When we chat with brands about their influencer marketing needs and they are coming to us from another agency experience, one of my favorite questions to ask is, “What don’t you love about your current team?” Man, I get a LOT of great nuggets from this question. I also find myself surprised, over and over, by some of the shenanigans that are going down at other agencies.
To that end, I’d like to propose the following list of features that brands should insist on from any influencer marketing agency that they hire:
- Timely Influencer Payments It is kind of shocking that this has to even be stated. When a brand hires an agency to handle its influencer activations, that agency is acting as an extension of the brand. When the agency is delinquent in paying the influencers for that work, that reflects poorly on the brand (and can even result in negative PR). Despite this very direct correlation between payment times and brand reputation, I still see brands hiring agencies that have become legendary for their sleazy payment tactics.
- Guaranteed Results At the Niimbus conference last week, I was kind of surprised by how shocked the room was when I shared that we guarantee results at Sway Group. On our campaigns, we guarantee KPIs (usually video views or engagements). We are able to do this because we have extensive benchmarks from 14 years of running campaigns. I understand that not every agency can do this, but at a bare minimum, agencies should be able to guarantee a number of deliverables, a specific tier of influencers, or even a timeline. Brands pay good money for influencer campaigns. They deserve to have deliverables that aren’t loosey-goosey.
- A Documented and Organized Process Again, brands pay good money for influencer content. If they are going to outsource the process of securing it, they deserve to be working with an agency that is highly-organized and has a system in place. I have heard reports of agencies whose process consists of “100s of Google sheets floating around” or “vibes.” We can do better.
- A Sliding Scale Agency Fee A $150,000 program can consist of 2-3 higher tier influencers or dozens of smaller ones. Guess which one takes more time to manage? It’s ridiculous for brands to pay the same fee for both of these programs.
- No Double Dipping Double dipping was disgusting when George Costanza did it. It’s just as disgusting when agencies do it. If you are charging brands a fee to run their program, it is unethical to also charge a fee to the influencers you are using.
Anything I’m missing?
Danielle