Last Updated on June 8, 2020

Creating a social media marketing agreement between your brand and influencers may seem simple, but having an agreement is important for the effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign. Brands don’t always treat this agreement seriously because the responsibility is largely on them to make the right impression and get influencers excited about helping them. To avoid common pitfalls, review our guide on maximizing influencer output with expertly made agreements. The following tips should get you more of the correct influencer relationships and help you keep these relationships running smoothly.

Pitch to the Correct Influencers

Don’t pitch to an influencer solely because of size or engagement. Every influencer has specialties that your brand’s target customer base may not fall under. Target customers should be at the forefront when choosing which influencers to approach. Someone in the fitness space, for example, may not be interested in reviewing child care products, and the individual’s audience may not care either.

Related: What is a pitch?

Better connected influencers are naturally going to request greater payment, but this request is balanced by them getting bigger results. Take into account your influencer marketing budget and the scope of your business currently. Finally, don’t forget to study an influencer’s content, such as blogs and social media pages, to get your own impression of whether the individual fits your brand.

Explain the Value of Your Product to Your Influencer

Influencer marketing is all about being seen as genuine, and audiences react negatively to perceived phoniness. Influencers often decline pitches because they can’t muster a natural reason to promote a product or service to their audiences without seeming forced and fake.

Even influencers who agree to a pitch may get less exciting results if they don’t personally believe in your brand. Be descriptive and convincing in your pitch; it’s usually an influencer’s first impression of you. If someone doesn’t understand exactly what it is you provide and why the product or service is better than the competition, what chance does this individual have of promoting it to others?

Be Thorough With Your Instructions

Thorough instructions are an important factor that brands often neglect. As an example, let’s use the Intellifluence platform. When you approach influencers to participate in a campaign, Intellifluence gives you the space to fill your pitch with detailed instructions on every required action that influencers must take. Some other information to clearly outline could be the following:

  • Date and time windows for posting or performing different actions. Timing is critical in social media marketing, and spreading out posts or activity too far apart in a planned campaign can reduce the potential for something to trend and go viral.
  • Specific information to be stated. For example, if you’re promoting sales of a book and you want influencers to post their thoughts about the book, you could emphasize some specific marketing details such as the beautiful cover and chapter headings.
  • The tone or attitude to use when describing the product or service.
  • Points or topics to avoid discussing.

Leave Room for Creativity

While being thorough in your instructions is important, don’t take this advice to mean that you should outline every aspect of what an influencer does by basically writing a script. You don’t want your campaign to be transparent, and if you force multiple people to use the exact same statements, to word their messages in the same way, or to use overly similar pictures, savvy potential customers may be turned off.

Related: What should my pitch include?

Forcing different influencers to use the same rigid format will inevitably lead to more rejections and issues with influencers whose personal brand and methods don’t match up with a prescribed format. Put simply, be firm but flexible.

Be Open to Negotiation

If you pitch a potential marketing agreement to an influencer with a bit more clout and audience size, don’t be surprised if you don’t get a simple acceptance or denial. Sometimes an influencer will want to negotiate, and the negotiation may not be solely related to payment. Some reasons that influencers seek negotiation include the following:

  • Not being able to viably perform the task in the allotted date or time window, and therefore requesting a different timeline.
  • Having an idea about how to earn larger rewards for your business and thereby pitching an enhanced action plan for more payment.
  • Having questions about a specific requirement.

Creating a social media marketing agreement isn’t hard, but an influencer’s reply will vary depending on how prepared you are. Keep in mind that while your business creates a product or provides a service, so too does the influencer in the form of his or her online content. The more clarification you give about what is expected of an influencer, the better the chance he or she will have of producing especially good content that captivates an audience. In the end, these efforts all add up to better ROI for you.