Chapter 3

Engaging Influencers Using the “Three Cs”

IN THIS CHAPTER

Approaching influencers with irresistible offers

Entering into mutually agreeable relationships

Ensuring great results and happy influencers

Compensating influencers the right way

The overwhelming majority of influencers, especially the ones brands should be targeting, are not celebrities. They don’t have agents. They aren’t corporate entities. They may not have any corporate (let alone marketing or advertising) experience to speak of. They’re real, genuine people who have amassed an online following simply by being themselves.

Reaching out to influencers, getting them to respond, and ultimately getting them to do what you want is possible … but it’s not as easy as automated transactions. You can’t “order” engaging, personal, and authentic sponsored content the way you can buy ad space or hire a celebrity endorser who will ultimately read from a script. And you can’t reach out to influencers as though they’re press or as though they understand (or care about) your corporate-ese.

Mastering influencer outreach, relationship building, and program execution isn’t hard as long as you keep the three Cs in mind: communicating, contracting, and compensating. This chapter has you covered.

Communicating Like a Pro

When you’ve decided that you’re ready to work with social media influencers, you may spend quite a bit of time finding the right influencers for you. Don’t let it all fall apart by screwing up your communication. In this section, you find out how to reach out to influencers in a way that will reflect well on your brand, whether the influencers decide to work with you or not.

Making your communication personal

The number-one mistake marketers make is sending the same generic email to every influencer.

How personal social media is can’t be stressed enough in this chapter. People connect through dozens of different channels every day to stay in touch with friends, family, their communities, and the world. Social media outreach needs to be personal, too.

Each influencer is special in her own way. Each influencer has cultivated a unique audience and deserves to be recognized accordingly.

If you want a successful influencer outreach program, start by contacting individuals (not mass email lists). Find an influencer you believe will do good work for you and tell her why — read her blog, understand what she blogs about and who her audience is, and tell her why you think she’d be the ideal influencer for your company. Approach influencers as you would potential partners — not as potential hires who didn’t even know you had a “help wanted” sign on your window! This means doing your research and putting in a lot of upfront work. But the time spent is worth it!

To make your outreach personal, follow these tips:

• Remember that most influencers take their work personally. They consider their relationships with their readers personal as well. If you want to interrupt their regular flow of content to have them showcase your sponsored messaging, the very least you can do is recognize that’s what you’re asking of them.
• Don’t address your email to “blogger” or “writer of such-and-such blog.” Find the name of the person behind the account, or at least how he refers to himself.
• Avoid marketing-speak. You’re reaching out to a person, not a corporation. Approach your target with respect and professionalism, but also as a human being.
• Don’t forget that you’re asking them to do something for you, not the other way around. Even if your product is the best, even if you’re only contacting the very top of the top-tier influencers, even if you’re planning to pay them well, never lose sight of the fact that you’re the one asking for their help.

Making your offer compelling

You want to leverage each influencer’s voice and brand and the influence she’s established among her community to further your brand message. Why would an influencer want to do that for you? Unless you can answer that question, you’re not likely to get very far, no matter how personal your message.

As influencer marketing expands as a viable marketing approach, influencers are in higher and higher demand. As a brand, your offer needs to be compelling. Simply having a great product may not be enough. Never approach an influencer if you haven’t thought through a good response to the question, “What’s in it for the influencer?”

In the following sections, you walk through several key ingredients you may be able to offer to sweeten the deal: stuff, status, and creative freedom.

Offering free stuff

The simplest and most obvious offer brands make to influencers is a quid pro quo:

We’ll send you our product for free in exchange for your writing a review of the product on your blog.

Makes sense, right? In many cases, this approach works well. For example, many beauty bloggers, Instagrammers, and YouTubers receive makeup samples in exchange for including those samples in their makeup photos and tutorials.

If your product doesn’t have much retail value, or you don’t have enough product samples to send to every potential influencer, this approach isn’t the right one for you.

Offering status

Offering “insider” information about your company and products is a great way to engage fans on social media. Liking a brand page on Facebook may give someone access to behind-the-scenes information, advance notice of cool announcements, and even special discounts or coupons.

A similar tactic can work well with influencers. If an influencer is someone who would likely use your product or like your company, you could offer her special “insider” status in return for writing about your brand. In fact, you could even offer her an ambassador role.

A brand ambassador is an influencer who partners with a brand and works almost as an extension of the company. Her role is to promote a brand online over an agreed-upon amount of time (although it’s possible that she’ll be so enamored of your company that she’ll continue to promote it after her ambassadorship is over).

Many influencers enjoy being brand ambassadors as long as the brands follow through on their end of the bargain — that is, they ensure the role of brand ambassador is actually compelling. Here are some tips for how to make a brand ambassador or “insider” offer compelling:

• Offer your ambassadors sneak peeks at upcoming products or announcements as you would with employees.
• Engage in regular communication with your ambassadors to share behind-the-scenes information, such as photos of the company or product that isn’t otherwise available to the public.
• Send your ambassadors product(s) to sample before the product is available in stores.
• Offer your ambassadors special coupons or discounts or (even better!) give your ambassadors codes that they can give away or pass on to their readers at their discretion.
• Cross-promote the content that your ambassadors create on your own social channels — you can repost her photos on Instagram, retweet her tweets, even feature her blog or images on your brand’s Facebook Page.

Offering creative freedom

You’re selecting your influencers because you like the content they produce. Unfortunately, too many companies make the mistake of engaging with an influencer only to tell her exactly what she is supposed to do — from the photos she should post, to the language she should tweet, to the features and benefits she should highlight.

Not giving an influencer her space to create an authentic-sounding, crafted-by-her message dilutes the whole reason you want to use influencers in the first place. Brands that give the influencers gentle guidance but then let them “do their thing” are much happier with the results.

You’re working with influencers so that they tell your brand’s story in their own unique way. The more you try to control their message, the more like an ignorable “ad” the message becomes. You also risk damaging the influencer’s reputation with her audience if you force her to use your marketing language while framing it as though it’s her own.

In addition, consider brainstorming with the influencers about the kind of content they want to create! Don’t be afraid to invite your influencers to your company’s creative table and be part of the campaign planning from the beginning. After all, who knows what will resonate on your influencers’ social media channels better than the social media influencers themselves?

Keeping it real: Do’s and don’ts

When it comes to influencer outreach, put yourself in the mindset of the influencer. Social media is founded on authenticity, so as much as you’re able to, leave your jargon and marketing hype out of the equation.

Online influencers are popular because their audience relates to them. They aren’t corporate entities — if you want these influencers to respond to you, you need to speak to them like the people they are. This may seem obvious, but it’s harder than it seems!

Here are the do’s and don’ts of keeping it real in influencer outreach:

• Don’t make false claims about your brand or company. For example, don’t call a product “life-changing” if it isn’t (and let’s be honest, few products are).
• Do explain why your company, brand, or product is worthy of being promoted.
• Don’t make the message or request confusing. The influencer shouldn’t have to guess at what you’re asking them to do! Don’t send an email saying, “I thought you’d want to know about this product” with no call to action if what you really want them to do is write a blog post reviewing the product.
• Do keep your message clear and simple. Ask for what you’d like the influencer to do.
• Don’t expect your product, message, or social media campaign to go viral. Yes, influencers have caused virality but there’s no way to predict what, when, or how something — especially a sponsored piece — will hit it big.
• Do be realistic in what results you can expect from your influencer. There are many different ways to set goals for influencer marketing programs. Unfortunately, “We want it to go viral” is not a realistic or useful one.
• Don’t expect the influencer to create an ad. Influencer-generated content is not a glossy print ad, it’s not a press release, it’s not a graphically designed display ad. You’re asking the influencer to create a sponsored message in her own authentic way. If you want to control every aspect of what the influencer produces (her language, her post design, editing her photos), you’re no longer engaging in influencer marketing, you’re defaulting to a purely paid media model.
• Do provide clear editorial guidelines and standards (things the influencers should or should not do) and let them tell your story their way.
• Don’t ask your influencers to jump through hoops. The harder you make the program, the more room there is for errors and incomplete assignments. For instance, don’t require that your influencers download a coupon, print it, take it to a specific store miles and miles away from them, purchase the item, bring it home, demo it, write an extensive review, take tons of photos, and post everything to their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with only a few days’ notice.
• Do be considerate of your influencers. The easier your request, the better the odds that you’ll have a successful program.

Upping Your Game: Creating an Influencer Contract

One of the most important things you can do to ensure a successful influencer marketing program is to establish a contract with your influencers. This should be a simple but legally binding contract between the hiring entity (that’s you, or your marketing agency if you hired one) and each and every influencer that entity is engaging.

Use an online service such as EchoSign (www.echosign.adobe.com) to send and sign contracts electronically with no need to print, fax, or mail anything.

Setting up a simple contract can mean the difference between the “spray and pray” approach — where you reach out to dozens of influencers and hope they produce something of quality — and knowing exactly what results you can expect.

Nothing is preventing you from entering into a professional relationship with your influencers. You are, essentially, hiring them to function as an extension of your marketing team. You’d never hire someone (even a freelancer) without a written agreement, so contracting with influencers just makes good business sense.

Setting expectations

Don’t leave your influencer marketing program to chance. When you’ve reached out to your influencers and established mutual interest, it’s in all parties’ best interests to put in writing exactly what is expected, when, and for how much.

Forget the idea of writing an influencer to say, “I thought you’d want to know about …” without actually asking them to do anything specific. Be as clear as possible, and don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.

Controlling what you need to control

Many brands harbor some fear of bloggers and influencers in general. For as far as social media has come, some companies still hate the loss of control that comes with engaging with the masses on platforms they don’t own and can’t completely steer.

With one-way communication (where companies controlled everything about their brand image and messaging, before social media allowed consumers to “talk back”), companies didn’t have to worry about anything being “off-brand.”

When you hire influencers to produce sponsored content, you’re walking a fine line. You want the message the influencers create to be on-point, but you can’t have the message seem too corporate or it’ll sound inauthentic (because it is!). But if you allow someone to produce brand content for you, you risk that influencer going “off-brand.”

The entire point of influencer marketing is to let the influencers do what they do best: Craft your story in a way that’s best for their readers. Fortunately, this doesn’t mean giving the influencers carte blanche. With a contract, you can give your influencers express guidelines that should help them stay within the bounds you feel comfortable with.

Protecting yourself and your brand

A contract doesn’t just help the influencers understand what’s expected of them, it helps protect you, your company, and your brand.

From a simple legal standpoint, if the influencer you contract doesn’t fulfill her end of the deal, you’re under no obligation to compensate her. If the work she produces isn’t up to your standards, or is in violation of the guidelines you provided, you have recourse to ask her to change her work and bring it up to snuff.

You may be wondering what happens if you hire a blogger and she hates your product. What if she writes terrible things about your company? Can you make her sign something that says she won’t say anything bad? The short answer is “no,” but the longer answer is “nor should you want to.”

You can draft a contract that clearly states that the influencer may not post content that is false. However, it’s unethical to require a positive review. What’s more, if an influencer posts an unbalanced review of a product or company, it’ll come across as inauthentic. Her readers will know she’s not being genuine — especially because influencers are required to disclose that they’ve been sponsored to create brand content. This is mandated by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) so don’t make the mistake of overlooking this.

Avoiding problem influencers

Not only is it unethical to require positivity in a contract, it’s largely unnecessary. Consider why an influencer may write something damaging to a brand so you can avoid putting yourself in harm’s way:

• The influencer genuinely doesn’t like or understand the product. Make sure you’re targeting the right influencers and that they’re a good match for your product before you enter into a contract, and you’ll likely avoid this problem.
• The influencer receives a shoddy product that doesn’t work, doesn’t meet claims, or doesn’t live up to its hype. If you don’t make claims about a product that it can’t live up to, you’ll prevent this problem. And if the product just isn’t very good (which sometimes happens), use another form of marketing instead of asking for honest feedback from influencers.
• The influencer feels frustrated, undervalued, or angry with how the program has been managed. Make sure your expectations have been communicated clearly and are outlined in a contract that both parties have signed. The more respect and professionalism you show the influencers, the better the quality of the work they’ll produce. Having a contract in place helps solidify your partnership and prevents influencers from retaliating — because they have nothing to retaliate against.

Knowing what to include in a contract

Have a lawyer create your contract with all the standard elements needed to ensure your contract is legally binding. your influencer contract should include these contract elements:

• The influencer’s legal name.
• The influencer’s social media addresses where you expect her to post (for example, her blog URL, Instagram handle, Twitter handle, and so on).
• Specific deliverables with deadlines. For example, “Write one blog post between July 6 and July 17, 2019, including what you enjoyed about the product, why other families might enjoy the product, three to five high-quality photos that complement your post, and top and bottom disclosures (provided separately) in compliance with FTC guidelines.”
• Language about who will own the sponsored content that the influencer creates for you. We recommend that you allow the influencer to always own her content, but that she grants you and your brand rights to use or repurpose her content.
• Professional standards. Here’s your opportunity to make sure the influencer doesn’t post anything illegal, false, or defamatory; doesn’t use profanities; doesn’t plagiarize; provides error-free work; and attributes photos properly.
• How you prefer to communicate and how you’ll confirm that the influencers’ work has been completed.
• What the influencer will be paid, dependent on what, by which means, and by when.

Compensating Influencers Fairly

Paying influencers is something of a controversial topic, but there are no two ways about it: You must compensate your influencers.

Some PR and marketing professionals believe that the old, spray-and-pray method is the best way to approach influencers. They still believe that the best way to get “organic” (or “earned”) media placements is to send product samples or press releases to as many influencers and possible and just hope to get something good in return.

But influencer marketing isn’t only about earned media, it’s about earned, owned, and paid-for media. There is no reason to limit how you approach influencers, and there should be no controversy about paying them. This section helps you know how to pay your influencers fairly.

For more information on earned, owned, and paid media see Book 5, Chapter 1.

Understanding why you need to pay influencers

If you’re still not convinced that you need to pay your influencers, here’s why:

• Not compensating your influencers sends a clear message: “We don’t value your work.” You want influencers to produce good content in a timely manner that supports your brand goals. In other words, you’re asking them to work for you … for free.
• Some influencers may promote you out of the goodness of their hearts, but most will not. Influencers who do agree to promote a brand “for free” do so with the expectation that they’ll be compensated down the road.
• Brands that don’t compensate influencers fairly risk getting a bad rap among influencers. One of the most prominent bloggers in the country, Jenny Lawson (a.k.a., The Bloggess), has an entire section of her blog dedicated to PR people who pitch her poorly. For a great laugh, see www.thebloggess.com/heres-a-picture-of-wil-wheaton-collating-papers.
• You get what you pay for. The less you’re willing to invest in your influencer marketing program, the less successful it will be. The best talent doesn’t work for free, so what level of talent are you engaging?
• Air and traffic don’t pay the bills. Brands sometimes promise that they’ll pay influencers by featuring them on their website or Facebook Page, explaining to the influencers that this will benefit them — it will boost their visibility and increase their traffic. Unfortunately, that is a rare outcome for the influencer, and almost never worth the amount of work the influencer put in.

Avoiding compensation pitfalls

Several brands and agencies just entering the world of influencer marketing start off with this question: “How do I calculate what to pay influencers?” It’s a tough question. And it’s also the wrong one.

Bloggers and marketers have been struggling to come up with a formula for calculating how much a blog post is worth for over a decade. The trouble is, formulas are necessarily dependent on numbers alone, such as how much traffic a post is likely to receive, how many comments it generates, or how much revenue it drives. But what you’re really asking influencers for is to create quality content — almost (but not completely) irrespective of numbers.

How can you create and apply a single formula based on subjective, qualitative requirements? You can’t. The best way to figure out what to pay influencers is to understand what the going rates are in the influencer marketplace. That way, you avoid the two likely-to-fail approaches in the following sections.

Calculating influencer payments with traffic and engagement metrics

Some marketers try to quantify the success of a program (and associated influencer payments) using formulas based on an influencer’s reach and engagement, where engagement includes likes, comments, and shares of that influencer’s sponsored content. They do this by placing a dollar value on these things — deciding, for example, that a Facebook “like” is worth $100 and a comment left on a blog post is worth $250.

At best, these numbers are arbitrary. At worst, they’re absurd. For one thing, these numbers suggest that all content and engagement is created equal. But some influencers have better content and more genuinely engaged fans. Someone who likes a brand’s Facebook Page to enter a contest is not as valuable as someone who likes a brand’s Facebook Page because they’re genuine fans of that brand.

More important, if these numbers are used to calculate the value of an influencer program without taking into account the actual, measurable success of the program on the whole, the numbers are useless! How much money was invested in the program? What were the program’s main objectives? To what extent were the objectives met? Did an increase in sales revenue occur? Only when taking those factors into account can you truly know the value of your influencer marketing. Otherwise, your calculations are being done in a vacuum and the numbers aren’t tied to anything.

Tying influencer payments to click performance or revenue

Some brands prefer to pay influencers on a performance basis, such as how many clicks their posts generate, how many coupons someone downloads, how many sales are generated directly as a results of an influencer’s post. This is an unfair and impractical approach for several reasons:

• It devalues the work the influencer is doing. Sometimes a product, brand, or service is simply not very compelling to readers and doesn’t get traction through social media. But the influencer who has spent time, energy, and talent building good content for your brand should still be compensated for it.

  It’s up to you to make sure that you’re not working with an influencer who is willing to damage her brand by agreeing to promote something that her fans won’t respond to.

• Performance metrics don’t tell the whole story. Influencer marketing is primarily about building brand awareness, not delivering immediate conversions to sales. Paying influencers based solely on the sales they generate is affiliate marketing, not influencer marketing.

  Affiliate marketing is when a publisher (like someone who writes a blog or produces a website, not necessarily an “influencer”) gets a portion of a sale that is generated from her site. For example, if a blogger has a link to Amazon.com on her sidebar, and you click it and then make a purchase, the blogger will be paid a portion of that sale (essentially a commission). The upside for affiliate advertisers like Amazon is that they only have to pay their publishers if and when a sale is made, so there’s no risk for them. The upside for publishers or influencers is that they can make a fee simply for passively posting something on their site — they don’t have to create sponsored content. The downside for affiliate advertisers is that very few people click the links and purchase something. The downside for publishers/affiliates is that the fees they make are a tiny, tiny fraction of sales they generate, which are usually small to begin with.

• Performance metrics set up influencers for bad behavior. Over the years, too many brands offered influencers payment based on the number of clicks they drive (pay per click, pay per performance, and so on). This sets up influencers to try to “stuff the ballots” and find unscrupulous ways to inflate their numbers. The best influencers know better and shy away from these arrangements.

Looking at the going rates for influencers

You’ll only be able to engage and contract with the best influencers out there if you’re willing to compensate them fairly based on market rates.

You don’t have to pay your influencers in cash. You may offer to compensate influencers with product in addition to or in lieu of cash payments. However, the value of the product should be equivalent to what an influencer would command in cash. Of course, “value” may be calculated by retail value or by other intrinsic qualities of the offer: opportunities to meet celebrities, receive an in-demand product before it’s available to the public, and so on.

In addition to cash, the “Izea 2018 State of the Creator Economy” study indicates other incentives for influencers include:

• Free products
• Free services
• Discounts or coupons
• Gift cards
• Trips or travel

Just be reasonable. Don’t offer an influencer a coupon for $30 worth of shoes if she can command $300 for her work. And remember, nothing says, “I love your work” more than cash.

The Izea study (https://izea.com/2018/11/01/announcing-the-2018-state-of-the-creator-economy/) also presented some very interesting information about the difference between how marketers value content and the compensation creators expect to receive. Here are some examples:

Type	Creator (Influencer)	Marketer
Sponsored Facebook update	$77	$1429
Sponsored blog post	$329	$1129
Sponsored pin	$75	$1061
Sponsored tweet	$59	$910

Obviously creators are undervaluing their worth to marketers. However, it’s hard to determine how much more marketers would be willing to pay influencers when they have a host of other costs to run a campaign.

Obviously, these market prices continues to evolve. But remember that according to this study, the most important criteria for a marketer when choosing a creator is quality of content.