips for Negotiating with Influencers

Define Your Goals

Before you even think about negotiating with influencers, you should be very clear about what you’re looking for. This means that you need to have a very good idea of who you want to collaborate with, what kind of content you want them to create, and what your goals are for the campaign as a whole. Make sure that you’ve done your research and have a good idea of the type of person you want to work with. 

Some influencers have rich experience in collaborating with brands. It makes them a veteran in creating sponsored content. If you don’t clarify your goals, they might insist on their old creation style which does not fit your campaigns.

Set Your Price

If you’ve decided that you want to negotiate with influencers, the next step is to set your price. This can sometimes be a bit tricky, especially if you don’t have much experience with this type of thing. 

But, how to reset a price for each influencer when negotiating with them. Normally, brands will have a total budget for a marketing campaign. And there are multiple creators to partner with in a campaign. Therefore, budget allocation is an important job, allocating budget to each influencer. Such allocation is based on a calculation of how many goals can be reached by each influencer. And the principle is to make every influencer’s price lower than their own price. 

Long-term Partnership Opportunity to Lower Price

Usually, marketers will receive prices that are far higher than expected from influencers. Therefore, brands have to be able to command some tactics of price arguing. 

Here is a tactic: use long-term collaboration offer to attract influencers. Taking the first collaboration as a test to see the performance can be a reason to have a lower price. If results are good, collaboration can continue and more revenue will be earned. This is absolutely an attractive offer for most creators.

Be reasonable 

It’s important to note that your budget won’t be too low, but you also don’t want to be too expensive from influencers. If you charge too cheap, you might scare off less established influencers who care about being respected. Low price bid means disrespect to their creation. Most creators see themselves as artists.

The best way to find a good middle ground is to look at other campaigns similar to yours and see what other people are charging for them. 

Be careful with contracts 

This is something that a lot of people forget when they’re negotiating with influencers. While it’s important to come up with a contract that both parties can agree to, you don’t want to scare potential partners away by insisting that they sign a long and strict contract before collaborating with you. The best way to go about this is to come up with a simple contract that covers the basics, like how much each party will be paid, what the campaign will entail, and when the payment will be delivered.

3 Steps to negotiate with Influencers before Collaborating

Figure out your goals 

Before you talk to any potential influencers, you need to first figure out what your goals are for the campaign. What are you hoping to accomplish with this partnership? These goals might be as simple as getting more followers on social media, or maybe they’re more complex, like growing traffic to your website. 

Make a list of potential candidates 

After you’ve figured out your goals, the next step is to make a list of potential influencers that might be able to help you reach them. To do this, you’ll want to think about the kind of content you want to create, and then find influencers who are creating similar content. Next, you’ll want to look at how many followers these influencers have. This will help you decide who you want to collaborate with. 

Contact potential partners 

Now that you have a list of potential partners, it’s time to contact them and start negotiating. When you contact these potential partners, you’ll want to let them know what you’re looking to do with the campaign and why you think they’d be a good fit for it. You’ll also want to let them know what you’re willing to offer in return for their help.

Final Words

Now, you’re ready to negotiate with influencers and collaborate with people who can help you meet your goals. The best way to go about doing this is to be polite and respectful, but also confident in what you’re offering. The best influencer marketing campaigns aren’t created by people who desperately want something; they’re created by people who know what they want and are confident enough to ask for it. Remember, though, that influencer marketing is a two-way street. You have to be willing to collaborate with the influencers who want to work with you. If you follow these tips, though, you should be well prepared to negotiate with influencers and collaborate with people who can help you meet your goals.