Influencer Marketing FAQs: Answers to Your Questions on How It All Works

Influencer marketing is still relatively new in the marketing world, but it’s spreading quickly. YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat stars are making millions by promoting brands. Our recent webinar covered advice from experts on how to create a partnership with influencers, which metrics to measure, negotiating price, and much more. The 60-minute webinar went into a lot of detail, but we ran out of time to answer all the questions, so we’ve compiled all the answers to frequently asked questions below.

(Not sure what influencer marketing is? We covered the basics in a previous blog post.)

Most Frequently-Asked Questions About How Influencer Marketing Works

Question: How do you know if an influencer is taking advantage of you? Or what do you do if they do not fulfill their contract obligations?

Answer (Lisa Navarro): I would say it’s important to gauge guidelines with the influencer upfront, and talk about what is expected. Nowadays, with such large growth in influencer marketing, it is not unorthodox to send a contract. Also, make sure conversations are moved to email for tracking — track engagement and test various influence channels to measure engagement and ensure which users are giving you the best response.

Question: I’ve been hearing a lot about “micro-influencers” recently…where is this line drawn? How much can we expect to pay for a promotional post? Is there a certain range that we should try to be fitting in?

Answer (Lisa Navarro): the term “micro-influencers” is new, and not clearly defined yet, but i can say that at The BLU Market, we have a threshold of more than about 50k followers/friends for our influencers.

Question: How do you know what to pay for an ad?

Answer (Erik Radtke): in my opinion, what you pay should be based on what is profitable for your product. If you pay $1,000 for a post, your expectation should be that this post will be cost justified by the revenue you get back from the growth attributed to that spend. I know, easier said than done, but that should be how to start.

Question: How do you talk to an influencer about paying a flat fee versus performance, like on app installs?

Answer (Erik Radtke): The BLU Market’s preferred model for working with influencers  is to pay influencers on a revenue share for the directly attributed volume that they generate for installs. So I prefer to pay on a performance basis to the influencers. I will say that has the potential to decrease the amount of influencers you can work with, so the BLU market will buy on a flat fee basis, still billing on a CPI or other performance metric basis for our clients. The risk then becomes for us to make it a profitable buy. We’d like to see the industry moving toward influencers being comfortable with a one-to-one payout.

Question: Is it possible to incentivize influencers with something other than cash?

Answer (Adam Hadi): A: I can personally say yes. I’ve paid influencers in kind before. Especially if you have an app that lends itself to that. Concert tickets are a really great example of that. Believe it or not, even in virtual currency it can work. In kind merchandise, it certainly works.

Watch the whole webinar here.