How to Hire Influencers: An In-Depth Guide to Successful Influencer Collaborations

The success of your influencer marketing campaign relies on the influencers you hire. If you manage to recruit the right influencers and form a good relationship with them, you’re off to a good start. So it’s important to carefully conduct the hiring process to improve your chances of running a successful campaign.

This post serves as a detailed guide on how to hire influencers and ensure a fruitful collaboration. We’ll break down the benefits of working with the right influencers and where you can find them. We’ll also break down the steps to hire influencers for your brand.

Why You Need to Hire the Right Influencers

The right influencers are foundational for campaign success. Here are some of the ways you can benefit from hiring the right influencers:

Reach the Right Audience

Influencers who are “right” for your brand will help you reach your target audience. These are influencers whose follower base matches the characteristics of the audience you want to reach. You’re not wasting valuable marketing dollars delivering your message to an audience that’s not even remotely interested in your products.

For example, NARS partnering with influencers like Divina Wong (@divinamuse) makes sense as the influencer creates makeup-related content. The influencer’s makeup tutorials and creative looks have attracted hundreds of thousands of followers with the same interest.

Engage Real People

When you’re careful with your influencer partnerships, you’ll be able to weed out fake influencers during the vetting process. So you’ll end up working with creators who can influence real people rather than bots. In other words, your campaign has a greater chance of succeeding because it will reach a real audience. This is crucial with the prevalence of influencer fraud.

Enhance Brand Awareness

Hiring the right influencers means working with influencers who have the level of reach needed to meet your goals. They’ll be able to get your brand in front of hundreds of thousands of people, allowing you to raise brand awareness.

For instance, brands like Casper established their presence in the sleep and mattress industry with the help of influencers. They worked with YouTube vloggers and engineers who could reach the brand’s target audience. The campaign resulted in over 10 million views, with 100k targeted website visits and 2.5k+ new customers.

Boost Brand Credibility

The right influencers have established trust with their audience base. Whether they’re experts or enthusiasts, they already have a solid presence in the given niche because of their vested interest. So people look to them for advice and recommendations. This means that when these influencers vouch for your brand, you can instantly build credibility in the space.

Drive More Conversions

The ability to reach a highly relevant audience means that the right influencers will help you attract people who are likely to be interested in your products. This significantly improves the chances of converting them. 

Moreover, these influencers can position your brand or product in a way that engages people and convinces them to give it a try. So you can ultimately boost your conversions with your partnership.

Build Lasting Relationships

When you hire the right influencers and onboard them effectively, you can build a long-term partnership with them. This benefits your business in the long run as it simplifies the process of hiring influencers for future campaigns. Moreover, these influencers become true brand advocates, which makes your partnership more authentic.

In fact, our State of Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2024 found that brands are increasingly preferring to work with the same influencers. This indicates that more brands are starting to realize the value of sustaining existing influencer partnerships.

Where to Look for Influencers for Your Brand

Before we proceed with the actual process of hiring influencers, it’s important to have a clear understanding of where you should conduct your search. There are three main ways to find influencers for your brand.

Influencer Marketing Platforms

One of the best places to conduct your search is on an influencer marketing platform. These platforms come with built-in features to perform influencer searches using keywords and categories. Depending on which influencer marketing tool you’re using, you can further filter your search based on other factors such as:

• Platform
• Audience size
• Location
• Engagement rate
• Language
• Gender
• Age
• Interests
• Price

Creator Marketplaces

Creator marketplaces are another great place to find influencers for your campaigns. These serve as a centralized platform where creators have signed up to collaborate with brands. 

In this sense, many influencer marketing platforms have their own influencer marketplaces as well, which simplifies the search. Additionally, social media platforms also have dedicated marketplaces like the Instagram Creator Marketplace and the TikTok Creator Marketplace. This makes it easy for brands to find potential influencers within the respective platforms.

Many influencer marketplaces, such as Creator.co offer brands the ability to create campaigns and attract influencers. This means you get inbound applicants instead of having to search for influencers yourself.

Influencer Marketing Agencies

Finally, the easiest option is to work with an influencer marketing agency. This will outsource the entire process of influencer discovery, vetting, outreach, tracking, and relationship management. You can work closely with the agency to narrow down ideal influencers for your campaign and leave the rest to them.

Many agencies even have their own network of vetted and trusted influencers to choose from. This speeds up the process of influencer discovery and hiring as it minimizes the need to do additional vetting. You can trust the agency to help you hire trusted and relevant influencers based on your unique needs.

6 Steps to Hire Influencers for Your Brand

Once you’re ready to start hiring influencers for your campaign, it’s important to take a structured approach to keep things organized. Follow the steps below to hire influencers for your brand.

Step 1: Outline Your Ideal Influencer Persona

Start with a clear understanding of the types of influencers you want to work with. Who’s a great fit for your brand or for this specific campaign? This will depend on factors such as your goals and your target audience. You’ll want to look for influencers who can drive the desired action in the audience you want to reach.

You can create an outline of your ideal influencer persona, noting the key characteristics they should possess. Let’s say you want to drive brand awareness for a new line of cruelty-free makeup products currently only sold in the United States. You also want to keep costs low since you’re a startup, and you can’t afford to spend too much on influencer payments. In this case, your ideal influencer persona may look something like this:

• Name: Clean Beauty Claire
• Age: 25-35
• Location: United States
• Followers: 1,000 to 10,000
• Audience Demographics: Female and Male, aged 20-40
• Audience Quality: Minimum 75%
• Engagement Rate: Minimum 2%
• Platform: Instagram, TikTok
• Category: Makeup, Beauty, Skincare
• Niche: Cruelty-free, clean beauty
• Price: Gifting or maximum $50 per post

You can add more characteristics and fields depending on your unique needs. Having this outline in place will speed up the process of searching and filtering influencers. Instead of figuring out what to look for along the way, you’ll already have a clear guideline to inform your search. Depending on the campaign, you may even have multiple influencer personas to help you reach several types of audiences.

Step 2: Figure Out Compensation and Value Proposition

Just because you want to work with an influencer doesn’t mean they’ll agree to work with you. Many influencers are selective with their collaborations, making sure they’re partnering with brands that align with their own values. Even if a brand is well-aligned, some influencers may only agree to a partnership if they get value out of it.

This makes it crucial to have a strong value proposition that would make an influencer want to work with you. What’s in it for them? What will they get out of your partnership? Clearly lay out the value of collaborating with your brand before you reach out to potential influencers. 

Starting with compensation, have a solid plan for how to pay your influencers. Will you pay influencers through free products or experiences? Will you include monetary compensation? If so, you’ll need to make sure that the payment is competitive and aligned with the current influencer rates.

Most brands today pay influencers monetary compensation, according to our State of Influencer Marketing report. However, instead of a flat rate, payment is made from a percentage of the sales they generate. This is a great way to ensure that whatever you’re paying influencers corresponds to the value they generate for your brand.

Besides this, lay out other perks of working with your brand. Do they get exclusive access to your pre-launch products? Do they get VIP invites to your events? These should all be included to make a strong value proposition.

Step 3: Create Your Influencer Shortlist

Once you have your ideal influencer persona in place and you’ve figured out compensation, it’s time to begin your search. Use any of the influencer search methods highlighted in the previous section to look for influencers who match the characteristics you’re looking for. 

If the platform has the option to filter influencers by rate, use the filter to further narrow your search on influencers who match your budget. If you’re not providing monetary compensation, make use of platforms that focus on product seeding campaigns and have networks of influencers who will accept free products in exchange for posts and reviews.

Platforms like Upfluence, for instance, come with built-in influencer gifting tools. So you can easily find influencers, choose products to gift them, send out your offers, and ship your products from one place.

Based on your search results, go through each influencer’s stats and content samples to get a better idea of what they can deliver. This would require a bit of manual digging, but it’s important to ensure that you’re working with influencers who are perfectly aligned with your goals.

If the platform offers the option to measure audience quality, this will make it easier to filter out fake influencers. You can also look at the types of content they’re creating and go through the comments they’re getting. This will give you some idea of the types of engagement they’re generating so you can narrow your list.

Once you’ve completed these steps, you can put together a shortlist of all the potential influencers to include in your campaign. Keep in mind that not all of those influencers may agree to collaborate, so don’t forget to have a few extra creators to serve as backup in case you can’t work with your top choices. 

Step 4: Perform an Influencer Outreach

The next step involves reaching out to influencers from your shortlist. Some influencer marketing platforms will have built-in outreach functions. So you can instantly send personalized emails and messages on the platform.

These platforms make it easy to send hundreds of personalized messages to influencers in just a few clicks. That way, you don’t have to manually dig for their content info and craft a unique email each time. Some of these tools might even have templates that you can easily customize without having to craft your message from scratch.

If you’re not using an outreach tool or you want to come up with your own message, check out our influencer outreach email templates to get started. Remember that you have to pitch to the influencers, so it’s important to strategically establish value right from the start. Make sure they know the message is coming from a credible brand if you want them to consider your proposal at all.

Here are a few best practices to follow when conducting your influencer outreach:

• Send the email from your official work email address or through a trusted influencer outreach tool.
• Include your brand website and contact information.
• Let them know why you’re reaching out (and why they’re a perfect fit).
• Include your value proposition, such as compensation and benefits.
• Keep it friendly but not too casual to come across as rude or disrespectful.
• Personalize your message with the influencer’s name and personal info (without seeming invasive).

Additionally, some influencer outreach tools will have built-in tools to automatically send an invite. So you may not even need to craft a lengthy outreach email in the first place. And if you’re using an influencer marketplace where you can build campaigns that influencers can apply to, you can skip this step altogether since you’ll get inbound applications.

Source: influence.co

Step 5: Negotiate and Finalize Your Agreement

After you’ve received confirmation from influencers, the next step involves negotiating with them on the terms of your partnership. Some influencers may want to negotiate the compensation. Others may want to negotiate the timelines and deliverables. This is the part of hiring influencers that requires a lot of back-and-forth.

It’s important to be clear about your position, limits, and expectations right from the start. Otherwise, you might make too many adjustments at this stage of the process, meaning you could end up with a partnership that doesn’t work for you. 

For example, you might end up exceeding your campaign budget because you agreed to an influencer’s requested payment, and you didn’t want to risk not working with them because they’re insanely popular. Or you might not have made yourself clear about the timeline of the project, resulting in influencers failing to deliver the content within the expected timeframe.

Once you’ve come up with an agreement, seal it with a solid contract. Make sure to include the following details in your agreement:

• Deliverables
• Timelines
• Compensation
• Payment terms
• Confidentiality
• Content usage rights
• Approval processes
• FTC responsibility

Check out our influencer contract template guide for a full list of things to include. If you work with an agency, you won’t have to worry about this aspect of the hiring process as they’ll be able to help you draft and manage your influencer agreements.

Additionally, you can use contract management software to easily send, sign, and track all your agreements. Some influencer marketing platforms even come with contract management features so you can manage every aspect of your campaign in one place. This streamlines the influencer campaign management process.

Source: izea.com

Step 6: Onboard and Execute

The final step of the influencer hiring process is onboarding the influencers to execute your campaign. This is another critical step that requires a hands-on approach if you’re going to establish a long-term, sustainable relationship with your influencers. A confusing and unpleasant onboarding experience could deter influencers from working with your brand in the future.

Make sure influencers are properly onboarded so they have clarity on what they need to do next. Provide them with a detailed campaign brief guiding them on what content you need from them. If necessary, make sure they have access to certain tools that might be used for communicating with them or managing campaign content. Ideally, your influencers should have a dedicated point of contact who will be in charge of guiding them and coordinating with them throughout your partnership.

Hire the Right Influencers for a Thriving Partnership

Now that we’ve walked you through the detailed steps on how to hire influencers, you can apply these steps to start running your own campaign. Make sure to have a clear outline of the ideal influencers you want to work with. This will serve as the foundation for a strong influencer collaboration.

About the Author

Jacqueline Zote

Writer

Jacqueline Zote is a freelance writer and content producer. She writes for leading blogs in the digital marketing space. Her areas of expertise include influencer marketing, social media marketing, social media management, and content marketing.