When, Why, and How to Pay Influencers

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of AttendMedia. Jenny, today’s episode when, why and how to pay influencers, Jenny, we’re doing another podcast episode about influencer marketing. There’s just so much to talk about. Yeah, I think today we’re going to go into the weeds a little bit. We’re going to be talking about financially compensating influencers. It’s just kind of a question that we get a lot about. We’ve got an idea that most of our audience is working with influencers, influencers, to some capacity, but in your opinion, are most paying or where does the landscape lie? Yeah, I think some of the bigger ones are paying, but it’s sort of a trickling end, right? I think the majority of the influencers that are working with are still on ticket trade. Okay. And then, yeah, let’s set the stage. What is influencer marketing? How are we defining it in terms of local non-proper cultural attractions? Yeah, so it’s somebody else creating content for you, right? So it’s a user generated content, a UGC content that an influencer or someone with a following their own audience is posting and creating for you. So it’s that more authentic content, that kind of word of mouth content. It’s more organic. It feels less like an ad. Right. And these videos, this content is living and being promoted and shared through TikTok and Instagram and to an extent, Facebook and YouTube, correct? Yep, that’s primarily where this content lives. All right. So where do you want to go with this? How do you want to start? Well, I think, kind of, we’re thinking of paying influencers. We’re really thinking of influencer marketing as part of our paid advertising, right? Paid influencers, paid advertising. And I think this is something that we kind of preach a lot of, you know, really sort of maybe flipping how you’re thinking about and working with influencers or influencers in American as a whole because when we move underpaid advertising, we’re going to treat it like our other paid advertising channels, right? And I think one of the most important things here is we’re going to measure it like other paid advertising channels. And probably one of the biggest things that we’ve heard about influencer marketing is, don’t really know what it does for me. Like I know I’m supposed to be doing it or should be doing it or yes, someone says video looked great when they came, but like, what is it doing for me? And I think that’s when we move it underpaid and we start measuring it, now we can start saying like, this actually is working for me or does it, right? Like maybe we have the wrong influencer me to work with somebody else. But yeah, you’re treating each one of these influencers as a, you know, kind of like you would treat each print publication or each TV station or each radio station or, you know, creative on meta, right? Like we’ve got to look at how it performs, just like we look at everything else we do. Yeah, actually we did a whole episode on this. It’s some aptly titled think of your influencer marketing as paid advertising. You know, just recalling that conversation a little bit more. It’s something where you have it on your media plant, right? There’s TV, outdoor, meta, and influencer marketing that brings in that measurement piece, right? That brings in that, oh, it didn’t work for me. Like I ran one TV commercial one time and I don’t know what it did for me. You just want to say that if you have television as part of your your advertising plan. I also think like, you know, if it’s going to be on on our advertising plan, we have to plan for it. We have to budget for it. And in this case, we’re talking about financially compensating influencers. So maybe there’s a budget for that. We’re also talking about putting paid advertising dollars behind the content that these influencers create. And then we can also talk about like budgeting for trade. You know, a lot of times we’re trading tickets for these influencers to come in just like we would budget for trade if we’re going to be working with radio stations. Like I’m going to trade tickets. It’s not like you just have a million tickets to trade, right? We have a set budget to kind of help us guide. Guide us throughout the rest of the year. Yeah, some some people, you know, trade is treated like cash. So it hits their bottom line the same way. So budgeting for trade is extremely important. And then for others, you know, maybe they have a much more, uh, lacks amount of tickets that they’re able to to give out for trade. But regardless, if we think about, you know, kind of the example you gave of, you know, trade for radio, right? That’s pretty common. It’s like, uh, you know, if you’re putting together paid schedule on a radio station, oftentimes you’re offer, you know, you’re looking for 10, 15, 20% in like a trade schedule as well too. But you’re not just saying do whatever you want with that, right? Like you’re getting, there’s still going to be a schedule and maybe that schedule is not, you know, uh, evening drive every single day. But you’re going to have a schedule that’s not just like a total broad rotator that they can run whenever they want. Like, there’s still going to be some stipulations behind how it’s done. And so I think that’s how you have to start trading influencers as well too is even if it’s, even if it’s tried, like, what is the value of the trade that you’re giving them? And what is the value and return that they’re giving you? So and you know, that could be tickets and that could be more premium experiences and events as well too, and that you’re, you know, able to offer them to sweeten the pot. Well, okay. So, you know, I love doing this. You’re the media planner, media buyer, which would our budget be? Do you have any thoughts on, you know, if you were to kind of go headfirst into this strategy saying we’re going to look at our paid, our paid, sorry, we’re going to look at our influence remarketing as paid advertising. What’s your guidelines on budgeting? Is this, we’ll go ahead. Yeah. Um, yeah, it’s the question that I think we all kind of hate getting initially like, what should I spend? It’s like, well, what are your goals, right? But um, over the years, I’ve learned that you actually do need to have some kind of guardrail here to guide our guidelines, you know, to really think about how you’re going to budget this. So, um, we’ve got kind of our, kind of media planning guideline. Um, make sure you did a whole episode on this, but we’ve got a document on the website as well too that you can go to, but we have a couple of like rules to be thinking through. I should put together your media budget or your media plan. And there’s two that stick out that I think it can help guide how much to spend against influencers and one is we say, really don’t invest in anything if it’s less than 5% of your budget, right? So get picky about, you know, what you’re, what you’re running, what you’re doing. And so I think you can look at that to say, okay, if I have a $100,000 budget, I’m going to put $5,000 aside to pay some influencers to come out. Obviously, that’s just kind of a starting point, a guideline that you can use. You can, you know, invest as much as you want here, right? But the other side of it is when we talk about influencer marketing is we talk about amplifying it in our paid social campaigns. So the other kind of guideline that we have is you should be investing around 10% of your overall budget and paid social. And some of that budget can go to support the amplification of this influencer marketing. So if you’re looking at this altogether, your paid social and your influencer marketing, you’re probably investing around 15% between the two of those, if not more, the smaller the budget you have, I think the larger that percentage is, but that’s kind of one area like, how much am I going to pay influencers and how much support am I going to put behind it based off of my paid social allocation for the year? And that’s numbers probably coming into that 10 to 15% range. Yeah, not to delve into this too much, once again, we did a whole episode on it, but that minimum of 10% social media for your annual budget. And I think we have some language in our guide that talks about if your annual budget is closer to that $204,500,000 mark, that percentage of share for social media should be a little bit higher than 10%, probably closer to 30, 40, 50%. Bottom line is we’re just big believers in the power of social media. And this influencer marketing piece is a subset, a part of a paid social media plan. All right, let’s get into it. Why? Why would an attraction pay an influencer? First of all, I’m an attraction. I’ve got cool stuff to go look at. I love saying this, I’m not a dentist’s office. People are going to come to my attraction, post pictures, create videos, tag their friends, share with their followers, and they’re all going to do it for free and I don’t have to do any work. And I don’t have to pay. And I’ve got a million other things to do. Why would I take the time and effort to pay influencers? Yeah, so if we’re thinking about it as paid advertising and if it’s paid advertising, it’s going to have a strategy behind it. Then I think when we start introducing the study of paying an influencer, we can now start ensuring that we’re selecting the right influencers. So people who are coming to you, you can have some really great influencers, with really large following reach out because they really just love your attraction and want to promote it. That’s awesome when that happens, but that doesn’t always happen. Or it’s not always the right audience that’s coming to you asking for those tickets. So maybe your an attraction that is opening a children’s museum or our children’s center, right? And you don’t normally have families come. You want to make sure that you’re working with mom influencers, right? That might not be who’s coming and knocking down the door for those free trade tickets to begin with. Or maybe you’re in an area where you do really well with a particular age group, but you need to get younger, right? And so that you need to introduce your attraction to a younger audience or maybe a Hispanic audience, so maybe you have no content that is in Spanish language, right? And so now we can work with influencers to bring them in to help, but we have something that appeals to them and we want them to know that we’re here and we’re, you know, we’ve got content or we’ve got an attraction for them, right? So those are, I think, some ways that when we think about why pay, it’s because we can really start getting more selective over the type of influencer that we want to work with, not just the size of influencer that we want to work with. So that’s kind of always my number one. And when you’re reaching out, when you’re going through and you’re sourcing, you’re figuring out who’s my target audience, who’s my growth audience, how am I going to utilize influencers that fit in these different audience buckets, let’s say, you’re reaching out to them. Chances are they’re going to be like, yeah, let’s work with you. Here’s my race. I hope do expect that cost to come into discussion when that happens. Yeah, that makes sense. If we’re looking at this marketing tactic as part of paid advertising, we know as part of that is like, we need to go and spend dollars to go reach this particular audience, invite them to come into our attraction. And this falls in line with what you’re saying, we can be picky on who we want to work with. All right, so that’s one reason why to pay finding that right influencer. What’s number two? You can direct them. So this is everything from the creative brief to the deliverable to I really want you to come for a new event or exhibit that’s opening versus just whenever they want to come. So this, I mean, just think about it, if you’ve got somebody who’s reaching out of January and you’re an outdoor, you’re a zoo and it’s cold outside and no one’s coming. I mean, you may want to work with somebody in January to help kind of promote it when you’re not running out dollars, but you also may say, this isn’t really going to help my attraction right now because no one’s coming in this now anyways, right? So when do you want them to come versus just when do they want to come? You’re directing them in terms of what they’re going to say, but you’re not directing them in terms of exactly how to say it, right? So I want to make sure that you know, I’m giving somebody some great background information of my attraction, but I’m not going to tell them like, here’s a script for you to read off of. And then I think just directing them on that actual deliverable. So I want to post it on TikTok or I want to post it on Instagram. I don’t want to just post it wherever you want to post it, right? Like, or a lot of times people will, I guess, would trade, they might just post it to their main social handle and you really want to cross-fem out it to YouTube and TikTok because you want to do some additional advertising in those particular channels. So you have more control over being able to do that if you’re actually paying this person. Yeah, we’re like, like compilation rules like top five things to do in Dallas this weekend, and you’re just jumbled in there with kind of your competitors. Yeah. If we pay them, we’re getting dedicated content, we can dictate, I want it to be 15 seconds, I want it to be 30, whatever it may be. Yeah, I’d say that’s kind of two things that I see a lot is you’re kind of rolled in with a lot of other stuff because there really wasn’t direction on how they had to use those. I think some attractions do a good job of even on trade, they’re giving some pretty specific directions on how to use it. And then the other one is just on the time, right? So I’ve seen some that are literally just like six seconds, one line of copy. And it’s not like bad to have that, but if I want someone actually talking, if I want voiceover, if I want text overlay, if I want a little bit more information about how to get a ticket in that copy, if I’m paying them, I can direct that a little bit more. Okay. Yep. So number one, right, influencer, finding that audience that we want to invite in, number two, you can give direction, right? We can instruct the influencer to talk about these certain things. What’s number three? The biggest reason to pay is really to be able to amplify the content. So getting more usage out of this influencer content that’s being created for you by putting it in ads. So in our social channels, this is typically what we refer to as like white listing. So it looks like it’s coming from the influencers handle from their own page. It is coming from a page that you’re promoting it and putting dollars behind it to run it as an ad. This is going to be some of the most organic looking content. That you can run in these social channels. And if we’re directing them, right, we’re telling them we want video and this type of this video, these reels or you know, video on Tate tag. This is what performs best and what often times we find that a lot of attractions or advertisers actually lack in terms of having enough of this content. So these influencers now can be creating this content for you and you can be amplifying it as part of your paid advertising strategy within specifically Instagram and TikTok. Yeah. And there’s what you’re talking about like with getting ad codes, right? The influencer would send you an ad code or give you basically permission to use their content that they’ve produced in your advertising. Mm-hmm. Yep. So they post it on that channel. And then when they posted, there’s an ad code that they can pull from it and send it straight to us to them, put into our business manager campaign. We are putting the dollars behind it, not the influence of themselves. We’re paying them for these usage rights, right? Think about a TV or radio spot if you’re going to like use a voice talent. They need to know where and how that spot’s running because it’s going to charge you differently if it’s in one market or if it’s national, right? So it’s the same type of concept. If you’re going to actually be using their content to promote your tickets, hails, they’re going to want to be compensated for that. I find that’s typically not that much more. Some will just give it to you. No for no charge. Some will give it to you for a very low charge. Some want a lot of money for it. So there’s not like a set standard rate for usage rights. And then I’m going to pull back on something you said enough, making sure that you have enough content. Like how many influencers do you think an attraction should be using or engaging with throughout a year or campaign? Yeah, again, this will vary. But we generally say, going back to how many audiences you’re trying to target, right? I want moms and I want Hispanic influencers, right? That’s two audiences. We say have two to three influencers at minimum per audience, per campaign. So in that example, I’d have two to three moms, two to three Hispanic influencers over one campaign for one month. I’ve got four to six influencers that I’m working with for one month period or so. So I like to think through it that way, the longer your campaign runs, the more content you’re going to need. These platforms hit content wear out pretty quickly. There are some ways that you can refresh that creative and continue running it so that it doesn’t hit wear out quite as fast. But yeah, I think just having those two to three influencers to give you two to three pieces of content per audience that you’re looking at working with is reaching is kind of a baseline. Sure. All right. So if you’re promoting your blockbuster event, maybe you have a couple of different audiences that you’re bringing out. You mentioned moms, maybe Spanish speaking, and then the younger date night type of crowd as three different audiences. So a quick math here, two to three, ten, that big event, a couple more for the spring. So there could be a scenario where there’s an attraction working with 10, 15, 20, 30 different influencers throughout the year. You kind of get to that idea is like, man, we got to be aggressive on how we can get that much talent in offering a few hundred bucks in exchange for creating the video and getting that ad code can help you get to that level of different content to avoid this idea of content wear out. Yeah. And you’re probably going to have some combination of some who are going to do it for free and for just the tickets and some combination of influencers who are going to want to work with you two, three, four times throughout the year and they want to be compensated for that. You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast conversations on how non-profit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media. Attend media is a media planning and buying agency specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information please visit attend.media. Now back to Ryan and Jenny. All right, Jenny. So we were just talking about why we would pay influencers and one of the reasons you gave is giving direction, right? We can tell these influencers a little bit more what we expect out of this and this telling them happens through what’s called a creative brief. Tell us tell us about your approach on creating a creative brief. Yeah, so a brief that you provided an influencer obviously you can go to them the information of who went and where, why? But I think kind of the number one rule I would tell everybody when it comes to creative brief with influencers don’t say too much, right? Don’t tell them, don’t direct them too much, right? The idea of this brief is to give them background information so they can come up with this creative process and speak in their own tone. Same way you would give it a creative agency, a creative brief. You’re not telling them this is exactly what I want you to say and what I want the spot to look like. You’re giving them all the information that they need to then go in and come up with a creative concept for you. So, treat your influencers the same way, right? And then you’ve given me a list of six must-habs to be in a creative brief on what’s number one? So first, it’s really just giving them some background information whether that’s on your attraction as a whole or a particular event or exhibit that you have them coming out for. And it’s really just so that they can go off and do their own research on you, but this is really just to make sure that they know all the main points that they need to know about what’s happening. I like to say like a press release especially if it’s for an exhibit opening or an event, a press release can be enough information for that. You don’t need pages and pages and pages of information here. Try to get it all to just one page on that. And you can always direct them to the website for more information. But you want them to come to your attraction and experience it like another visitor would, right, or another guest would. So let them share their experience through their eyes without having to tell them like here’s every step of the way. All right, in number two. So include the goal of the campaign, right? Just like you would put in a brief to an agency, are we trying to drive visits? Are we trying to drive ticket sales? Are we trying to share our mission or conservation efforts? What is that goal that you’re trying to do? Are you trying to reach a new audience? Those are just some of the basic information that I need to know, how are they going to drive success for you for this campaign? Is it just creating awareness or should they be pushing a certain ticket package for someone to buy? So give them as much information about your campaign goals as possible, again, the same way you would maybe brief an agency. Got it. A number three. So the third thing is really what you expect from them, the right, the deliverables. So this is everything from like mandating the content length. So I, we talked about some things that maybe some influencers do would ticket trade if they’re not directed, right? You’re in a compilation video of other parks and attractions in the market or it’s, you know, just a few seconds long, right? What kind of content do you want from them? I tend to request 20 or 30 second reels for if I’m paying someone and that’s what I’m putting in a brief. And then it’s usually like cross promoting it on on take talk as well too. So the channels that you want to be in and the type of content you want them to create, if you don’t direct them on this, they can create whatever they want, right? And there’s nothing for you to go back to and say, “Wait a minute, I thought you were going to give me a video and you just put two images up in a carousel post.” So a brief kind of as a setup for your contract as well too. All this makes sense. All right, number four. Make sure you include all your mainatories, right? The handles that they need to use to tag you in, the, you know, the specific names of the events so that they don’t call it the wrong thing or shorten off the name, right? And then disclosures are really important. So if you’re, especially if you’re paying an influencer, they need to say that they were paid or they were hosted. So make sure that you’re using all the proper disclosures there. When you do run it as an ad, it does automatically come up as a paid partnership so you’re covered there. But if they’re, like if you weren’t running it as an ad, you’d want to make sure that they are using that, you know, thank you for sponsoring this post or paid partnership or ad or hosted. Got it. All right. And number five on your must-hows for a creative brief. So we want everything to run as an ad. So how to get ad codes. I would instruct the influencers and how to do it. A lot of influencers who have larger followings are probably familiar with this, but just make sure you have the instructions for how they can get an ad code. If you need them to join an ad campaign, like take that creative marketplace, which is, I think it’s just transitioning over into the business manager accounts now. But if there’s anything specific that they need to do or join for you to be able to report it back on the campaign on what they’re posting and creating for you, make sure you’ve got that in a brief as well. Yeah. Like this is like the one stop shop document to tell the influencer what’s going on. Okay. But you don’t want to do is going back and forth with 10, 15, 20 influencers of them all asking you, how do I do this? Where’s that at? Right? So that starts to become a nightmare managing them. So as much instruction information, I’ve just like the process as a whole, I think is really important and a brief. Well, I think this sets up number six quite nicely. Yeah. So what do we do after the content is posted and created? So you can build in your approval process. Do you want to see it before it goes live? I do recommend if you’re going to review it before it goes live. You get to light edits, right? Did they check off all the check boxes on the brief that you agree to? But as long as they’ve spelled everything correctly, they hit their minimums, you know, everything looks nice, you got to let it go. Like don’t try to control it too much there. Give them a window to post. So if they’re visiting on a, or whatever time they’re visiting, like I like to say a seven bell post content within the seven day window. I have some flexibility with some creators, you know, of not going to like never work with somebody again because they post it one day late. But what I don’t want is to have to follow up with several influencers to say, when are you going to post this, right? So give them that window at like seven days typically. And go ahead. And just last for reporting. So whether you use software or not, I think just having a particular you know, request or demand on your influencer is, especially if you’re paying them is completely fair here. So make sure they’re following back up with the actual URL to the post so that you can more easily kind of aggregate all of that content. Or you know, like I use software. So it’s they just upload that URL straight into the software. So again, just directing them on a full process so that you’re not stuck after a campaign run saying like, you know what, I should really get in a report together and I don’t know you have links to all these that I got to go out and find them, right? Or now I need to go and request it off. I really try to like the brief should have all of this information in it so that there’s less back and forth email between you and all of these simple answers that you might be working with a man. You kind of touched on this a minute ago, but in the editing portion like giving feedback on the the final content that the influencer produces for you. Voice over, text overlay, like are you making that a requirement as well? I do. So I give them the option. And you know, I’m thinking through how this is going to work as an ad. So I do like the text overlay for ads, but voiceover is fine too. So and also just kind of what you want them to call on on copy. Again, I’m not giving them a script, but do I want the dimension prices? Do I want them dimension hours? Right? So just giving them a few bullet points there. Yeah, day to the event. That kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. But let them have some creative flexibility there. Don’t don’t try to write it out for them. All right. And then what about music? Do you give them direction on music? So music is kind of interesting. So they can the influencers themselves can post with any, you know, trending audio on their own pages that’s coming from like Instagram or TikTok music library. But what you can’t do is run any kind of any copyrighted music in an ad. So I’ve typically directed them just don’t use copyrighted music, which they know based off of like it in the music kind of gallery, I guess within setting up their content. They know if it’s copyrighted or not. But there has been some changes. So in meta business manager, for example, if I were to go try to repost or promote an influencers content and they had copyrighted music and it’s actually flagging it now and telling me like you can’t use this music, which I think is actually a really nice addition in the campaign manager. So I actually will have a choice to swap that music out with something else, which is nice because I don’t have to go back to the influencer and ask them to do that for me. And then the influencers organic content can actually still have some trending music in it. Just the paid content wouldn’t have that music. So we don’t violate any copyright law, any copyright laws or anything like that. But yeah, just something to be aware of and keep in mind, you know, you can either just tell them avoid it upfront altogether or you know, once you run a dozen ads, you’re going to need to make the changes there. Cool. That is a nice feature. All right. Let’s talk about when to pay influencers. I got a list of three kind of different scenarios or situations, but when is an attraction ready to kind of take that next step, if you will? Yeah. Well, we talked about as part of your ad campaign, right? So you’ve got a campaign push coming up, your opening, you exhibit, you’ve got an event coming out. It’s a great time, obviously, to work with influencers and you’re able to source them and work with them and get them out like that opening weekend, right? So that you can get all of that fresh content, like right, right, early when opens versus maybe several weeks later, a month later when people start hearing about it and then they’re like, oh, can I come? I’ll post about it, right? Like if I’m going to have influencers come, I want them to come at the beginning and create a lot of hype early on. So that’s one time when you might want to look at actually paying influencers, right? Because again, you’re kind of controlling when they come and directing them on what to say or directing them on what to share, really. Another thing is just like smaller events. So maybe everyone reaches out to you for your huge holiday events, but no one’s really reaching out to you for other smaller events throughout the year. Or you don’t really have a lot of ad creative for smaller events, especially like video creative throughout the year. So I was really like using influencers and paying them to come out for like a smaller event or exhibit. So it might be my weekly cocktail event. Maybe it’s, you know, the dog friendly Thursdays that we have. Maybe it’s, you know, the tea in the garden, right? Like something that maybe I just don’t put as much ad dollars behind the influencers are great because it’s content that they’re creating for you with video. It’s UGC. So it’s authentic and organic and, you know, people don’t scroll past it like they wouldn’t add. And then it comes with an audience, right? So the creator themselves is bringing audience to the table and then you can put just a little bit of money behind it and a paid ad campaign to help generate those additional views. So love it for those smaller events. Or can I pull on that thread a little bit like this? We had a guest on from a zoo and they’ve had some sex success with a, a, a happy hour. That would be a dog friendly happy hour. Forgive me if I get this wrong about help once a month or throughout a couple of weekends throughout a month, a month. And I’m thinking if I’m in the marketing team there, hey, we’ve got some extra budget that we can use to support this event, $2,000, $3,000 or whatever it may be, right? I’m not going to go create a radio ad, right? I’m not going to go create like change out my billboard creative, run a digital rotator. Sure, I’m probably going to use my social channels to promote it, put some paid dollars behind that. But this could be a great scenario to look at. Okay, where can we go get some dog friendly dog-focused influencers in our local market and invite them in. We might have to pay them a hundred bucks, 500, whatever that number is, have them create the content, use the rest of my budget to promote that type of content. That’s an example of when, when to pay influencers. Right, yeah, yep, love that one. All right, what else you got? You know, looking at it from just turning somebody maybe from a one-time influencer or creator to more of a brand ambassador, right? So maybe they come out even if it’s for free or trade and they produce some really great content. And it’s like, that’s not, that influencer is producing the type of content that really represents our brand while their audience are following is who we want to see coming in or who want to bring more of in like, I really want to work with this person long term. Maybe I’m providing them a membership and then some, you know, a financial compensation to come out two, three, four times throughout the year to share all of the different events and activities and, you know, giving this audience a reason to maybe buy a membership because this influencer that they follow is coming all throughout the year to all of these different things that we’re doing, right? So it’s going to be, I’m not saying you can’t find somebody who would come out just for ticket trade four or five times here, but that’s usually a situation where someone’s going to say, okay, yeah, I’d love to continue, you know, producing this content for you. Let’s, you know, work out a, you have some fair compensation for that as well too. Yeah, and once you offer financial compensation, that kind of relationship changes, right? You get that opportunity to provide much more direction. Like, hey, I want you to go and highlight my children’s garden that’s all the way in the back of my attraction that doesn’t get enough love, right? And you’re providing that level of direct for that expectation, some financial compensation goes a long way to ensuring that you’re getting, you’re going to get that content that you exactly want. Yeah, and I find that they, um, such as some of the good influencers, like, they also bring ideas to you. So I love it when the influence was like, hey, I have a great idea for how we could work together again, because oftentimes is not what I or the client, you know, are thinking about necessarily because they are the audience, right? So they, uh, they’ll come up with ideas and then we’ll maybe work to flush out, to spend it, to support either an opening of an event or, you know, a period when we’re trying to bring in that particular audience. So, um, it’s, it’s when you’re, when you’re paying them, they’ll often, you know, as an ambassador start bringing you some of those ideas as well too. I’m going to add another scenario of when an attraction might be paying influencers. It’s not on our list. I’m going rogue here, but I’m thinking a lot of the, um, the attractions that we work with are approached by maybe some of the more established larger local influencers in the market. And they’ll send an email saying, hey, you know, I’ve got this great idea. Here’s my rate card. It’s $5,000. And then it’s like, okay, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn’t, we’re going to get into negotiation tips and actually how to pay influencers, but I kind of just want to throw that out there in that when. Um, so we’ll talk about how to negotiate some of those, um, times where you’re getting approach and being asked for financial compensation. Okay, let’s get into it. How, how to pay influencers? What do you got? Uh, yeah, so, you know, again, I’m assuming I’ve gone through my process, right? I’ve sourced, um, sort of the influencers that I want to come out to my attraction. I’ve identified my target and growth markets and kind of how they fit. How many I need for each one of these audiences that I’m focused on, how many campaigns I’m going to have running. Um, you know, another next step is I found them. I now need to go contact them, right? So, um, most of these, most influencers are going to have their contact information in their, uh, social, um, uh, on their social page, right? So you can, nine times, I’ll tend to have an email address and that’s what you’re, you’re going to want to use. I like to give everything through email to keep it organized versus like everything through DM. But certainly you can go that route if you can’t find an email. Um, but I like to send them an email and actually like to approach them with an offer. So rather than just sending an email saying like, hey, I like your content. Do you want to come? Here’s some tickets or like, what do you charge? Right? Like, don’t throw it back on them. Like, give them something to react to. So, um, I like to start with how much I really need to pay and what we’re looking for. Uh, and there’s kind of like, uh, I guess a standard. I think we’ve, we’ve shared this before. We say it’s an industry standard, but it doesn’t seem to be an industry standard on the influencer side because nobody seems to follow this rule, but it’s I think a good way to get a starting point price for how much you should pay some money. And, uh, that rate is, um, $100 per $10,000 followers per piece of content. So if I work with an influencer and I want them to post, you know, one video on Instagram, one real on Instagram and they have 10,000 followers. I might pay them $100. If they’re going to post it on Instagram and tick tick, I might pay them $200, right? So that’s just like one, um, starting point that you can use for like budgeting, how much to pay an influencer. I’ll say if they have a really, really large following, you can probably get away paying less than $100 per 10,000 followers. Um, you’re not going to pay less than $100. So if somebody has 2000 followers, you know, you’re probably going to pay them $100 to come out and produce that content for you. Would you pay somebody with only 2000 followers? I would. I have, yes. Or, um, yeah, usually my rate is just $100. I’ll, if they have under 10,000 followers, that’s what I’ll pay them. That seems a little high though. I mean, 2000 followers, like, why would you even mess around with that? Yeah. So it’s all going to be about the content in that case. So again, maybe I’m looking for that really great mom influencer. Maybe I’m like on the outskirts of town and this particular, you know, mom influencer posts just about like my suburbs, right? Like that’s really, really important content. Or that’s a really important influencer that I would want to work with. So I’m still willing to pay. I’m not going to pay like somebody who just has like a general lifestyle, like, doesn’t even really talk about my city that much. Like, I’m not going to pay them $100 or $100 for 2000 followers. But if it’s the right influencer with the right content, I will absolutely pay them. Yeah, it’s almost like thinking about it, like, um, you talk about hiring an ad agency to create a TV commercial. It’s like, I’m paying $100 to create a mini TV commercial that’s unique to your experience, right? And kind of putting that lens, like, $100 is, is there a cheap compared to, you know, a real deal, 30-second spot? I mean, it’s not exactly apples to apples, but I see your face. Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s like, you’re not just paying them for their followers. I mean, you’re paying it for that content, right? Because if there’s a financial compensation here, I expect you have usage rights and be able to repurpose this content. That’s the other thing, right? If I, if I can’t get any of that, I’m by pay for it, right? So, um, right. Yeah, just a hammer that point home, it’s, you’re paying for the content, and then you’re going to use your own ad dollars to promote that content beyond just those 2000 followers. Right. Exactly. All right. So you’re going to, this is going to cost me to hire someone to go produce that type of content for social. I’m not going to get for less than $100. I know that. Exactly. All right. So there’s $100 per 10,000 followers per piece of content. Are you always asking for a 30-second real? Like, what is kind of your mandatory when you’re making this initial offer? Yeah. I actually use that as for less, but we tend to push to like a 20 or 30-second minimum for a real, like a, a take-type video. And that’s just so that we can get more content. After, you know, we, after maybe we promote that or the, the creator posts it, do we want to maybe chop that up and grab just like some of the best, you know, best pieces of that content to put into other spots that we’re going to run? So I, I generally ask for like a 20 or 30-second real. And you can ask longer. I just ask that as a minimum. I have influencers who will post, you know, most of them in it. I think now the algorithms are like, if you get to a minute in views, you get, you know, better compensation. Like everyone’s pushing for like longer video content on these channels. Now, so, you know, 30 seconds, I think, well, I think like a few years ago, we’ve been like, oh my gosh, we like, six, 10, but now it’s like really pushing for that kind of 30-second to a minute-long video. And I know we touched on this earlier, but you’re requiring some sort of voiceover or a text overlay? Yes. Again, just so that there’s more of an explanation around this event or, you know, my attraction as a whole versus just, you know, a couple of images or, yeah, you know, five seconds of video walking around the park. So, all right. So put this all together for me. Like, what does a typical email look like, you know, are you offering $100? That’s always your starting point. Like, what is like your most frequent offer look like? Yeah, I mean, I would say for most, I’m usually offering a few hundred dollars, you know, again, it’s based off of the followers, but not just the followers, right? Actually, I would encourage most people to look beyond followers, especially as they get bigger because views and engagement are really important. If I’m, you know, doing this to build awareness, then views is going to be a really big one that I’m concerned with. So I’ve had influencers that have 10 or 15,000 followers who will drive 10,000 average views on a video. And then I’ve had influencers that have 70, 80, 90,000 followers and they’re not driving anymore than 10,000 views on a video, right? So why am I going to pay that other person just for their followers if they’re averaging the same amount of kind of views over all of their videos organically? Now, the difference all would be if that person was 70,000 followers is just producing substantially better videos that gets higher engagement than I might justify paying that person more. But there’s other layers I’m looking at versus solely followers. It’s just we’ve got that kind of rate that we can use to help determine, okay, are they going to go into bucket A, B, or C in terms of, you know, maybe how much we’re going to pay. That’s cool. All right. So it’s hey, sugar, berry, 3221, I really like your content that you produced in Dallas about restaurants. And I was thinking for $200, you could create a 32nd real and post it on Instagram and provide an ad code. Is that kind of the template? Yeah, so we like bullet out the deliverables of what we expect. I want a 32nd real on Instagram. I want it cross posted on tick tag. I want to add code for 30 days usage rights. And I want, you know, to have the ability to repurpose this content over, you know, the next 12 months. All right. So they get back to you and say, I want a million dollars. Can you give us some negotiation tips on working with these influencers? Yeah. So I will say 50% of the time they’ll come back and be like, oh my gosh, that’s awesome. I love, you know, exo-e-attraction. I would be happy to do this at that rate that all works for me. Half the time they get back and they’re like, hey, I love exo-e-attraction. I would be happy to do this. But yeah, my rate is $2500. Right? So maybe you threw out 250 and they’re asking $2500. So one go, you know, again, the purpose of kind of already doing your research and coming up with an amount that you’re willing to pay is because, like, if I’ve done all that and I say, okay, I think the value here is $250 and they come back and say $2500. It’s just easy for me to say things, but no things. Like, you know, hey, yeah, and it’s always be nice, right? So these are real people that you’re talking with and negotiating with. This is in like a media vendor. But that’s where I would just come back and say, like, we’re a nonprofit. We don’t have unlimited budget. I would love to work with you if anything ever changes, but I just, I can’t come up that much. And I’d say about half the time, they’ll either ask for just a little bit more than what I’m asking for and I might be willing to go up just a little bit more or, you know, they’re just going to come back and say, okay, that’s fine. We’ll move along, right? No, there’s just no point in both of us wasting our time if we’re so far off on that range. But the other thing that I can do is if we’re close, so let’s say maybe I throw out $250 and they say I want $750, right? That’s not quite as extreme, but still like from a cash, like, I have a budget, right? So I can only do so much, but what I might be able to say is, you know, I can’t really pay more, but I can’t give you a membership or I can give you VIP tickets or I can give you four tickets. So that all your friends can get like, is there maybe something else? Maybe you have a little bit more flexibility with my trade that I’m able to give. So there’s something else I can do here. And oftentimes you can tell just kind of in the response from the influencer, like you can tell if they like really want to do this or if they don’t like if they’re only willing to do it for the money, they should be paid for it. Like this isn’t, they’re doing actual work for you, right? But you can just tell like, are they going to be someone easy to work whether they’re going to be someone who wants to do this just kind of based off of their communication style and how much they’re willing to negotiate. So know what your max is so that you’re, you know, you’re not going to get me just say yes to whatever price they come back with. I’ll add something to the negotiation tips here. Okay, if you’re really going to be putting paid advertising dollars behind their content, that’s good for the influencer, right? They want to grow their followers. That’s what helps them promote themselves and help some get other paid partnerships, etc. So maybe that can be a kind of negotiating tip or. Yes, be careful with that though because I think a lot of influencers have been burned there of just like, oh, well, we’re going to give you tickets and we’re going to promote you. So this is going to help you out like at the end of the day, think about the fact that they are actually producing content for you. And if you win and you paid somebody to go produce social video content for you, like they wouldn’t, you wouldn’t just be like, I’m going to run it on my channel and you’re going to get exposure and I’m going to tag you and utter something, right? So think about that with influencers too. Yeah, they’re real people to any, not just 90 eventers. You’re paying for production here too. So. All right. And then we kind of talk about the creative brief, but do you have like a contract that you or it’s separate than the brief or is everything within the brief? What does the paper work look like? Yeah, so if there’s financial compensation, there’s absolutely contract. You know, I started anywhere from like, just there’s a one page contract that I send them through an A sign and it’s got all the terms in terms of like, what the deliverables are when they’re going to get paid. All normal terms and conditions that you’d have in any contract actually manage a lot of that through my the software that I use for. Influence or management so I can send my contracts directly through there and customize all my terms, but then I have an easy way to keep track of who’s approved what? There’s no questions of like, well, I thought you were going to do this or that, right? So yes, a contract is very important if there’s going to be financial compensation. And you can even have like a very simple contract even if there’s trade if you wanted to go that route to it manage. And just to be clear, that’s separate than the creative brief. Yes. Okay. All right. And then they, you know, they sign the contract, they get the tickets off they go and do they just post or do you review it first? How does that work? Yeah. So kind of what we were talking about before in that creative brief, you can kind of spell some of this out, but do they have to upload that content for you to review first? So you can build in a review process and then, you know, build in that posting window as well too. So seven days within visits or three days after, you know, approval of the content, whatever that is. And then how do you actually pay? Yeah, a couple of things here just to be aware of. One, I think this is obvious, but if they’re over $600 in a year, you know, you’re going to have to $1099 each one of these. So if you’re working with $10, $15, $20, influencers that you’re paying and they’re over $600 a piece, that’s, you know, that could be a big burden on your accounting team. And I think the other thing to think of is they, a lot of them don’t take checks. Like they don’t want to get paid in checks, you know, some of them will, but just you need to know all of this upfront. But we’re typically paying through like, sell, then mail, paypal for, you know, most of the influencers that we’re working with. And then I think lastly, just like you need to pay fast. So this isn’t something that you can drag out 30, 45 day terms. You do not want to have a bad reputation in the industry. These influencers are, they work together, they’re tight, they share information and they’re going to share information. If there’s somebody that’s not paying them. So I typically put in terms for like 14 or net 15 after they post content and send an invoice and typically pay much faster than that. Jenny, this is the deepest time we’ve got into influencer marketing yet. I like it. Thank you very much. Yeah, I’m sure we’ll do another episode diving into more parts of automated templates. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. 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