How to Work With Influencers on Behalf of Your Brand

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Jeremy, a full-time designer, YouTuber, and creator from Sydney, Australia. I've been in the industry for 10 years now and I've worked with brands all over the world. In this class, you're going to learn how to manage your collaborations with influencers, the best practices on working on a project, how to negotiate and price your collaborations, how to write a simple contract before working with someone, the importance of using organic content and what platforms you can use, and how to communicate with your influencers so every project runs smoothly. For your class project, you're going to create a strategy for you to use on future campaigns. I will supply a workbook that you can follow along with as your guide, and you can use that to start off your project. Now, if this sounds like fun and it is useful, then enroll in the class today so you can start to work with influencers for your company. 2. Why work with influencers: Why should we work with influencers if you're a large company or a medium-sized company? The reasons that, I reckon it's great to work with influencers is that you can build brand awareness to your service or product and it's an organic way of actually doing it and it's also cheaper than doing ads on YouTube or even Google and so leveraging someone's audience is a cost-effective way to get eyeballs onto your product and build that awareness. You can also build long-term relationships with content creators so they can produce content for you long-term, which is going to be a benefit to you because having those strategic partnerships will allow you to always have someone there to always be promoting your product and maybe you might have a referral program and that will probably use that over a long period of time to always generate traffic for you and ultimately it's more organic because at the end of the day, people love buying from people, not brands anymore. We've seen now in the current economy that people don't even like celebrities as much as YouTube is now, or famous TikTok is and so people resonate with those type of people because they are similar age to them, because they're more relevant in the way they speak and the content they create and people love connecting with those type of deal about being personable so working with influencers allows you to tap into that audience. Another thing I want to say is that the current economy is growing by billions and billions of $ every year. They say by 2025 it's going to be $100 billion industry so now is the time to invest in influences and content creators for your brand, because in the long run, it's going to benefit you. Now before working with an influencer, I recommend writing down the objectives and goals that you're trying to achieve as a brand awareness. Are you trying to sell a product? Are you trying to get sign-ups to an event or a webinar? Really get clear on the goals. Also, identify who your audience is and what platform they are sitting on because that's going to start a conversation on the strategy and direction that you want to take these campaigns that you're working on. Now for your first student action, what I want you to do is create a list, let's say 20-30 people of the top influencers and creators you'd want to work with and have that list ready to go when you're ready to send an email, send a message to see if they want to collaborate with your brand. 3. Do’s and don’t working with influencers: In this lesson, I want to share with you some do's and don'ts of working with influences. You got to remember that every influencer or creator has a different level of experience, they have a different skill sets, they also have a different audience. Some might be big on TikTok, some might be bigger on YouTube, so you really need to understand everyone is different, every campaign is going to be different. I always recommend being flexible and knowing how to work with people is going to help you an your business grow. Here are the five do's that I recommend. Number 1 is always be empathetic and listen to the influencer. They know their audience more than you do so more than likely they know what's going to work for them. Which brings me to my Point number 2, allow creative control and ideas to the influencer. Most likely, this is their full-time business. They create content full-time, all the time so they know what's going to work, they know what they like to create, and they probably know what's coming to work for your brand as well. Obviously, you can negotiate ideas, you can brainstorm together, that's totally fine. Be collaborative, and also make sure you respect each other's ideas and just focus on delivering the most value to the audience. Now Point number 3 is that you can actually do a trial run. If you don't want to commit to a long-term relationship, let's say six months or 12 months, you can always do a trial run for the first month. Obviously, treat it as a paid thing. Do a test see how the audience reacts, see how it's like working with that influencer. If the process was smooth and if they were easy to work with and if they were professional, then continue to work with them on a month-by-month basis. I think that's a good rule of thumb. Number 4 is provide logos and the guidelines. Now some brands don't supply these files and so if you do that, you're going to be ahead of the game. Make sure you store your files, maybe in a Dropbox or Google Drive where we have access to those files. Some brands also have already made promotional videos. Have that on hand and then have the guidelines for the brand. It might have some messaging examples or best practices when talking about the brand. Then lastly, provide examples of past collabs. I know personally for me that helps me get ideas. When I look at past collabs, maybe it's from another YouTuber that worked with the brand in the past, I can see how they approached the content. This is going to give me some ideas when I'm just starting out on that campaign. Now here are my five don'ts that you should remember. Number 1 is don't ask for specific numbers because it's not guaranteed. You can have an amazing ID. You can have a great campaign and strategy. But at the end of the day, you can't guarantee specific views are specific numbers because every platform has an algorithm. Sometimes a video might go viral and do well, and other times it may not do as well. You know the saying that on Instagram they only show your post to like 10 percent of your audience. Obviously it can vary, but that's why most of the time I recommend doing a longer-term relationship and doing more content instead of just a one-off story or one-off post. Because having more videos, more content is going to buildup that brand awareness over time, and it's going to build more trust with that audience. Number 2 is sending misinformation about the brand or sending wrong tracking links. I've had at times in the past where I've worked with a client and they first gave me a link and then the link didn't work and they updated their system and they switched to another referral app. Then the links changed and this just causes confusion. This causes a mess when you're creating content because then you got to swap all the captions and change the links and stuff like that. Make sure that everything is ready and set to go. Make sure everything is correct. Make sure the brand guidelines are up-to-date. Number 3 is don't rush the creative process. It can take a lot of time to script a video, strategize content ideas, come up with titles, thumbnails. Some people have editors, so they're going to send it to the video editor, and that can take time in the editing process. Then you've got to schedule and do revisions. The process can take long, so it can take 2, 3, 4 weeks just to create a solid piece of content. Make sure that you give space, give time to the creator, and don't try and rush that creative process. Number 4 is, don't have a crazy long contract. Keep it short, keep it simple, keep it clear. Because we want to keep the ball rolling. We don't want have to spend too much time on the nitty-gritty. We want to make sure that we're jumping into the content but obviously have those clear guidelines and objectives because that's going to help you. Then number 5 is, don't make the influence of pay for your product. Give them a free version or pro account, send the product for free, but also compensate them for the work because sometimes just giving a free product is not enough. This is their living. You want to make sure that you build that rapport, build that relationship, because they'll most likely want to work with you again in the future. For the class action, I want you to create a reminder for your team. Create a set of guidelines of the five do's and the five don'ts, and you can add to that, just to help your team know what to do when working with an influencer. 4. Managing the collaboration: If you have many influences, things can get pretty hectic. You need a system that helps you manage everything efficiently. For me personally, I use Notion, you can use something like Basecamp, Asana, or Monday to manage your projects. I know Notion works for me because I can have databases in pages interconnected together and it's easy for me to share that link to my client. What you'll want to do is you want to keep track of the progress of the creation process so you know where are you up to. Are you in the scripting phase? Are they in the content creation phase, you want to make sure that you know where you are along that process? You also want to track traffic coming through any referral or affiliate links. Make sure you're ready to set up on those links and you can have it all in one place. It just makes it easier. You also want to be able to revise the content before they schedule and post it. Instead of going back and forth with a long string of emails. If you have like a nice dashboard or you have a workspace that you can put notes and feedback, then that's going to make everything a lot smoother when you go through that feedback phase. Now, if you don't have a third-party app that you're currently using, there are also marketplaces you can actually use that already have everything set up for you. I'll give you three of them that I think are really cool ones called tribegrouped.com. This is a good one. They've got Aspire.io is very professional and Clara for creators.com. Those are through marketplaces you can join if you're a creator or a brand. You can find a whole bunch of different creators in that marketplace. I think it's another good way to find more people a lot easier. Now for me personally, I had this dashboard. I'll show you a quick example of how it looks like I did a recent collab with a company called Bloom. This is how the dashboard looks. They've got the project status. We've got any notes here for meetings. I can put a contracted proposal files in here as you can see. Invoices are the little links that help. Then I've got the timeline so we can see what is done and complete. You can see the scripting phase. I can put like a to-do list, but the video content there. I can add some feedback with a PDF already, I typically stored on my computer. I don't always have to upload it here. Then so I can see the delivery phase, the delivery phase and so it's easier to just keep track of that. Then I can have links and then also the timeline down here. This allows me to manage the project and keep track of the content. Now, some tactics that I do use is that I would typically send the statistics of the contents. I'll get my insights from my Instagram reels, the stories, and also the YouTube Analytics. I'll screenshot it and after typically 14-30 days, I'll send a performance report to the client to see how everything went. We can really track the ROI of the campaign and the content we created. Also, remember that views and impressions take time. Things don't go viral straight away, especially on different platforms, for example, YouTube. YouTube doesn't value recency as much. It's more about evergreen content and keywords, titles, thumbnails. Your YouTube can pop off six months later down the track. Depending on what's trending and what's happening in the market, that's YouTube. But if it's TikTok and IG, it values recency. The more you post content and the early it is within the first seven days, you're going to get a lot more boost of views, but later on, it typically dies down. Now when it comes to tracking links, I do recommend using something like bit.ly. You can use something like that if the company didn't have a lot of tracking stuff or it can use something like a UTM link. Here's a good blog posts from HubSpot. They talk about what to tracking link and how to connect it to your Google Analytics. You can read that blog post for more on how to set that up. But typically for me I usually felt like a bit.ly and then I'll customize it to the brand. Just makes it easier for me to try to link and send it to my client at the end of the day. Now, what I want you to do for the student action is create a system, use an app, create something that you can use to manage the project efficiently. 5. Pricing and negotiation: Now when it comes to pricing, it's both an art and a science, there's no specific formula. There's literally hundreds of ways you can price something and every creator, whether they're small or big, will have different ways of pricing, so you got to understand that you might get different versions. Ultimately, you most likely will have a marketing budget if you're a company and so you'll get allocated, per month, or per quarter, a specific budget and you'll usually have to spread that across a certain amount of influences in that specific quarter or campaign and then it will change for the next campaign that you do. Typically, I think of the D.U.E framework, the DUE framework, which is D for deliverables, what are the actual deliverables that the creator is creating for you? Is it a story post on IG, is it three reels, is it five YouTube long-form videos? What specifically is the deliverables that they are creating? Then you've got U for usage rights. What is the brand actually using the content for? Are they going to be using it for ads, are they going to use it on their own platform, are they just going to pay for three months of usage? Is it going to be six months of usage, 12 months? Think about what platforms it's going to be on. How long are you going to be using it and if the company wants to use it for their ads, or just a post on the creators platforms. These are the questions you should be asking when it comes to usage rights. Then you've got E, which is for exclusivity. You've got to ask, are they going to be exclusive, or they're going to whitelist this creator? That ultimately means that your creator can't work with any competing brands competitive to you, so you might want to pay for six months of exclusive rights, which allows them only to create for your specific brand in that niche or category and so that can cost a lot more when you want exclusivity. Now when it comes to figuring out a specific formula, there's different formulas, but there's one I liked from Hootsuite. They have a influencer rate blog that they created, I think this is really cool. You can check out this link, it talks about how to use a calculator, typically what people charge for Instagram, obviously for YouTube it might be a little bit different, so definitely check that out, but typically it's the engagement rate per post, so your average engagement rate or your average views if it's, say, for YouTube, or maybe the average plays on Instagram, so however you want to calculate that. Then you do plus the extras for the type of post. How many posts is it and what type of format is it? Then extra factors. Extra factors can be the experience that the creator has, the value, the format that they're creating in, if there will be whitelisting or usage rights. This can ultimately all increase the price of working with an influencer. That'll equal the total rate. On Hootsuite, on that blog, it says the unspoken industry standard is $100 per 10,000 followers, so if you have 100,000 followers, the minimum you'll be paying is at least a $1,000 and then you got to calculate all the extras that come with that. Now another thing to think about as well, is the level of the influencers, so are they a nano influencer, micro, are they in the mid-range, are they a mega influencer with one million followers plus, or are they in that middle-tier with 50K to 500K, because as the more followers they have goes up, it can actually increase the price. But remember, it doesn't always have to be about followers, because at the end the day, you can have, say, 100,000 subscribers on YouTube, but only be getting 1,000 views and so that's going to mean less eyeballs for your product. Most of the time, it should be about the views and the ROI and the value that they're generating for your brand. When it comes to whitelisting or usage rights, typically it can be around 10 to 25 percent of the total fee that will be added on top of that fee that they supply to you, so keep that in mind if you want to go down that route. Here's a recent collab that I did work on for a client. You can see here, this is what I pitched to them, I had a content plan, as you can see here, we wanted to do some YouTube videos, some short-form videos and some dribble shots, which is really cool. We got the investment and I take a deposit and then I'll gather some ideas, so I sent them some links to some content that I found could work and then I gave three ideas and then we go through the terms and conditions, payment schedule, responsibilities, content metrics, the benefits, timing schedule, etc. That's basically it and that creates a conversation. Then we negotiate, we had a call and we set that up. Start to determine how many impressions or views you can get by working with this influencer, look at their stats, ask for their media kit and that will help you get a ballpark idea of what value you're going to create and generate for your brand. Now for your action, think about working on your marketing budget and allocating what's the highest and the lowest you can go for working for a specific campaign and start to break that down for your business. 6. Crafting your contract: Now before you work together, you want to have a contractual agreement that you have with that influencer. It makes you professional, it creates that trust as well. Obviously it's a legal document that you have in case things go off track, you can always refer back to that contract on what you agreed upon. When working with smaller creators, they might be new to the business or they might not be familiar with working with brands, so they might not have a contract. That's okay as long as the trust is established and they deliver on what they're asked, but it's always good to have like a one-page contract at least to show what we have. Now, some of the things you can include on that agreement, you can have the goals of the project. What are we trying to create? Is a brand awareness. Is it clicks, downloads, etc. What are the key messaging points? The features and benefits of the product, what do you want them to say? What can't they say about the product? How do you want to reposition the brand perception of your specific product you are promoting. Then you've got the deadlines. What's the timeline? Do you have a certain date that you have to have the content by before posting and scheduling, or maybe you're having a new product launch. Make sure that's all written down. You've got the copyright. Who will own the copyright? Or if there's usage rights, clearly state if the creator owns the rights to it, or are you buying the usage rights and the license for say, three months or six months, whatever it is, make sure that's all clear. Then you've got the SOW, the statement of work and the deliverables. Clearly outlining the scope of what is being delivered, is it five videos? Is it two posts on TikTok, Instagram, whatever platform, make sure that it's clearly stated. Then lastly, the payment schedule, how would they get paid? Are you paying it all up front? Are you paying 50 percent deposit? Are you paying a bit in crypto or a bit in cash, whatever it is, make sure that it's clear on how they're going to get paid. Now here are a few examples of some contexts I've worked with some brands, I'll just blur out the important information. But you can see here we've got the task or the work clearly outlined. We've got the deadlines here as well, by what date, and then we've got the copyright and payments schedules. This is a really simple one on how they did that. I just liked it because it was just very clear, very simple, and straightforward. Here's another example that show the background, who the audience is, what are the objectives, what platform and then the messaging points, how things will work so the timings and the feedback, how will that work as well? Here's a quick way, you can do it in a Google doc. That's totally fine and allows creator to see it and read it really easily with just having one simple link. Typically how I would sign a document, it usually be over something like HelloSign or eSign, or Adobe Sign, and I would sign via a PDF or a Google Doc that's connected to that app, and that allows you to sign the contract online really easily. Now for your lesson action, I want you to create a simple contract agreement that you can send to influencers, makes sure that everything is set in stone, that it's clean, and that it's easy to change and update that template over time. 7. Content ideas for specific platforms: There are heaps of different ways to get conversions, clicks, and downloads to your learning page, your business page, your product, whatever it is, you just need to understand what's the best ways on each platform. I'll show you a few examples on what to do on Instagram and YouTube, but here are some of the things that you can actually negotiate with the influencer on what you can actually include. For example, on Instagram, you can actually have a position in someone's link. You can see I've got a link in my bio Znaplink. This takes them to a page like this and typically, I will include the brand. You can see I've got Milanote here, DesignBro and Bloom. That's one place you can have it in a bio link. Also in content, you can do collaboration reels on Instagram, you can do carousel posts as well. This was a reel that I did for a brand. For Instagram, that's totally fine. You can also do stories as well and obviously in the hashtags and captions, you can connect with the brand like that. That's some ways. On YouTube you can actually put links within the video, you can also put it in the first pinned comment and the description. You can see at the top of description, I've got a link here to my affiliate for this app and then if I scroll down, I've got the link also in the first pinned comment. You don't have to just have it in the video but you have it in the description and first pinned comment. This just helps increase the chances of getting more clicks because ultimately some people skip to the video, some people like to look and read the comments, etc. You need to make sure that you ultimately have as many touchpoints as possible. You've got Twitter, you can have a DM strategy where you send them a link. Also, you can do threads. The influence that can promote your brand, maybe do a list, list the cool type of content or maybe storytelling and trying to communicate an idea. Then you've got TikTok basically short-form videos having a link in the bio as well as similar to Instagram. There are some ways on those platforms that you can actually get those clicks and have your brand positioned on that influencer's pages. Think about where your audience most likely will be and think about what platform will be the best to get the most ROI out of the collaboration. 8. Closing thoughts: Thanks for taking this class. I really hope you've gained some insights on how to collaborate with influences and creators, and I hope that every interaction you have with them is smooth and that you have a fruitful relationship with those people. Now, remember to craft your strategy and start reaching out to influencers and see how you can start to craft your own campaign. Remember there is a workbook in the project section that you can follow along to help guide you on that planning phase and strategizing on what to do. Thanks so much for taking the class. Post your projects and I will give feedback. Thanks so much, I really appreciate it. See you in the next class.