INFLUENCER TIP OF THE WEEK #04 There is a way to fully sabotage your influencer program... and it's not obvious at the start. Many brands mistake "influencer marketing" for pay-per-post ❌ This is the easiest way to lose both money and hope in influencer marketing. It's the most common mistake I see brands making. If you do this, you'll end up with an unprofitable influencer program and end up prematurely concluding "this influencer stuff doesn't work for us!" HERE'S WHAT TO DO INSTEAD 👇 When you start out, do only affiliate deals so you're profitable by default. Your advocates only get paid when they generate sales for you 💰 Some creators would still want you to pay them upfront, but don't. It's okay to say "not right now". ⚠️ You may lose some deals to start, but that's alright. Your focus should be on getting a profitable channel running. Do pay per sale (not pay per post). Get results. In doing this, you'll get a general sense of the ROI generated by creators with a certain size, alignment, and engagement. You can then graduate to doing pay-per-post deals and ensure that they're profitable too. Slow and steady wins the race when it comes to creator-driven growth 📈 Helpful? I appreciate you reading 🙂

Interesting tip! We're just about to kick off a trial of an influencer campaign, using this as a playbook: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-this-chrome-extension-acquired-150k-users-with-tiktok-2bec088c92 Curious: For something like what you recommended how do you set the expectation with a creator on how much they'll make? Doesn't it require a product or service that already has an established funnel so you can say "You can expect to make $XXX from this campaign"?

That's a nice playbook. Are you selling SaaS too? You can make a projection based on their engagement rate and expected conversion rate, but you also risk quoting too high here. I recommend not saying anything like that and instead giving a ballpark estimate. Eg: "If you simply drive NN customers for us, you stand to make $$$$" (make the number NN realistic based on their follower count) I'm happy to answer more questions @Adam Riggs-Zeigen

@Yash Chavan yes basically. It's a consumer (for now) focused mobile app. I'd guess that qualifies as SaaS 😄 Appreciate the guidance on how to phrase the conversation. I assume we'd need to use a promo code of some sort to track the transactions (attribution)? In your experience are influencers generally open to that? And do they generally just trust you will report accurately? That seems like a lot of trust....

In my experience with saas/apps, they tend to trust our internal attribution. The way we did it was to have custom links for every influencer (company.com/influencer) and tracked signups through there using our internal analytics. In some cases we've had to share screenshots/access with creators just to build that trust up. I'm not sure how you'd use coupons for a consumer focused app (as most of them are freemium/no cc needed), so maybe link tracking is a good option to go with. Let me know!