Social Media
Influencer marketing with the right creators
Influencer marketing works when the creator genuinely reaches your buyers. We find and vet creators whose audience matches yours, handle briefs and negotiation, and track what each partnership returns.
Who it is for: Brands that want creator reach without gambling on follower counts and hoping for the best.
Everything in this service
- Creator research and audience-match vetting
- Outreach, negotiation and agreements
- Campaign briefs that leave room for the creator voice
- Disclosure and compliance handled correctly
- Tracking links and per-partnership reporting
What to expect
- Reach into audiences your own channels cannot touch
- Partnerships judged on return, not follower counts
- A repeatable roster of creators who work for your brand
How influencer marketing actually works
Vetting creators on audience quality, not follower count
Follower count is the number everyone quotes and the number that predicts the least. A creator with two hundred thousand followers can produce fewer enquiries than one with eight thousand, if the eight thousand are the right people and actually pay attention.
Vetting starts with the audience, not the creator. Ask for screenshots of their audience breakdown: country, age, gender split and, where the platform provides it, the proportion of the audience that is active. A creator whose audience is mostly in a country you do not serve is not a match, however good their content is. Then read the comments. Real comments are specific, ask questions and reference the actual content. Generic praise, emoji chains and identical phrasing from accounts with no posts of their own indicate bought engagement or an engagement pod, and either way the numbers are fiction.
Then look at the pattern over time. Sudden follower jumps with no corresponding spike in views are a warning sign. So is an engagement rate far above the norm for that follower size, which is a red flag rather than a green one. Check the previous brand work: how many partnerships they run, whether they have promoted a direct competitor recently, and whether the sponsored posts perform anywhere near the organic ones. That last comparison is the single most useful thing in the vetting file, because a creator whose sponsored content collapses is selling reach they cannot convert.
- Request audience location, age and activity data before shortlisting
- Read the comments for specificity, not volume
- Compare sponsored post performance against organic performance
- Treat sudden follower spikes and outlier engagement as warnings
- Check partnership frequency and recent competitor work
Briefing without flattening the creator voice
The reason a creator works is that their audience trusts how they talk. A brief that dictates the script removes exactly the thing you paid for, and the audience notices immediately.
A good brief is tight on substance and loose on execution. Substance means the things that must be right: the product, what it does, the claims that are true, the claims that must never be made, the disclosure requirement, the link or code, the deadline and the deliverables. Execution means the script, the jokes, the format, the pacing and the structure, and those belong to the creator. The most useful line in any brief is a short list of what must not be said, because it is far more workable than a list of what must be.
It is also worth handing over the honest limitations of the product. Creators who understand where something does not fit produce more credible content, because they can be specific about who it suits. And the review process should be about accuracy, not taste. Checking that a claim is correct and that the disclosure is present is legitimate. Rewriting a creator sentence into marketing language is how a paid post starts sounding like an advert read out under duress, which is the outcome nobody wants.
- Fix the facts, the claims, the disclosure and the deliverables
- Leave script, format and humour to the creator
- Include a short must not say list
- Share the product limitations, not just the selling points
- Review for accuracy and compliance, not for tone preference
Disclosure is a legal requirement, not a courtesy
Any material connection between a brand and a creator must be disclosed clearly and prominently. This is not best practice or a platform preference. In the United States it is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, in the United Kingdom by the Advertising Standards Authority and the Competition and Markets Authority, and in Australia by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. A material connection includes payment, free product, commission, discounts, and any ongoing relationship such as an ambassador role.
There are things we will not do, and it is worth stating them plainly. We will not run undisclosed paid endorsement. We will not write, commission or generate fake testimonials, and that includes AI-generated reviews or invented customer quotes presented as real. We will not buy reviews or engagement, or suppress genuine negative reviews. The FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, which took effect in 2024, makes several of these practices directly actionable with civil penalties, so this is legal exposure rather than a reputational risk you might absorb. Liability can sit with the brand as well as the creator, which is why disclosure belongs in the contract and not in a polite reminder.
In practice, disclosure must be visible without effort. It goes at the start of the caption rather than buried after a more button, it appears in the video itself and in any spoken introduction for video content, and it uses plain words. Platform tools such as a paid partnership label are useful but are not sufficient on their own. Ambiguous tags like sp, collab, thanks or a bare brand mention do not meet the standard. Live and story content needs disclosure repeated, because viewers join partway through.
- Disclose any payment, free product, commission or ongoing relationship
- Place it before the fold, in plain words, not buried in hashtags
- Repeat it in video, in speech, and throughout live or story content
- Platform paid partnership labels help but do not replace clear wording
- Never commission fake, incentivised or AI-generated testimonials
Contracts, usage rights and what happens when it goes wrong
A written agreement protects both sides and removes almost every argument that occurs later. Verbal arrangements with creators are common and are the reason so many campaigns end in a dispute about what was promised.
The contract should cover the deliverables in exact terms, meaning the number of posts, the formats, the platforms and the dates. The disclosure obligation, written as a requirement with the wording specified. Approval rights, and the fixed window in which you must respond before the creator can publish. Exclusivity, meaning which competitors they cannot work with and for how long, priced accordingly because exclusivity has a real cost to a creator. Payment terms and timing. And a takedown clause covering what happens if a claim turns out to be wrong or a legal issue arises.
Usage rights are the clause most often missed and the most expensive to fix afterwards. Creator content is licensed to you, not owned by you, unless the contract says otherwise. If you want to run their video as a paid advert, use it on your website, or keep it live after the campaign, each of those is a separate permission with a separate duration and a separate price. Creators are usually reasonable about this when it is negotiated up front and considerably less so when a brand has already been running their face in an ad campaign for three months. Whitelisting, where you run ads from their handle, needs its own explicit terms including account access and how long it lasts.
- Exact deliverables, formats, platforms and dates in writing
- Disclosure written as a contractual obligation
- Usage rights by channel and duration, priced separately
- Exclusivity scoped and paid for, not assumed
- A takedown clause and a fixed approval window
Measuring beyond reach
Reach is the easiest number to report and the one that hides the most. A campaign summary showing a combined reach of four million tells you nothing about whether any of it worked, and it conveniently averages the failures into the successes.
Measurement has to be per creator, which means every partnership gets its own tracking link and, where it fits the business, its own discount code. Then you can see the chain: how many people saw it, how many clicked, how many did something, and what that cost per creator. Codes and links both undercount, because plenty of people see a post and search for the brand later, so a rise in branded search and direct traffic during a campaign window is a real signal worth capturing alongside the tracked numbers.
The qualitative side matters too and is usually ignored. Read the comments on the sponsored post. Questions about where to buy, comments tagging a friend, and people asking whether it is worth it are signs of genuine interest. Complaints about being sold to are a sign the fit was wrong. Also count the content itself as an output: a strong creator video that you have the rights to run as a paid advert often returns more than the organic post did, and that value belongs in the assessment. Finally, judge on a cost per outcome basis and be willing to say plainly that a partnership did not work, because the alternative is repeating it next quarter.
- A unique tracking link, and where relevant a code, per creator
- Watch branded search and direct traffic during the campaign window
- Read the comments as evidence of fit, not just as sentiment
- Count usable content as part of the return
- Report per creator, never as a combined reach figure
Gifting, affiliates and paid partnerships compared
Three models cover most creator work, and they suit different goals, budgets and risk levels. Choosing the wrong one is a common reason a programme underdelivers.
Gifting means sending product with no payment and no guarantee of coverage. It is cheap, it scales, and it is honest only if you genuinely accept that some recipients will say nothing or say something critical. Asking for guaranteed positive coverage in exchange for a free product is where gifting stops being gifting and becomes an undisclosed paid endorsement. Note that receiving free product is itself a material connection and must be disclosed by the creator when they post about it.
Affiliate means commission on sales, usually through a code or link. It costs nothing up front and aligns incentives, but committed creators often decline it because the risk sits entirely with them, so it tends to work best with creators who already use and like the product. Paid partnership means an agreed fee for agreed deliverables. It costs the most, gives the most control over timing and content, and is the only model you can plan a launch around. Many programmes sensibly run all three: gifting to find who responds, affiliate for the ones who convert, and paid deals with the small number who prove they reach the right people.
- Gifting: low cost, no guarantee, and still requires disclosure
- Affiliate: no upfront cost, aligned incentives, harder to recruit
- Paid: predictable timing and deliverables, highest cost
- Never trade free product for guaranteed positive coverage
- Use gifting to discover, affiliate to sustain, paid to launch
A clear path, step by step
- 01
Find and vet
We shortlist creators by real audience match and engagement quality, not follower count.
- 02
Brief and agree
Clear briefs, fair terms and proper disclosure agreed in writing before anything posts.
- 03
Launch
Content goes live with tracking in place, so every partnership is measurable from day one.
- 04
Measure and repeat
We report what each creator returned and reinvest in the partnerships that performed.
Why choose us for this
Vetting looks at audience quality, not vanity numbers
Briefs that protect your brand and respect the creator
Every partnership tracked, so budget follows evidence
Common questions
Are micro-influencers better than big names?
Often, yes. Smaller creators tend to have closer audiences and cost far less per engagement, which lets you test more partnerships. The right answer depends on your goal, and we model both.
How do you measure influencer ROI?
Tracking links, discount codes and post metrics per creator. You see what each partnership drove in traffic and enquiries, not a combined reach figure that hides the losers.
Explore related work
Want this for your business?
Book a free visibility call and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
How this is delivered
One person leads every project. Where a job genuinely needs a specialist, I bring in people I have worked with before and manage them, so you get one point of contact and one invoice rather than three suppliers blaming each other.
- You talk to the person responsible for the work, not an account manager
- Specialists are briefed and managed by me, and their work is checked before it reaches you
- One contract, one invoice, one place to chase