The checklist to profitable influencer deals 📲
It's not all about CPM's
CPM’s are important, but it’s not the only thing that matters when assessing an influencer deal.
In this post, I will share the full checklist that we use to prioritize partners before we test an influencer.
We use this list primarily for assessing pay-per-post deals (also referred to as flat fee posts), but it can also be used to assess affiliate partners who are paid on commission.
Alright, let’s get into it!
Many marketers know that an influencer deal can be highly profitable if done well.
A viral post can be a game changer for a growing business.
They also know that it can be a huge waste of money if done poorly.
We have increased our odds of success by using the pre-test checklist that I share below before we sign any deals.
We are constantly testing and learning, however, and I will update this list as we test more in the coming months.
Big caveat on the approach - Every brand is different and they should test against their own filters to find what works best for them.
Our success rate with this approach to date is ~30%.
Meaning, only ~30% of the partners that we test turn out to be strong partners (IE: generate > 3x ROAS).
The amazing thing for us is that the revenue generated from these winners are usually enough to cover the costs of the entire program and then some.
It’s similar to a VC portfolio strategy in that way.The criteria we use to assess a potential partner includes:
Platform selection
Following size
Engagement
“Viral” potential
Category relevance
Other advertisers
Available ad inventory
CPM’s
Let’s dig into each of these a bit more.
Platform selection
It all starts with choosing the right platforms to run ads on.
We have found that posts across platforms can vary widely in their ability to generate strong ROAS.
The typical DTC influencer deals happen across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. And this is where we play.
When we first started testing influencers, we started on Instagram and saw moderate success.
We then tested YouTube and found that it was the true unlock that we were looking for.
My hypothesis for this is that the posts on YouTube seem to have a longer shelf life than on Instagram or TikTok.
The posts tend to stick around longer, which helps them generate revenue over multiple days.
The posts are also easily clickable with accessible links in the video descriptions.
This helps bring audiences back to our site for driving sales.
Brands like Seed Health also leverage this strategy to make the most of their influencer efforts.Every brand if different and it takes time to test multiple creators on different platforms to really figure out which ones are worth the investment.
The first step is to try to understand where your top customers are already hanging out.
Then, go and test more posts on that platform to see if there is room to grow that audience.
For us, we found that our top audiences were on YouTubes, so we doubled down there.
Following size
When it comes to influencer partners, size does matter.
We know that the larger partners have the best chance to increase our brands exposure and generate a healthy ROAS.
The benefit of these influencer deals (as opposed to affiliates) is that the ROAS can scale up to many multiples above our other channels if the posts perform well.
They can also fall flat, which is the main risk we are trying to mitigate with a checklist like this.A large following doesn’t guarantee success, but its a helpful check measure to make sure that the time we put into researching and setting up a test partner is worth it post-launch.
Engagement
We check engagement on specific posts to see if an influencers audience is responding well to their content.
I don’t think an aggregate engagement rate metric on a social handle is that useful. Those can be gamed with bots and low quality audiences.
Instead, we dig into the latest posts from a potential partner and check the comments section to see if the comments that are coming in are of high volume and quality.
It’s a good sign if we see a high volume of comments that are diverse in their content and lengthy (2-3+ sentences).
It’s a bad sign if we see a lot of posts with fluffy or one to two word responses.
We like to see breadth and depth in this regard.
“Viral” potential
It’s almost impossible to know if a specific post is going to go “viral”, but we still like to check a page or channel to see if there are other posts on that had unusually high levels of reach.
We do this manually by assessing the latest ten posts on the creators page and then looking at view counts across each.
We also check the types of posts that are live. Typically, strong pages vary in content and you can tell that the creator put a lot of time into each video.
Mr. Beast is an obvious example of what the best creator pages look like.It’s a bad sign if you notice that the posts are bland or only promoting product reviews with a lot of brand deals.
If you do this enough times, then you can start to get a feel for if the content is on a quality level good enough to go “viral”.
Category relevance
The best performing partners that we tested fall under a few specific categories that are relevant to our brand.
For example, Athletic Greens has a lot of posts from health and wellness creators and Whoop leverages a lot of athletes.
These categories make sense for these brands because their audiences are likely already buying products similar to what their core offer is.
We like to think about content-product fit for each channel and then base our tests on the ones where there is the most alignment.
Other advertisers
We also check to see what other advertisers are being promoted to see if there are ads already working on a page or channel that are closely related to our brand.
If we see a lot of posts with ad sponsorships from brands that are tangetially related to us, then its a good sign.
If we notice that there are advertisers that are super brand awareness focused or from large companies (IE: Geico, GM, etc.), then it likely is not a great fit for us.
We keep a running list of brands that we like to follow to see if they show up on our potential partners pages before we sign any deals.
Available ad inventory
On YouTube posts, we have found the most success with dedicated videos and mid-roll ad placement spots.
We tested a few end roll placements because they were cheap, but we found that they performed really poorly.
This is likely due to the fact that no one watches the full videos to the end!The key for us is to make sure that we are partnering with influencers who will offer us the dedicated and mid-roll ad spots.
Otherwise, it’s not worth it to us.
CPM’s
Last on the list are the CPM’s.
CPM’s are a helpful check measure to assess how expensive a potential partner is.
We now have a baseline for what is a good CPM and bad CPM for our category and partner list.
In the early days, brands will just need to get some tests up and running to get an initial understanding of what a good CPM benchmark is.
Sometimes a higher CPM is okay if there is a higher conversion rate to go with it, but high CPM deals are inherently more risky.Until then, a checklist like this one can be a helpful guide for pre-partnership assessments.
Recap
Okay, there it is.
At the end of the day there is no greater learning than running a live test.
Over time we have refined our criteria and I expect this list will develop further as we move forward into 2024.
To recap, we check the following criteria before signing any influencer deals:
Platform selection
Following size
Engagement
“Viral” potential
Category relevance
Other advertisers
Available ad inventory
CPM’s
Cheers and best of luck in 2024!