If you are a small or large business offering sought after products, you have probably received emails from an influencer requesting heavy discount, free products or even payment for their marketing promotion to their audience.
It’s understandable to be tempted by the thought of promotion to many thousands of people with very little effort but you need to do the research or reply smart to avoid losing out.
Use this technique to avoid being scammed without having to research
If you don’t have time to research the influencer, I truly believe this is a way to hit the nail on the head to cover yourself from being scammed. Let’s use a hotel as an example and the influencer has reached out asking for a free/discounted stay. In response, suggest providing the influencer with a unique coupon code for them to post while they’re at the hotel and if it was redeemed let's say 10 times (depending on their following) for the use of a hotel stay, refund the influencer their money they spent on the hotel stay.
You will get very little coming back agreeing to this deal because the person requesting knows their true following and most likely won’t be able to help your business due to wrong target audience, purchased following or little to no engagement. It's essentially gives you a win/win situation.
Reply Smart
If you are interested in an influencer who has reached out but want to make sure they’re honest and real. I’d suggest responding using this email template:
Hi <Name>, thanks for getting in contact with us.
We would like to work with marketing partners if there is demonstrable evidence that they can provide value to our business to increase our long term performance. Before getting into a discussion regarding an exchange of the nature you’re proposing, we will need a few documents from yourself or team to make an educated decision going into negotiating a fee/compensation for your services.
1: A report on the demographics of your followers (activity, age, gender) and heat map of where they reside to determine if they are able to come to our place of business. Please provide screenshots.
2: Documentation on a previous project to demonstrate the effectiveness of your work.
Providing metrics on the social media performance of a precious work project, particularly in relation to your own performance pre and post project. This includes engagement statistics, correlation of engagement fluctuations between the client and yourself, and a “post mortem” of/if engagement from followers has held sufficiently steady to demonstrate long term impact.
3: Prior to the negotiation of a contract for services rendered, we require marketing partners to sign a non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreement. Refusal to sign either document will result in termination of any discussion regarding the initiation of a project.
We look forward to the possibility of working with you.
Best,
<Business Name>
This email will sieve through influencers with a fake following, it’s very hard to fake screenshots of results directly from social media channels so never accept an excel spreadsheet which can be easily faked with made up numbers. A real and honest influencer would have these metrics ready to send along with case studies of previous campaigns.