Without a doubt, influencer marketing is getting more popular in digital marketing, with Instagram as the top platform chosen by brands. Working with influencers in the past few years has helped me to identify these unresolved challenges in influencer marketing: The Trippy (Pricing, Process, and Payment).

Why Trippy? It’s a term that describes the effect that disarranges the reality. I find it relevant with Influencer marketing today, where we are facing challenges that involved different views of reality by brands and influencers regarding the Pricing, Process, and Payment. Besides, it’s a good pun, isn’t it?

Let’s get down to each of them, shall we?

First: PRICING.

Well, expensiveness is always relative to the price and value its’ perceived. Being influencers may seem easy and looks like it’s not worth brands’ money that much. It’s wise when brands are justifying the price with the value that they will get from the influencers.

I also had to mention that Influencers has little to no clue about the pricing they should set. What happen is, there are currently no legitimate benchmark or information source that can guide them to set the price. Most independent influencers are setting the price by comparing with their fellow influencers and the number of followers. But is it enough? I don’t think so.

In Mediatics, we determine influencers’ value based on their past performance to decide whether or not we should use the influencers for the campaign. 

Look beyond the followers count. If you’re only considering influencers by their followers, prepared to be disappointed by the results. When I said results, I talked about the number of audience reached by the influencers, the number of quality engagements they generate in terms of likes, share, saved, and comments - even conversions. These are the kind of variables brands should be evaluating from influencers and also what influencers should consider when setting up their price.

Second: PROCESS.

Influencer marketing process is a pain in the ass, brands who’ve tried should know this much. 

Communication is the challenge. At first, what usually happens when brands decided on which influencers they want to work with, brands are sending a direct message or contact them personally via email or WhatsApp stated on influencers’ bio.

So, what’s the challenge really? It’s the time and effort. Let’s say brands have successfully contacted the influencers - the next thing is to build the relation, deliver the brief, and so on. And when the post is published, they need to contact them again and ask for the insights to find out how the influencers performed.

It is also crucial to have written agreement about the collaboration at the first place to avoid different expectations between brands and influencers.

How long should the post be kept before it’s archived from influencer’s feed? Are brands allowed by influencers to re-use the content for another marketing purposes? Are brands allowed to give feedback for revisions?

Working on agreement with influencer isn’t always easy, influencers are mostly creative people who are good on producing content but not all of them are professionally trained for stuffs like this.

Third: PAYMENT.

As any other independent professionals who work with brands, influencers sometimes are being the victim of late project payment.

Time after time, we see more and more influencers are mature enough to be flexible with payment terms from brands or agencies, unlike the few years ago when people are just started to do influencer marketing and influencers are mostly asked for the payment upfront.

Even so, bureaucracy within the brands’ company sometimes still require longer time to proceed the payment, leaving influencers disappointed with the late payment.

When the brand needs to work with hundreds of influencers, it is when things got really messy. Aside of that, some influencers are not so good with taxes and therefore need to be educated about it (Psst.. Mediatics are sometimes taught influencers on how to create Tax Identification Numbers or NPWP too.)

These payment & financial administrations are sometimes the main reason why brands had to work with digital agencies, while they actually can get in-house people that is capable to do influencer marketing.

One thing for sure, influencer marketing works. I’ve seen many brands have successfully overcome The Trippy and get wonderful results with influencer marketing.

Now is the time for us to be more aware and come with a better solution for The Trippy, so it will slow down influencer marketing industry no more.