what should you be charging as an influencer?
what should you be charging as an influencer?
When it comes to working with brands as an influencer, one of the first things you need to consider, is how much you are going to charge. Influencing is at its core, a service. You are providing a brand with content, so that they can eventually profit. Whether that be directly [your content directly leading to sales], or indirectly [your content leading to brand recognition, higher share of market, or higher levels of trust, leading to sales further down the line].
As you are providing a profitable service for a brand, it is pivotal that they are paying you what you deserve to be paid. Many influencers when first starting out often worry about what they should be charging. It can be very daunting, and oftentimes very consuming knowing what to charge.
In order to figure out what you want to charge a brand, I would consider these things:
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how much exposure and engagement will the brand receive [your follower count and engagement rate]
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what level of content creation can you provide [are you providing high quality professional photographs, or iphone photography, for example]
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how much have you invested to get to this level [equipment, courses, education, etc]
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how long will this content take you to create?
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what is the brand exclusivity clause [if any]?
Think about the first three points and think about what would be a comfortable and acceptable hourly price for you. If you only have a few thousand followers, an okay engagement rate, are taking content on your phone, and haven't invested much into your influencer career, you may want to start with a lower hourly pay [£20/hr]
As your following, engagement rate, and what you can offer in terms of content quality grows - you may want to increase this [example: 10,000 followers - 8% engagement rate - high quality content - equipment = dSLR camera + professional lighting - investment = 4 week photography course] then you will be wanting to charge more, perhaps £90/hr.
There is no written rule on how much you charge, it is up to you - but you must be able to justify your cost to a brand so that they know what they are getting is going to be worth what they are paying for it [i.e. the points above].
Now we have an hourly cost - we can start to think about how long it will take us to create this piece of content. Let's say a brand is asking for 2 x feed posts. We can start to think about how long it will take us to:
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stage and take the content
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edit the content
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write the caption
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hashtag research
If it's going to take us:
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staging and taking the content: 30 mins
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editing the content: 1 hour
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writing the caption: 15 mins
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hashtag research: 15 mins
Then this piece of content will take us 2 hours in total complete. We will then multiply this by our hourly rate
Example 1 [£20/hr] x 2 [total] = £40
Example 2 [£90/hr] x 2 [total] = £180
Lastly, we need to consider exclusivity clauses. This was discussed in more depth in the previous module. In short - if a brand want us to work exclusively for them for a period of time, excluding us from working with their competitors or others in their industry, or even similar industries - then this can result in us as influencers losing out on jobs. As a result, we need to factor in what we may lose in other jobs, into our final offer.
how to negotiate an offer
As discussed in the previous module - when we receive a contract from a brand - this is not a final offer. This is simply the best case scenario for them. A bit like when you put an offer on a ouse. You never go in with the max, but instead the lowest - what you would like to pay. You totally understand if the property owner comes back with a counter offer, and brands know this will happen with influencers too! So don't be afraid to counter offer a brand, if what they are expecting for their budget, isn't within your expected hourly pay, you can always negotiate!
There are a few things you can negotiate with:
Expected Content
Firstly - you could offer to work with the brand on the budget that they have set - however with a reduced amount of content provided. For example, if we take the example in the previous section - whereby you charge £90/hr and a feed post will take you 2 hours (£180 total) to complete) - and a brand is offering you £180 for a feed post and a story - you could negotiate just making the feed post instead!
Expected Budget
Alternatively - you could increase their budget for the work required. Taking the same example again - you could offer to complete 1 x feed post and 1 x story post for a brand, for an additional £23 as you believe it would take 15 minutes (a quarter of your hourly pay) to create. Brining the campaign total to: £203.
Expected Exclusivity
Lastly, if you believe the exclusivity terms justify bringing the cost of the work up due to losing out on future work, you can negotiate by:
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Adding on the cost of what you would lose from other campaigns
or
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Offering to work on a non-exclusive basis instead
remember
When you are negotiating on price or terms with a brand, you must justify why you are doing so. This means including your hourly cost, and why the presented contract does not fit in with that. You may justify why your hourly cost is what you've set it as if you feel the need to also.
You must include a reasonable explanation for exactly why the proposed budget doesn't work for you, and justify your new budget recommendation.
Use this module as a guide for this!