 How many of you are doing influencer marketing? Like for real, like how many of you are hitting up influencers and getting them to use your music or create content around your music? If you are not, then you are missing out on one of the most effective music marketing strategies that you can do. And one thing that I've noticed is that it seems like a lot of artists tend to shy away from influencer marketing either because they don't know how to properly reach out to influencers or you're afraid that you're going to get finesse. And don't get me wrong, those are all very valid concerns. But you cannot let those fears stop you from utilizing, once again, what's one of the most effective music marketing tools there is. So what I want to do in this video is give you tips on reaching out to influencers, how to audit, how to deal with them and how to best cover yourself so that you don't get finesse. Let's get into it. It's the mat work. What's going on? My name is Kory, music marketing and co-founder, country brand agency. And today, what I want to talk to you about is how to deal with influencers. Now, like I said earlier in the video, influencer marketing is really one of the best things that you can do to get your music out there. I will put it, maybe number two, next to pay advertising. And the only reason I put pay advertising first is because you don't have to deal with people, you know what I'm saying? That is what it is and you can control the data. But influencers are great because they exist in abundance on every single platform. You can find micro, mid-level and mega influencers on any social media platform that exists and there are influencers that speak to any niche and any target audience that you're looking to get yourself in front of. Couple that with the fact that influencers are basically modern-day celebrities and you can really have a powerful impact on your campaign if you figure out how to find them and use them the right way. And that's exactly what I want to cover in this video. But before we get into all of that, come and follow me on Instagram and TikTok. Links will be in the description below. Come talk to me, come engage with me, come give me some video ideas. All of that good stuff. Now, with that being said, let's get into it. So the first thing that I want to get into is outreach, right? Reaching out to the influencers properly. And I'm doing this assuming that you have already found an influencer that you like. You've seen one that you think speaks to your base. Maybe at a different point, I'll make a video about how to find influencers. But for now, this is assuming that you found the influencer that you like and you want to make a connection and get them on board with your music and your campaign. So the first thing you got to do is you got to reach out and communicate to the influencer and let them know what's going on. Now, I recommend reaching out to them via their preferred method. Usually it is saying that bio somewhere, hit me up in my DMs or email me here or send a message to this person. Please reach out to them through their preferred method. Do not try to circumvent it and go a different way. Or you will literally start your relationship off with a bad impression, you know what I'm saying? Nobody wants to have their business, their preferred business method, disrespected. And no one wants to do business with someone that they feel like disrespected, their preferred business method. But once you have found their preferred method of contact, you want to reach out in a super professional and super polite way. Once again, no one wants to deal with the impolite artist. It just immediately makes people turn their head down at you and just look away for whatever you're asking. Now, in this outreach email, I would suggest that you let the influencer know one, how you found them. Two, what about them makes you think that there would be a good fit for your campaign? And then three, what exactly is it that you're looking for them to do with the song or with the content? So for example, I may reach out to an influencer and say, hey, my name is Corey, I'm reaching out on behalf of such and such because I found you on TikTok and I think that you're a really dope creator. We're currently running this trend that is, I don't know, X, Y, Z, we're having people dance to it. And I think that you will be a good fit for it. Please hit me back at your earliest convenience, let me know what your rates are and how we can best move forward to work together. Boom, simple, short to the point. Now, of course, you wouldn't be reaching out on behalf of someone else, you would be reaching out on behalf of yourself if you're the artist or if you're a manager or something like that, I guess you would be reaching out on behalf of your artist. So you can tweak that part to fit whatever makes the most sense for you. But the big things, once again, that you wanna have in there is once again, let them know how you found them. Why do you think there would be a good fit for the campaign? And then let them know what the idea is if you have one and if you don't have an idea, let them know that as well. Just say something like, hey, I really just want you to be super creative or do your thing around my song. Let me know if you have any ideas. From there, the professional influencer will either hit you back with some type of price sheet or they're going to ask you for your budget and trust me, they're going to ask you for your budget. I've yet to meet an influencer that does it for free. Or let me say this, not never but not many, you know what I'm saying? Like most influencers aren't gonna do it for free. So most of the influencers are gonna hit you back with some type of price sheet or some type of price for the services. And now you can start to begin your audit process. What I recommend you do during the audit process is look at the influencer social platform that you're looking to get posted on and go and look at their last six to 10 posts. You want to gauge how well the engagement is performing by looking at the views, the comments, the likes and then you also want to go through it and look for any sketchy behavior. So if an influencer's last five posts has 500 comments, but 400 of those comments look like they're fake comments or bot comments, then you don't want to work with the influencer. Same for the views, same for the followers, same for any type of fake engagement boosting. If you see them boosting their engagement, then you don't want to use them. Or if you see little to no engagement and they're charging a high price, you don't want to work with them. Now I would preference and say this, there is no like bottom line rate for an influencer. There's no average. All influencers charge whatever they think they're worth. So if I as an influencer feel like my audience or tapping into my audience is worth $1,000, that's what I'm going to charge. Now you may not feel like it's worth $1,000. And once again, that's what this audience process comes in is it's up to you to make the decision and go, hey, this is what the influencer wants, but does it make sense for the results that I feel like I'm going to get out of this? Yes or no. And then from there, you can move based on that decision. So like I said, start with general engagement audience. That's the easiest place to start. Other than that, there may be some other variations into whether or not you think the post is worth it. For example, there are influencers and influencer pages that we use that in my opinion charge a little bit more than what their actual engagement is worth. But the social proofing from being shouted out by those influencers are being on those social pages far outweigh the actual engagement that the post itself forget. And there are lots of influencers and lots of posts out there that we use like that. So in that instance, their price may be worth it to me just to get the brand association. Pair that to a smaller influencer who say let's has 10,000 followers and only gets 2,000 views per video, but once $500, it's like no, you know what I'm saying? That's not worth it to me or may not be worth it to me at least and I'm going to go and try to find someone that better meets the criteria and the things that I'm looking for. So once again, there is no perfect way to audit, but I recommend looking at their last six to 10 posts doing the aggregate of their engagement and looking at that stuff. There's a really cool platform out there called Social Blade where you can track of influencers growth over the last 30 days or so. I use that tool religiously to look at an influencer engagement, which actually leads me to another point that I wasn't going to bring up in this video, but you can also look at their follower growth for the last couple of days. So if you see that an influencer is on an uptrend, then maybe they are worth a little bit pricey of a number because at some point their engagement may meet the price level and assuming that they never take the content down, you will reap the benefits of them growing. So if you use an influencer at 10,000 followers and they catch a viral moment and they get to a million followers and your content is still on that page, then that's a great look for you, right? Versus if you're paying an influencer and their followers have been going down for the last couple of days, this may signify that either they bought fake followers and ended up being purged or their followers are no longer engaged and they're leaving. And it could signify a lot of really bad things. It may make it to where you don't want to pay the influencer their price or may make their price not worth it. Like one thing I see this pretty common, especially with TikTok influencers who have caught a massively viral hit in the form of content, they'll still charge numbers or charge prices that made sense when they were at their peak that no longer make sense, none of that kind of falling off the good graces of the algorithm. You'll run into that a lot with influencers. So once again, it's up to you to audit them, audit their engagement, look at their followers, look at their engagement over the last 30 days over the last couple of six to 10 posts and make that assessment to decide whether or not the price that they've hit you with during your outreach phase makes sense for you or if you should just move on to another influencer and spend that money a little bit more wisely. So the last thing I want to get into is payment, right? Paying the influencer because once again, I have yet to come across too many influencers that would do it for free. Sometimes you will and it genuinely shocks me every single time that somebody hits me back and I'm like, no, I'll do it for free. All right, cool, let's do it. So when you're paying an influencer, I recommend you pay using some type of secure payment method like PayPal, not the friends and family option, but the services and goods option because you need protection for yourself in case the influencer doesn't complete the thing that you're asking to do or worst case scenario, they try to run off with your money. You need to make sure that you have a way to dispute that and get your money back. So for me, PayPal has been the best solution to this. And what we do when we go through this process of sending payment, one, once again, you never ever, ever want to send an influencer a friends and family payment unless you have already worked with their influencer and you trust them. If you trust them and you pay them like four or five times and yeah, send them to friends and family. Y'all are cool at this point. But if it's your first time ever working with an influencer, services and goods, know if ands and buts about it, you're just gonna have to pay the extra fee on top of it to make sure you're secure, what's four or five extra dollars to make sure that you don't get finesse for 200, 300, 400 dollars. So we always send it through service payment on PayPal. And one thing that we do to protect our ass is we make sure we screenshot everything. We keep receipts, we screenshot the conversation between us reaching out to the influencer and asking them to do the challenge or whatever we're asking them to do. We screenshot the conversation of them, ask accepting it, we screenshot the payment, we screenshot everything. So that way, if it does come to a point to where we have to dispute, we have all this information to provide the PayPal to make sure that we can make sure things in favor will be for us. And nine to 10 out of 10 they do, I've only ever lost like maybe one or two influencer disputes on PayPal and that was because we didn't have enough information on our end to prove that certain things were said and had been done, which is once again why I now take screenshots of everything, like everything. Other payment platforms that you wanna avoid are Western Union, No Cash Up, No Zail, nothing that can't be traced or disputed if the influencer were to actually scam you. Once again, you only wanna stick to secured methods. And if anyone knows any other secured payment methods other than PayPal, I'd love to hear about them in the comment section below. Please drop them, I'm always looking for alternatives. If I can get out of PayPal and go to something else, I'm interested in it. But other than that, the other big thing that I do wanna say when it comes to paying influencers is if the price that they're charging you is more than $500, I will make them sign some type of contract. This can be an author independent contracting agreement, but I'm sure you could Google influencer contracts and something would come up, but I will make them sign a contract just for peace of mind. Now honestly, you're probably not gonna take someone to court over $500 or $600. Like most of the time you probably wouldn't wanna go through that effort, but it makes the influencer see that you're taking this seriously and that you view this as a job and that they should take it seriously. And if nothing else, it usually scares them into taking the role a lot more seriously, especially when you're talking about dealing with younger influencers who are in their teens to low 20s, seeing a contract scares people because it goes like, oh, shit, this is real. They may actually do something. You know you probably want, but I use it as a peace of mind. And if you ever find yourself in a PayPal dispute with an influencer who you pay the type of money to, then you have the contract as initial backup or extra backup on top of all the screenshots and other information that should provide the PayPal. And once again, that's usually how we want most of our PayPal disputes when it comes to the bigger influencers. We always get them to sign a contract. No if ands, buts about it. If they don't want to do it, then they don't want our money simplest plan as that. And I advise you to take the same strategy. If an influencer does not want to abide by these rules, if they are pushing you to send money through PayPal, even though you told them that you won't, if they're not down to sign a contract, or prove that they're going to do things the right way, then don't work with their influencer. They're literally thousands and thousands of influencers. They're not the only one your life and your world will not end if this particular influencer doesn't post. There are probably 20 other people that are just like them. And you have to remember that, you know, it's a thousand yous, it's only one of me. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, pay influencers and a secure method to better make sure that you don't just scam. If you're paying more than $500, make them sign a contract. If for nothing else for peace of mind and for proof if you have to dispute it and don't let them pressure you into sending money in any other unsecured method. Just don't let them do it. There it is. That's how you deal with influencers from the outreach process to the audit, to the payment process. Hopefully this helps a lot of you guys with your influencer outreach process. And I'd love to see a lot more of you utilizing influencers to market your music and promote your music. And like I said, I know this video didn't really address how to find influencers. It is once again, assuming that you've come across the influencer that you think would be good for your music or you've seen them. So if having a video about finding influencers is something that you guys are interested in, I can make that. Let me know in the comment section below. You know, if enough of you talk about it and I'll put something together over the next couple of weeks or so. But this should be enough to get a lot of you started in your actual outreach journey. Once again, influencer marketing is super important when it comes to my personal marketing for my clients and artists I work with. It's ads, it's influencers, and it's content marketing. You master those three things. You have a really solid marketing and advertising strategy for your music and for your content. Other than that, if you feel like you learned anything today, please like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you guys to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.