Setting The Foundation For A Profitable Relationship Between Your Brand And Influencers - Austin Stanfel

Gen Z and the rise of the ‘Influencer’ is here to stay says Austin Stanfel. MarketingDive.com reports that 54% of Gen Z and millennials are interested in becoming influencers, meaning your brand has a potentially huge marketing team waiting for an offer if you can strike the right deal.

Creating a very clear relationship between you and your influencer

Make no mistake, influencers are employees much like any other. However, influencers sit more on the contractor side of things than traditional employees. They therefore have a lot more freedom and can push the boundaries of their contracts far easier. It’s crucial you set out from the start exactly what services you expect them to provide and set performance targets. If your full-time marketing director wasn’t meeting their performance standards would they be kept on? Probably not, so why should you continue to pay for an employee that doesn’t pull their weight. This applies to influencers all the same. Influencer’s should be kept to many of the same standards as your full-time employee’s.

Understandably though as they are not full-time employee’s they won’t receive the same company benefits so there has to be some fair negotiation between both parties to find mutually beneficial terms for each.

Make them work for their money
Further to the above point, incentivise them to procure more and more customers and therefore capital for your brand. Giving them non-specific tasks like ‘hey can you promote our product for a fee’ is too open ended. Try something like this ‘hey can you promote our product and bring in X amount of traffic to the site/month and we’ll pay you Y per customer’ or words to that effect. Each brand will differ in the amount they can leverage their influencers based on their size and existing brand recognition. That doesn’t mean the same principles shouldn’t apply regardless of brand or business size. 

Be aware that the influencer marketplace is a flooded one and you can shop around for a better price. Go into negotiations with a clear idea of cost and benefit to the relationship. If you don’t like someone’s terms, due to the nature of contract work, simply find someone of equal ability that will work for a better price.

Take is directly from a marketing expert like Austin Stanfel: Influencers are an ever-emerging marketing tool for Gen Z and millennials and how your brand decides to use them could have big long-term effects on your business but setting the tone of the business relationship is still more important than just being part of the game. A good influencer can be worth several times their fee, but a bad one can potentially ruin your brand’s online reputation and earning potential. Therefore, how you initially set up the relationship and the continuing value you see from that is critical to you and your business.