Some Things A Two Year Influencer Marketer Has Learned

The career of an influencer marketer is relatively new compared to other marketing jobs such as paid ads, product marketing, email marketing, or event planning. The reason is obviously because influencers only gained media share and voice within the last decade and became an important channel for brand exposure.

Once a colleague of mine who has never done influencer marketing asked me how I negotiate lower prices with influencers. I told him that long term partnerships sometimes help us get discounts from them. He scoffed and said, “What discount? They set the price themselves. It’s all so ridiculous.”

It’s difficult for someone who has never been a creator to understand what it takes to be a successful one, and each content creator’s journey is different without having a full picture of how everyone else is priced — so who’s to say what the correct price should be for influencer deliverables? As an influencer marketer for two years and a tiny influencer who’s trying to make it, here are some costs influencers pay to create a successful channel:

• Thinking very carefully about what reaction you might get from the content you put out
• Dealing with PR crisis if it happens and surviving it
• Investing in filming equipment
• Brainstorming content ideas
• Editing
• Scripting
• Filming
• Having thick skin and strong mentality against criticism and misunderstanding
• Content research
• Potential extra or irregular work hours

And what are the potential perks? A more exciting life of course. Successful influencers get brand deals that take them to different places around the world, they may earn what a normal corporate job pays a month in just one day, and their network grows faster.

Of course it all looks easy. Would you still want to watch an influencer’s channel if it was all about how many hours was spent editing, or how hurt a comment made the influencer feel, or whatever hardship or negativity the influencer had to go through to keep their channel running? No. Because no one wants to watch negative content all the time. So of course there’s more to what meets the eye on influencers’ handles, of course at least some part of it is superficial or fake — maybe because the audience isn’t always interested in the truth either.

I worked with almost 100 influencers over the course of two years of being an influencer marketer and there’s only one influencer who I had to cancel our partnership with and recall our product. The contract was signed and everything and she went AWOL and failed to deliver — we could sue her if we wanted to. Long story short, we spent rounds and rounds of back and forth modifying her sponsored content, and she switched out the sponsored content last minute for another brand without letting us know. Of course I was livid.

This influencer kept using her mental health as a reason for not being able to act professionally, whether for content creation or for sticking to negotiated deliverables. However, on her page she often, and still is, posting all these encouraging, mental health content such as ‘trust yourself you can do it’ or ‘never give up you got this’. It’s all so fake. Why can’t she just tell her audience that she’s facing mental health issues like she tells us as her client? Maybe because she’s afraid that that’s not what her audience expect her to be? So that’s what’s a part of influencing is about right? Be delusional and it will somehow become your reality, or at least what most of the world believes your reality to be.

One of my short videos recently got nearly two million views, and the comments are so diverse and bizarre. It gave me a glimpse at what truly successful influencers face on a daily basis. You either become numb to what people say and ignore it all together, or you have skin so thick that no criticism fazes you…or you get out of the game and lose.

That short video was about a huge abandoned construction site. Some comments were discussing the location, some were hate comments out of nowhere that made no sense, some people were fighting about politics and which governmental party should’ve been responsible, some were talking about how fun it would be to go in and check it out, and some were asking me not to use AI generated voices. It was too noisy and would be much too draining if I had to react to every comment, so I stopped looking and let people talk. Comments, positive or negative, was traffic and engagement and was all the same to me if I didn’t look. Like Cardi B once said at one of her awards that she thanked the haters, because they would spend time dissing her but at the end of the day the attention benefited her.

Being misunderstood and living with it without feeling like you need to explain yourself is a part of the job when you reach certain success. At the end of the day, the misunderstanding isn’t all that detrimental if it doesn’t conflict with your end goals, and hence doesn’t necessarily need to be dealt with. It’s impossible to make everyone happy, so most of the time it’s healthy to give up trying to.