Influencer marketing is one of the most exciting and effective trends in modern marketing. According to a study, “17% of companies now spend over half their marketing budget on influencers.”
With that much money being spent on influencer marketing campaigns, it’s essential to define set guidelines for influencer collaborations to ensure that you get the best possible return on investment. That’s where influencer contracts come in!
In this article, we’ll be exploring the benefits of using influencer contracts and highlighting what legal terms you should include in them.
Table of Contents
What’s an influencer contract?
An influencer contract is a written agreement between you the advertiser and an influencer.
If you’re planning to work with an influencer to promote your products or services, you’ll need to create a written contract to ensure that the influencer delivers on whatever agreements that were made.
Influencer marketing is an emerging trend, and as such, the parameters of exactly how to go about hiring and working with influencers are still being defined. However, using an influencer contract can eliminate guesswork and create a professional, effective relationship.
Why do you need an influencer contract?
Clearly defined legal terms are absolutely essential to any brand partnership. It’ll help to ensure your influencer marketing campaigns go down without a hitch.
It’s important to use influencer contracts whenever you work with influencers, as it’s the only real way to guarantee that your investment is protected. You need to make sure that everyone is on the same page about what’s expected. Contracts can help to clearly define the collaboration process and manage expectations for both you and the influencer.
Using a contract is not only beneficial for you – it’s advantageous for influencers too. The influencers will benefit from knowing exactly what they need to do, or not do, to ensure that their payment is delivered without any issues.
Influencer contracts help reduce the chance that there will be confusion or misunderstandings about the campaign and can help you to take control of the whole process.
If you want to turn your collaborations into long term ambassadorships, check out our post on brand ambassador contracts.
Common sections in influencer contracts
If you’re new to influencer marketing, it can be hard to know exactly what sort of things should be in your influencer contract. Here are some common sections that you should be include:
Introduction
The introduction is kind of like an overview that should sum-up the whole agreement in a few lines. It should have details of which parties are making the agreement and which social media platforms the sponsored content will be published on. You can go into this in more detail further into the contract, but the introduction should provide a brief summary.
Timelines
The timelines section should set out a clear start and end date for the collaboration. If you plan on having the influencer make a series of posts promoting your business, you can also include more specific dates for when each post should go live.
Payment terms
This section will cover the payment agreement. It should detail when you will complete the payment and any other payment terms that you might want to add. This section can also cover how payments will be made in cost per acquisition (CPA) and cost per click (CPC) deals.
Content requirements & deliverables
This section should detail exactly what’s expected of the influencer in terms of content. It should detail how many posts are required, as well as specific guidelines for content creation, such as hashtag usage. You can also include details about your content approval process if you have one.
Things to avoid
As well as providing content creation instructions, the agreement should clearly define what influencers should avoid when creating their posts. This can be things like mentions of competitors or certain language usage.
Copyright
In this section, you should set out what type of content usage rights you’d like to have over the influencer’s posts. This will determine exactly how and where you can reuse the content online, and ensure that you don’t receive any copyright claims at a later date.
Cancellation policy
This section should cover what will happen if either you or the influencer wants to terminate the agreement. What you choose to write in this section will depend on your business processes and what the influencer is happy to agree to.
Confidentiality and exclusivity
During the collaboration process, the influencer may be provided with sensitive or confidential information about your business. In this section of the contract, you should cover how the influencer is allowed to handle this information, and what should be done with it after the collaboration.
You might also want to include a clause that restricts the influencer you’re working with from partnering with other brands, such as your competitors. Lots of companies ask influencers to avoid working with any competitors for at least 3 months after the contract has been completed.
Legal considerations
This section of the contract should cover legal considerations that need to be made by the influencer. All posts need to be published in line with regulatory guidelines from bodies like the FTC and ASA. This means publishing posts with declarations like #paid or #ad.
