Why You Should Hire An Influencer - Top 3 Tips
Written by: Alex Sunshine
For the better part of a decade, influencer marketing has established itself as the premiere marketing channel for Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) brands. The birth of any social media platform was fundamentally created to build a sense of social community online. Over time, it became clear that there was a ton of consumer attention on the platforms that both businesses, as well as its users, found opportunities to foster their products and services. These users are now referred to as influencers. For the sake of comprehending the size of the global marketplace, Instagram and Tik Tok have 1.4 billion and 1 billion users respectively. Additionally, Instagram and Tik Tok have 500,000 and 100,000 influencers respectively. In 2023, there are no shortages of potential influencer partners who can make for the perfect fit with your brand. I will share my top 3 tips to know when hiring an influencer for your brand.
1. Be Selective
My first tip is to be extremely selective about partnering with influencers who are the correct fit for your brand. In the early days of influencer marketing, the influencers who were early adopters had an early mover advantage and became hot commodities for brands. A fashion blogger with a few million followers was going to sell out any type of product line because the algorithm allowed them to reach most of their followers. It didn’t even matter if they spoke about a product that wasn’t of interest to them or aligned with their niche or branded expertise. Fast forward to today, and you will find it challenging to find success in any partnership that doesn’t align with the content creator’s genuine interest or expertise based on the content they are already creating. Furthermore, always know that a fashion blogger creating content around fashion will have a base of followers who also love fashion. This increases the probability of sales conversions as well as engagement from the influencer’s community. Long story short, if you are selling vitamins, it is extremely important to do your due diligence on finding creators who are actively creating content about their health and attracting people who are also trying to do the same thing.
2. Deal structures
My second tip for hiring an influencer is to make sure to get extremely creative about the variety of deal structures that you can offer to a talent. There are a lot of industry professionals, including myself, who claim to have the secret sauce to the exact dollar amount you can offer to each influencer. Our claims are that we have benchmark projections like CPM’s, demographics, as well as previous case studies to truly predict the outcome of a campaign. To clarify, all you need to do is follow a single pricing strategy and find influencers who are the right fit for your brand correct? Wrong. While there are industry standard benchmarks for deal valuations, there are a variety of different variables such as the creative(s), algorithm, timing of the post, product quality, product price point, and so much more that can impact the overall valuation of working with an influencer. To make things even more complex, each creator has different preferences in compensation. For example, some creators want to work only on a long-term deal and will offer flexible pricing. Other creators might place a heavier value on the time it takes to make the content rather than the actual distribution strategy of the content and vice versa. I’ve even seen creators become accustomed to getting certain rates based on previous campaigns, even if it doesn’t resemble what the metrics of their posts reflect today. The last thing to consider, is whether you want to pay a creator on a fixed fee, pay-per-view, or pay for the usage rights to run ads with their content. In any event, there are so many ways to make a deal with an influencer so don’t just ask for pricing but rather find out what type of compensation is valuable to an influencer and if they would be open to different types of deal structures.
3. Picking the right platform
How to pick and choose the platforms that make the most sense for an influencer and brand to create content on?
The third and final tip that I can provide for your brand when contracting an influencer is to be thoughtful about the social media platforms that you are choosing to work on when creating influencer content. Effectively, breaking down your influencer marketing spend percentages across each social media platform is crucial. So how do we know which platforms to pick and choose? Let’s use a fashion brand as an example when determining the ideal social platform. For example, a fashion brand doesn’t require a lot of languages so eliminate podcasts. A fashion brand needs models, who are mainly found on IG, and can create static images or short-form videos. In short, don’t try to reinvent the wheel when it comes to selecting a platform that makes the most sense for your brand. Save the creativity for the type of content being made, which will always be the ultimate variable. Another example can be a brand selling an eco-friendly and high-quality sustainable product. These types of products are quite popular with Gen Z so I would recommend marketing these products on Tik Tok where you can find a high concentration of Gen Z users. If you don’t know who your ideal customer is then you are flying your influencer marketing plane blindly and it will crash.
About the author:
Alex Sunshine is CEO and founder of Rising Suns Agency, a boutique influencer marketing agency for DTC brands. He builds partnerships between brands and social media influencers with common audiences, helping brands connect with their target market in creative and lucrative ways. Over a span of 4 years, Rising Suns Agency has closed over 234 influencer contracts, totaling over $823,000 in revenue to date. Alex has signed Gretchen Rossi, Ali Levine, Jesyka Harris, and worked with brands such as Amazon and Zulily. Alex's work is shaping today's influencer marketing industry to become more widely understood. He believes no brand should ever have to worry about finding their ideal customers again.
