For most agencies, setting up an influencer marketing service seems a straightforward and potentially lucrative task. When businesses earn an average of $5.20 for every $1 invested in influencer marketing, it’s easy to understand the excitement.

But then you get started with building your service – and quickly realise that scaling influencer marketing is a major headache.

There are so many difficulties to overcome.

One of the most overlooked is your relationships with influencers.

The dream scenario? Established rock-solid relationships with trusted influencers who can authentically connect with target audiences.

The reality? Something much more complex, messy, frustrating, and ineffective. And if you’re dealing with micro-influencers, the challenges and risks just get even more amplified.

This article will outline the key challenges of working with influencers, give you seven steps for building successful influencer relationships, and provide five ideas that will help your agency gain a hugely positive reputation in influencer circles.

Understanding the challenges of influencer marketing

Influencers are not members of your staff. They’re not employees bound by your office expectations and processes. And if you end up working with the wrong influencers, it can soon start to feel like herding cats. 

Here’s some of the most common pitfalls:

• Unprofessional behaviour can be more common than you might think, simply because the influencer juggles their activities with other day-to-day commitments. They might have a job. A family to look after. A house to manage. For them, selling a few paid ads on their social media account is nothing more than a nice side hustle that gives them a bit of extra income. This mindset is particularly prevalent among micro influencers. It can lead to missed deadlines, inconsistent communication, or work that doesn’t methodically follow your brief.

• Hiring misaligned influencers also happens more frequently than it should. Choosing the wrong influencers – one whose audience, style, or values do not align with your client’s – can derail a campaign before it even begins. Low ROI and reputational damage are two of the potential knock-on consequences.

• Low engagement can be a nasty surprise, especially when you’ve carefully selected a bank of influencers that have all got high follower counts. The trouble is, a high follower count in no way correlates to high engagement. Genuine engagement is the fuel for real influence. Make efforts to check your influencers haven’t paid for followers or driven down engagement with a series of low quality or irrelevant posts.

• Reputational damage is a major risk if you partner with influencers who later become involved in controversies or display questionable behaviour. As an agency, protecting your client’s brand is a fundamental part of your service – so you must always ensure your chosen influencers have a reliable track record of positive behaviour.

• Influencer misconduct is a small but significant risk. In most cases, it occurs when an influencer accepts products or payments, and then fails to actually deliver the content you’d agreed to. It’s stressful and messy to resolve. And it potentially exposes either you or your client to financial losses, as well as campaign delays.

• Overpayment is generally a consequence of the challenge of understanding how to value influencers. Without proper valuation methods and total pricing transparency, agencies can easily fall into the trap of paying too much. That means the overall campaign budget becomes inefficient. It fails to deliver what it should. The client becomes annoyed and you generate a reputation among influencers for being an easy touch.
  
  
  

7 steps for building risk-free influencer partnerships

There are many ways to scale influencer marketing in agencies. Focusing on building risk-free influencer partnerships is a crucial part of the mix. Here are seven ways to build long-lasting relationships:

1. Set Clear KPIs

Do this before you’ve contacted a single influencer. Plan out in detail what your campaign aims to achieve. What does success look like? How will it be measured? Those targets then feed into the decision-making process when it comes to selecting your influencers. Need huge reach? Either hit up the biggest influencers you can afford, or work with a network of micro influencers at scale. Focusing on engagement? Find the influencers that have a genuine bond and relationship with their followers.

2. Conduct Thorough Vetting

With the advance of AI, it’s becoming easier than ever to pull the wool over people’s eyes and fraudulent activities related to influencer marketing are on the rise. To protect your client, you need a vigorous process for vetting potential influencers. Checking they have a Stripe account is a basic way to verify their authenticity and confirm payment security for anti-money laundering (AML). Document other ways your staff will look for professionalism.

3. Perform Account Reviews

Develop a detailed methodology for assessing influencer accounts before you reach out to them with your first contact. Look at a range of factors, including posting frequency, follower numbers, growth patterns, and content quality. You’re looking for influencers who post regularly (but not so regularly that your post disappears from the feed quickly) and maintain consistent engagement with their audience.

4. Ensure Brand Alignment

Do your chosen influencers’ brands align with your clients? Check the influencer’s posting style, content format, and overall values to make sure everything’s a match. If something’s off, the influencer’s audience will spot it immediately – and engagement will drop like a stone. Your client’s brand should feel like a natural partner for the influencer, not a forced PR opportunity.

5. Analyse Engagement Metrics

This is a tricky one, but it’s vital that you go beyond follower counts when you’re assessing potential influencers. You need a full analysis of all their engagement metrics, including likes, comments, shares, and other interactions. Unfortunately, asking influencers for screenshots of these figures leaves you open to potential fraud. Specialist tools and platforms can help you get genuine insights.

6. Use Detailed Contracts

Contracts might seem like a hassle, but a good agreement protects your agency, your client, and your relationships with your influencers. Take specialist advice to ensure your contract template covers all the critical elements of an influencer engagement, including deliverables, compliance with advertising regulations, and the disclosure of any conflicts of interest. You should also explicitly cover ongoing licence ownership.

7. Maintain Communication

At every stage of the process, keep the lines of communication clear and open. Every touch point helps to build trust and strengthen the relationship. Don’t go silent for weeks on end. Instead, reach out to cover all the fundamentals: introductions, negotiation, contracts, shipping, briefs, feedback, approvals, and congratulations on successful results. Campaign tools can streamline this complex relationship management.

What your agency needs to do to work well with influencers

So far, we’ve looked at the relationship between agencies and influencers entirely from the agency’s perspective. But there are two parties involved and both sides need to be heard. Our team has deliberately listened to the concerns of influencers to find out what they think are the important things your agency can do to make things as positive as possible. Here are their suggestions:

• Pay on time. You might think it’s not important. But to an influencer, every payment counts. Paying on time builds trust. In return, you get reliability and influencers who prioritise your campaigns. Just do it.

• Use fair contract terms. Don’t try to ‘win’ just because you can. Instead, aim to include clauses that protect both parties and specify expectations clearly to avoid any potential disputes.

• Provide payment guarantees. Some influencers might be wary of working with agencies, because they’ve heard of or experienced situations where the client goes bust before any funds reach the agency. In turn, that leaves the agency unable to pay the influencers. Provide a cast-iron guarantee the influencer will get paid. Platforms like Sway Me Good can help with this.

• Build real trust. From your earliest interactions, be transparent, respectful, and supportive. Show appreciation for the influencer’s work and wherever possible, work with the same influencers repeatedly. Long-term partnerships yield better results because both parties understand the others’ methods and expectations.

A strengthened future for all

Building risk-free influencer partnerships is part art, part science. You need planning, vetting, and ongoing communication. But if you keep on top of things from the outset, the rewards are there: better campaigns, improved results, and happier agency clients. 

Interested in learning more about how agencies use Sway Me Good to scale influencer marketing? Get in touch today!

QUIZ

Are your influencer relationships built on firm foundations?

1. Clear KPIs. Do you set goals and KPIs for your influencer campaigns and have a reliable method for tracking performance? 

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

2. Vetting. Have you proven to yourself and your client that your potential influencers are all genuine, real people?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

3. Account reviews. When choosing your influencers, do you have a defined set of criteria that you assess as part of the process?

Yes (1 points), No (0 point)

4. Brand alignment. Are you willing to recommend an influencer purely on the basis of the size of their audience?

Yes (0 points), No (1 point)

5. Contracts. Are you confident your contracts with influencers give you and your client adequate protection from unprofessional behaviour?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

6. Communication. Do you have the tools and systems in place to maintain effective communications with influencers throughout the course of a campaign?

Yes (1 point), No (0 points)

Scores:

0-2 points: Danger! This house is wobbling. Take remedial action immediately!

3-4 points: You’ve built a solid structure. Now you need to firm it up with the finishing touches.

5-6 points: Great job! Your influencer relationships are built to last. You’ll see the dividends for years to come.