Finding potential influencers to work with continues to be the biggest challenge for marketers according to our 2024 State of Influencer Marketing Report. But even when you get past this stage, you’re faced with another challenge of getting those prospects to work with you. Between limited budgets and unique brand needs, it can be extremely difficult to negotiate a deal that’s mutually beneficial.
This post walks you through the process with 10 crucial tips for negotiating with influencers. Let’s take a look.
1. Do Your Research: Understand the Influencer’s Value
Imagine negotiating with an influencer only to later find out that they don’t really add value to your business. Think: an audience base that doesn’t truly align with your brand or worse, an audience base that’s mostly made up of bots and fake accounts. Even with a successful negotiation, you’ll only end up wasting your budget.
This is why you need to do a thorough research on the influencer before you even begin the negotiation process. Analyze key metrics that will help you understand the value that an influencer brings to the table instead of simply focusing on follower count. This includes metrics like engagement rate to see if their content is resonating with the audience.
You’ll also want to analyze the authenticity of an influencer’s followers and weed out potentially fraudulent influencers. Tools like BuzzSumo and FollowerWonk can help you with this.
Even if an influencer’s follower base is mostly authentic, it may not necessarily align with your brand needs. Make the most of influencer marketing tools like Influencity to conduct additional research on the influencer’s audience. This will provide you with in-depth follower information like audience quality, demographics, reachability, and interests to ensure brand alignment.
2. Tailor Your Negotiation to the Influencer’s Type
Influencer negotiation isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Remember that you may deal with different types of influencers and have different approaches for different platforms. Your negotiation strategies should be adjusted accordingly to align with your campaign goals.
Adapt to Size
With smaller influencers, you should emphasize creative freedom and authenticity. You may even be able to negotiate product-based deals. Larger influencers, on the other hand, may require higher budgets with monetary compensation. It’s crucial to negotiate detailed contracts to minimize the risk of misunderstandings.
Consider Platforms
For platforms like Instagram and TikTok, emphasize the need for visually engaging and trend-driven content. On YouTube, however, you’ll want to negotiate extended usage rights and highlight higher production value. Platforms like Twitch will require live engagement and interactive collaborations.
Leverage Data
Audience data can help you align your campaign with the influencer’s biggest strengths and adjust your negotiations accordingly. An audience that regularly engages with bite-sized informative content may appreciate a similar type of content from your influencers. So you could negotiate that the best TikTok and Reels creators focus on informative short-form videos.
Meanwhile, an audience that carefully researches their purchase decisions will want detailed reviews. In this case, you could have the best YouTube reviewers put together long-form videos focusing on your product.
3. Set Clear Goals, Deliverables, and Compensation
The negotiation stage is where you decide on the terms of your partnership, making it crucial to get as specific as possible to avoid misunderstandings and unmet expectations. Clearly define your campaign goals and share them with potential influencers so they know what you’re working towards. Whether it’s sales, brand awareness, or event participations, knowing what you wish to achieve will help them understand their role.
This is also the stage where you specify all the deliverables that you expect from the influencer. Negotiate details like content type, number of posts, posting frequency, deadlines, and creative guidelines so they can decide if they have the bandwidth to meet your needs.
When it comes to compensation, start with a fair proposal based on industry benchmarks. Check out our detailed report on influencer rates to understand typical influencer earnings by audience size and platform. You could even offer non-monetary perks like product samples, early access, exclusive invites, and more to sweeten the deal.
You’ll also want to decide on a compensation model that works for both parties. The latest influencer marketing statistics show that almost 50% of marketers pay influencers a percentage of sales. Flat rate payment (24.1%) is the second most popular payment model, followed by product-level payments (19%) and tiered incentives (7.3%).
4. Prioritize Transparency to Build Trust
A good partnership is founded on trust. And to build trust, you need to maintain transparency starting at the negotiation stage. Hidden agendas and unclear terms are a recipe for disaster, resulting in mistrust and failed partnerships.
Clear communication and transparency, on the other hand, can set the foundation for a positive and productive influencer relationship. Be upfront about your expectations and campaign timelines so influencers know what they’re getting into. Provide clarity on your budget range during negotiations instead of giving them false promises about payment. Let influencers make the active choice to work or not work with you based on this information.
This is also the stage where you need to address any potential conflicts, such as usage rights and exclusivity clauses (more on that later). Doing so early and openly will allow influencers to make informed decisions about whether to partner with you.
Make sure this transparency continues throughout the course of your partnership. Share your analytics and campaign performance data after the campaign to demonstrate impact and provide necessary feedback. This is particularly important for partnerships that involve performance-based rewards like sales-based commissions.
5. Negotiate Beyond Rates: Usage Rights and Deliverables
Rates are just one of the many aspects of the influencer negotiation process. You also need to have clear agreements in place for the legal and technical elements of your partnership. Negotiate on usage rights and important clauses impacting deliverables.
If you intend on reusing the content for your ads, website, or social media channels, make sure to specify it during the negotiation stage. Discuss who retains ownership of the content created during your campaign and whether there are any limitations to your usage rights. Influencers can then give necessary permission, which will be formalized in writing to avoid conflict further down the line.
In some cases, you may even need to offer a higher rate or provide additional benefits for extended usage rights. This will ensure that influencers are fairly compensated for the value they bring to your business.
Exclusivity clauses are another aspect of your partnership that needs negotiating. If you expect influencers to avoid partnering with competing brands during the course of your campaign, make sure to specify it so they can decide accordingly. It’s important to avoid being over-restrictive with these clauses as it may deter influencers from accepting the partnership.
User-generated content platforms like Skeepers can streamline the process for you, with the team managing legal permissions and licensing rights for influencer content. Brands get a decade-long access to a huge library of authentic reviews as part of the standard Skeepers agreement.
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6. Focus on Long-Term Partnerships Over One-Off Deals
Between finding a new batch of influencers and onboarding them to ensure alignment, one-off partnerships can be more time-consuming than they are cost-efficient. On the other hand, building a long-term relationship with your influencers can result in time and cost savings.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to run ongoing campaigns if you don’t have the budget. Instead, it means keeping your best influencers close so you can easily work with them again for future campaigns. That means you won’t have to go through the whole process of finding new influencers, onboarding them, and aligning them to your brand all over again.
In fact, 63.2% of marketers in our State of Influencer Marketing report choose repetitive influencer partnerships. During the negotiation stage, propose multi-phase campaigns where your partnership gets extended based on performance. You could also offer exclusive opportunities like early access and sneak peeks to incentivize influencers for their loyalty.
Even for one-off campaigns, bring up the opportunity for repeat partnerships if there’s proper brand alignment. This will allow influencers to keep an open mind about working with your brand again.
During your partnership, regularly check in on them to gauge their satisfaction and collect feedback. Make use of influencer relationship management tools to keep track of your relationships with individual influencers. This will help you understand how to foster a stronger relationship with your influencers for a long-term partnership.
7. Use Data to Drive the Conversation
Your negotiations should be guided by performance data from your previous campaigns. How many impressions and engagements did you generate? And what’s your goal for this next campaign? This helps you benchmark success and refine your campaigns to deliver even better results over time.
When you back your discussions using data, you can also set realistic expectations on what influencers need to deliver. This is particularly important if you’re renewing an existing partnership but it also plays a crucial role in guiding negotiations for fresh partnerships.
Share KPIs from your previous campaigns to show influencers what success looks like to you. They can then decide if those expectations are realistic enough for them to achieve.
Use Google Analytics and UTM codes to track campaign and influencer-specific performance. These insights can then help you provide necessary feedback for improvement. They can even guide you to make adjustments throughout the course of your partnership.
Platforms like Grin let you monitor campaign and influencer-specific performance in one place. This provides you with essential data that could inform your negotiations.
8. Be Ready to Walk Away If Necessary
Not every negotiation will result in a deal that benefits your brand. Instead of being stuck with an unfavorable deal, knowing when to walk away is essential. Otherwise, you could end up with a campaign that costs more than it delivers value. While you should expect some push-back with your initial proposal, you should also know when an influencer is demanding too much.
Set boundaries that are non-negotiable, such as a maximum budget or a minimum number of deliverables. You should also have clarity on quality expectations that can’t be sacrificed. Use these boundaries to guide your negotiations so you can decide when an influencer’s demands are “too much.” For instance, if an influencer’s rates are much higher than your maximum payout limit, it’s a good sign that the partnership won’t work in your favor.
Similarly, respectfully decline deals when they don’t align with your goals. For instance, if an influencer isn’t willing to provide usage rights when you’re planning to repurpose their content for social media ads, you may want to look for alternatives.
Speaking of alternatives, make sure you have a list of backup influencers if the deal falls through with your main choices. That way, you won’t have to go through the whole process of finding influencers and negotiating with them all over again.
9. Use Performance-Based Incentives to Drive Better Results
Flat-rate fees may get influencers to work with you, but this isn’t always enough to encourage a deeper commitment. They may simply create the content according to your expected deliverables and be done with it.
If you want influencers to be more invested in your success, tying incentives to performance is an excellent solution. This could compel them to work even harder and drive exceptional results as they directly benefit from the effort. This involves designing incentives so that influencers get better rewards the more value they deliver.
Commission-based payments are the best way to incentivize influencers based on their performance. This is also the most common payment structure, as highlighted in the above section. But even with this approach, avoid putting a cap on how much influencers can earn or you could dissuade them from trying to drive more sales.
Create bonus structures that allow you to strategically incentivize influencers according to their performance. Usually, this would involve tiered reward systems where influencers earn higher commissions for driving a certain number of sales. For example, a 5% commission could increase to a 10% commission if sales exceed $5,000.
Unbounce offers a tiered incentive system that allows affiliates to earn up to a certain amount based on the number of referrals. This could compel their influencer partners to work harder toward referring people to the company.
Alternatively, you could also offer additional payment if they exceed their performance expectations. For example, an additional 10% payment for achieving a 20% higher engagement rate than projected.
Make sure to be transparent with influencers about how you’ll measure and reward their performance. This not only helps you set realistic expectations, but it also gives them a reason to work harder for your brand.
10. Bundle Deals with Multiple Influencers for Better Rates
If your campaign involves working with multiple influencers, you could save time and money by negotiating a package deal. This usually means approaching an influencer marketing agency and negotiating with them for discounts to work with multiple influencers. It could also involve approaching influencers represented by the same agency to get bundled deals.
So instead of having separate agreements with individual influencers, you’ll have a singular agreement through the agency to work with their influencers. The agency will handle the influencer payments on their end while you enjoy a better deal on your campaign investment. You could even negotiate a campaign package where multiple influencers promote the same product simultaneously.
You could further scale your campaign impact by negotiating cross-platform promotions to maximize your reach. So instead of paying a separate fee for each platform, you could have the influencers cross-promote their content across different platforms for a negotiated sum.
Become a Master Negotiator for Influencer Marketing Success
How you negotiate with potential influencers sets the stage for how the rest of your partnership will go. Clarity and transparency at this phase of your campaign will help you form mutually beneficial partnerships founded on trust. Make the most of the steps outlined above to improve your negotiation skills and hire the right influencers for your brand.
