Creator Economy

Negotiating With Creators: A 2024 Guide for Brands in Influencer Marketing

Navigate influencer negotiations in 2024 with ease. Discover key strategies for successful creator partnerships and boost your brand with Superfiliate.

Anders Bill

March 13, 2024

It’s an oft-quoted marketing adage that you must always meet customers wherever they are.

In 2024, that increasingly means that brands must know how to make their presence felt through social media platforms.

Enter influencer marketing — the method by which effective brands reach their audience online. In the past five years, influencers/creators have doubled the value they create for brands. A quarter of brands now regularly collaborate with content creators and influencers as part of their marketing strategies, and that percentage is on an upward trend.

Why is this? It’s relatively simple. Brands increasingly understand the powerful impact influencers have on customer behavior and choice. As ad-weary consumers become apathetic toward traditional advertising, they increasingly place confidence in the recommendations of authentic people whom they trust.

Recognizing this shift, brands want to leverage strategic partnerships with the right influencers who can educate and influence their target audience.

However, successful collaborations hinge on effective negotiations that align with both the brand’s goals and the creators’ expectations.

Let’s explore the fundamentals of successful creator negotiations in 2024.

Key factors for brands to consider when negotiating

Before you dive headfirst into negotiations, let’s just take a moment to consider the prerequisites for a fruitful relationship. What exactly signifies potential in an influencer?

Engagement over followers

In a saturated market full of fake accounts and followers, finding the right influencers for your campaigns takes an element of selectivity. Bear in mind that genuine engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and shares are far more indicative of a creator's influence than their follower count. A large but unresponsive audience is exactly what you don’t want.

Hypothetically, choosing to work with an influencer with a highly engaged, niche audience is the better option. Brands should prioritize these creators who foster a strong connection with their audience, as this often translates to a higher potential for conversion.

Diversity across platforms

You’ll want to look for creators and influencers who have a presence across multiple channels. Opting to collaborate with an influencer only active on TikTok is ignoring the reach of other high-value platforms like Instagram and YouTube. Instead, creators with a robust presence across multiple channels offer brands a broader reach and diversified engagement strategies.

Demographics

An influencer may have thousands of highly engaged followers across several channels, but that's no use to you if their audience doesn't align with your target audience. You must evaluate whether their audience aligns with your target customer profiles — are they actually likely to buy your product or service? Does their audience look like your existing customer base or a new customer base you’re trying to reach?

Brands must ensure that the creator's followers match their ideal customer persona in terms of age, gender, location, and interests. If the influencer’s audience isn't ticking most of these boxes, you’d best avoid entering into negotiations.

Creator enthusiasm

A creator’s genuine enthusiasm for a brand or product often results in more convincing and compelling promotions. Brands should consider creators who already express organic interest in their offerings or category more broadly. Assessing a creator’s enthusiasm is also often a valuable yardstick to predict the authenticity of the content they’ll produce. An enthusiastic, mission-aligned creator is more likely to produce content that resonates more deeply with their audience.

Successful negotiation strategies

If you feel like you have created a shortlist of potential influencers who are enthusiastic about your brand and have solid engagement, then it’s time to start a conversation about collaboration. Naturally, this will lead to a conversation about compensation.

So, what factors influence compensation figures?

Audience size - Influencers with larger audiences often command higher fees, given their broader reach. However, as we already hinted at, size isn't everything. The engagement and relevance of the audience are equally important.

Engagement rates - High engagement rates indicate a loyal and active following, making such influencers more valuable to brands. These influencers often have the leverage to ask for higher compensation.

Industry and niche - Influencers in high-demand niches, like fashion and beauty, can often negotiate higher fees due to the specialized content and dedicated audience they offer.

Deliverables - The specifics of what the influencer is required to deliver — from the number of posts to custom content creation — can significantly impact compensation.

Given these variables, you’ll see that there’s a significant range in influencer pricing. Let’s look at the numbers with recent statistics from Shopify for three main social media platforms in 2024: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Instagram influencer pricing

Instagram influencers can post about your product or service in their daily stories. There’s a generally accepted industry rate rate of $100 per 10,000 followers. Here’s how that extrapolates to different followings:
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Nano-influencers (500–10,000 followers)	$10–$100 per post
Micro-influencers (10,000–50,000 followers)	$100–$500 per post
Mid-tier influencers (50,000–100,000 followers)	$500–$5,000 per post
Macro-influencers (100,000–500,000 followers)	$5,000–$10,000 per post
Mega-influencers (500,000+ followers)	$10,000+ per post

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HubSpot data suggests that on Instagram, micro and mid-tier influencers are increasingly in demand, while mega-influencer rates have declined in recent years. This is perhaps a reflection that brands are favoring influencers with a more niche, selective audience for better targeting.

TikTok influencer pricing

TikTok, despite its incredible growth, still has fewer active monthly users than Instagram. Nevertheless, many TikTok influencers have fiercely loyal followings with high engagement levels.

Let’s look at the generalized pricing for TikTok:

Nano-influencers (1,000–10,000 followers)	$5–$25 per post
Micro-influencers (10,000–100,000 followers)	$25–$125 per post
Mid-tier influencers (100,000–500,000 followers)	$125–$1,200 per post
Macro-influencers (500,000–1 million followers)	$1,200–$2,500 per post
Mega-influencers (1 million+ followers)	$2,500+ per post

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YouTuber influencer pricing

YouTubers are able to demand higher prices than both Instagram and TikTok influencers. That’s due to the longer-form content that tends to hold the audience’s attention for a longer period and the increased conversion associated.

YouTube influencers often set their rates according to the number of views a video receives, or specifically, the views on an advertisement segment within their video. The cost can vary significantly based on the content type required by a brand, with some YouTubers creating dedicated ads to be integrated at certain points within their regular content.

Let’s look at typical pricing for YouTubers:

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Nano-influencers (10,000–50,000 followers)	$20–$200
Micro-influencers (50,000–100,000 followers)	$200–$5,000
Mid-tier influencers (100,000–500,000 followers)	$5,000–$10,000
Macro-influencers (500,000–1 million followers)	$10,000–$20,000
Mega-influencers (1,000,000+ followers)	$20,000+

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So, how should you negotiate compensation?

Now that you have an idea of what makes an appropriate collaboration and the kinds of prices influencers typically demand, it’s time to get your ducks in a row before initiating a conversation:

Establish a budget - Knowing your budget constraints helps identify suitable influencers and sets the stage for realistic negotiations.

Research - Thorough research ensures a potential influencer's audience, engagement rates, and content align with your brand’s goals, providing a strong foundation for negotiation.

Transparent communication - Clear discussions about budget expectations and deliverables can prevent misunderstandings and build trust (after all, you hope this will be a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship).

Flexibility - Be prepared to negotiate terms that satisfy both parties, which may involve creative compensation models beyond a flat fee. Sometimes, you can reduce per-post rates by signing up for a longer-term commitment which also builds trust with their audience.

Get contracts signed - Properly documenting everything ensures everyone is accountable. Documenting the agreed terms, including compensation, deliverables, and timelines, ensures clarity for all parties.

Finally, let’s add a word on the varied compensation models available. Most influencers are now receptive to hybrid payment structures that could feature a mix of the following:

Flat fee - A predetermined amount for a specific deliverable.
Cost per click (CPC) - Payment based on the traffic generated by the influencer’s content.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) - Compensation tied to the sales or conversions resulting from the influencer’s efforts.
Product seeding/product exchange - You provide products or services in lieu of monetary compensation.
Commission-based - You agree to offer a percentage of sales generated from the influencer’s content.

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Remember, these influencers are people and view content creation and posting as a job. Just like your job, they want to be paid a fair wage, so be respectful and empathetic. Understanding what they’re optimizing for is critical in arriving at a structure that satisfies everyone.

Superfiliate’s role in managing creators

Once you have entered into partnerships with influencers and creators, you need to manage those relationships. Thankfully, you can take care of everything within the Superfiliate app.

From outreach on email and social, gifting and seeding products, all the way through payment, Superfiliate puts your job on autopilot.

Additionally, the platform supports diverse compensation models, accommodating everything from flat fees to commission-based arrangements, milestone-based structures, and other reward strategies to make sure you and your partners remain excited.

When influencers and creators partner with you, they get access to their creator portal. Here, they can customize their personalized co-branded landing pages. They choose from a variety of templates, choosing to customize as they please with their favorite products and their own content if they wish. This allows them to create mobile-first, high-converting commerce experiences to share with their audience in just a few clicks.

While in the app, they can also seamlessly redeem their rewards, get paid, and unlock gifts at certain milestones. This makes the entire process super simple for both parties, with everything automated within the app.

The best part is that this system is readily scalable for you to manage multiple tiers of creators and influencers to make your campaigns as big as you want them to be.

Finding and negotiating with the right influencers is the complex step. Once they’re on board, you can track everything smoothly through Superfiliate. Try out Superfiliate with a demo today.

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