A Crash Course on Influencer Negotiation

If you’re like me you have a background in paid media.

Most leaders inside of eCommerce brands are PRO’s when it comes to spending money on Meta.

It makes sense, most eCom brands live and die by how Meta is performing. So naturally, most of the focus ends up on mastering Meta.

That’s great but you might be missing a skill in your arsenal of marketing weapons:

Negotiating with influencers.

But how do we actually set up these deals to become a win-win?

Well let’s start with the mistakes people make when outreaching to larger influencers...

Mistake #1: Not Understanding Your Own Budget

If you would like to give away all your money in your cash reserves account, just ask an influencer “what’s your rate” and go with that at face value.

An influencer (or agent) is always going to start negotiations at their highest price, which is often set because it was a rate that one brand in the past has decided to pay them and now it’s their new asking price.

If you don’t understand what this deal is worth to you, then you’re going in blind without any data to back up your decisions.

What you should be doing is the following:

Go through the influencers last 10 videos, and calculate the average view count.

Take your target CPM (could be a range of $20-$30 CPM) take that into account for the video views.

For example if an influencer has 50,000 views a video, and your CPM target is $30, you just need to plug this into a calculator.

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We have a CPM calculator available on our site you can use HERE.

So based on this calculation each video on average is at $1,500 for $30 CPMs.

We're going to start by offering $1000 for a post, to give ourselves some wiggle room in negotiation to hit our targets.

Mistake #2: Not Leveraging Deliverables + Terms

One of my favorite ways of negotiating is through terms.

As the old saying goes, your terms, my price, your price my terms.

Many people don’t know how many options they have available to them when negotiating with influencers.

They see these deals as a one and done post, instead of a potential long term partnership.

So here's a list of deliverables we can use in our back and forth with the creator:

• Instagram Reels
• Instagram Carousel
• TikTok post
• Syndicated Instagram Reel to TikTok
• Set of IG Stories
• Additional UGC statics or videos
• Content licensing / paid usage (from 30 days up to 1 year)
• Whitelisting access (running ads through influencers page)
• Exclusivity (whether or not an influencer can be in partnership with another brand in your category for a set amount of time)

My suggestion is to always include as much content licensing rights upfront as possible.

Creative payment options:

• More free product
• Monthly retainer
• % of ad spend on creative in paid social
• % of sales from affiliate link or Codes
• Featured on website / blog / newsletter

All of these are available to you to use.

Secondly, the cheapest way to get rates down is to suggest to the influencer that they can select additional free product from the website.

You’d be surprised how well this works, especially if you have a high AOV product.

Mistake #3: Not having enough deals in the pipeline.

The most leverage you have in a negotiation is being able to walk away from the deal table.

You can create this leverage by always having multiple deals being negotiated.

So if you are trying to sign five influencers for an upcoming promotion or product launch, you need to source 25 creators who fit your budget and scope overall.

You need to take a mindset that no one deal is more important than the rest.

Many times the rates influencers have set are because they were paid one time by a massive fortune 500 company OR because their discount code got leaked and got paid handsomely, and the marketers for that brand weren’t savvy enough to figure that out.

Live by this rule: Always be sourcing.

At AGM, we send a LOT of outreach to creators that we think would be a good fit based on their niche and content. Then with the creators who are interested in the campaign, we do a deep dive on their content and views to put together tons of offers at once.

Mistake #4: Too Much, Too Soon.

I have so many calls with CMOs of eCommerce brands who say the same thing.

“We paid this influencer $15k and nothing happened.”

This is a result of too much too soon.

When you are starting to pay influencers, you need a strong base to start from.

I love having a product seeding program that’s generating 50+ posts a month before paying influencers.

Why? It gives you leverage.

My suggestion is once you have a successful gifting program, start with just $5-10k/month in paid influencer spend, focused on mid-tier influencers completing specific deliverables around big marketing moments (i.e. a product launch that you need content for).

We have brands we started with at $5k who are now spending $50k/mo on influencer marketing.

Want to see your influencer program grow like this?

Book a demo and we’ll walk you through exactly how to negotiate, structure, and scale your deals.

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