Influencer marketing has become a popular and effective way for brands to promote their products and reach new audiences.
However, negotiating partnerships with influencers can be a complex and challenging process.
Let’s break down how, when, and why’s in the negotiation process during your influencer campaigns.
Most Common Ways of Running an Influencer Campaign
Running an influencer campaign falls down to two most common categories:
- Inhouse
- Outsourcing to agencies/vendors
Inhouse: A brand can choose to run its influencer campaigns in-house, which means that the planning, execution, and management of the campaign are handled by the brand’s own employees.
Agency/vendor: A brand can outsource its influencer campaigns to an agency or vendor. Agencies and vendors specialize in planning and executing influencer campaigns on behalf of brands.
Challenges in Running Influencer Campaigns
In-house and agency/vendor types of influencer campaigns have their pros. Let’s dive into the actual difficulties of running with each of them.
In-house Campaigns:
In-house campaigns let the brand have complete control over influencer campaigns.
When running in-house, marketers may find it difficult to manually find the influencer under the brand’s niche, shortlist, contact, and then execute.
In this influencer campaign workflow, finding and selecting the right influencer takes more time and burns most of your energy.
After all the effort, when you end up in an influencer’s DM, how sure will they reply?
There are multiple brands just like yours waiting in the unread request of an influencer.
The chances are mostly you get a very delayed response or no response.
This badly affects the timeline of your influencer campaign. Or it might push you to a point where you’ll have to work with influencers who responded (not the ones you actually had in mind.)
Also, mention that you only get to negotiate if there’s a response.
On the other hand, when there’s a delayed response, communication between the brand and influencer takes a hit.
And to those who responded, you’ll end up in a mindset that “not to miss” and end up agreeing on deliverables and cost whatever they’d quote.
Finally, you end up in “NO ROOM FOR NEGOTIATION.“
Agencies/Vendors:
Agencies/vendors know how influencer marketing campaigns work. They are experts in starting this from scratch regardless of the brand’s niche.
There’s a BUT.
When you handle influencer campaigns via agencies/vendors, something to look out for or something you’ve already faced is:
THERE’S NO TRANSPARENCY.
Have a look at the flow chart above, there’s no place where you get to contact the creator directly.
When the basics of communication is itself hanging, how would you negotiate or know if the quoted cost is the actual one?
You might as well know there’s a hidden cost from the agency, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Rather end up paying hefty fees to get your influencer campaign running.
This cycle keeps repeating, and you end up exhausting your marketing budget, paying extra every time.
To be precise, the agency stands as a wall between your brand and the influencer, not a bridge.
Solution to Transparency Issue
All the while facing these issues, you might have thought:
“ONLY IF I HAD DIRECT CONTACT WITH THE INFLUENCER.“
And how do you get it?
In the traditional manual reachout process, it’s hardly possible to contact and get responded to by every influencer and store their contact details.
This is when an influencer marketing tool comes in handy.
You’ll have access to influencer contact details. Contact them directly, get a response promptly, start negotiating costs, and save a massive chunk of your marketing budget.
Here’s how easily you can get the influencer contact information using influencer marketing platforms like Qoruz.
Having the contact number of the influencers saves a lot of your time, effort, and money.
A lot of your influencer marketing challenges, along with negotiating the marketing budget, will get solved, such as:
- Builds a relationship with creators
- No more delayed response
- Space to communicate with creators
- Ensure you and the creators are on the same page
- Having full control over your influencer campaigns
The Actual Solution
Now that you know how an influencer marketing platform helps give influencers contact information to negotiate costs, how do you proceed with this?
You might think not having the bandwidth to use a platform and run influencer marketing campaigns in-house is a barrier.
It’s a myth. You don’t actually need an entire team to plan and execute influencer campaigns when using an influencer platform.
Influencer marketing platforms help you throughout the campaign workflow.
From researching, analyzing, contact influencers to fetching reports for your campaign.
Try influencer marketing platforms, contact & negotiate with influencers directly and save money in your influencer campaigns.
