Digital Marketing
Influencer Marketing
You are buying access to a relationship somebody else built. Whether any of it transfers depends almost entirely on who you pick.
Influencer marketing pays somebody with an audience to introduce you to it. The Nexclick vets partners on audience overlap and genuine engagement rather than follower count, handles ASA disclosure properly, and measures on tracked outcomes — because most influencer spend is never measured at all.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You have paid for posts and have no idea whether any of them sold anything.
- An agency has proposed a list of names with follower counts against them and nothing else.
- A previous partnership produced a spike in traffic and no orders.
- Nobody in your business is confident about what the disclosure rules actually require.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Vet on overlap rather than reach
- Whether their audience is your audience: location, age, buying power and interest. A hundred thousand followers in the wrong country is a large number and no market whatsoever.
- Check the engagement is real
- Comment quality, the shape of the follower growth curve, and engagement against reach rather than against follower count. Bought followers are visible to anyone who looks, and most briefs never do.
- Brief for their voice, not yours
- The audience follows them and not your brand guidelines. Partnerships fail most often because a brand insisted on copy the creator would obviously never have written.
- Contract properly
- Deliverables, usage rights, exclusivity, approval windows and what happens if a post is deleted or underperforms. Usage rights are the clause most often skipped and the most expensive to fix afterwards.
- Disclosure that meets ASA and CAP requirements
- Prominent, up front, not buried in a block of hashtags. Liability sits with the advertiser as well as the creator, which is not nearly as widely understood as it should be.
- Track with discipline
- Unique codes and links per creator, plus a self-reported question at checkout. Influencer traffic frequently converts days later via a direct visit, so link tracking alone materially understates it.
- Whitelisting and paid amplification
- Running the creator’s post as an advert from their own handle, which routinely outperforms both the organic post and your own brand creative for the same money.
- Decide renewals on numbers
- Most of the value comes from repeated appearances rather than a single post. Judging one appearance is judging an introduction, not a relationship.
Checklist
Vet a creator against this before you pay them
Work through it on any name that has been proposed to you. A creator failing more than three of these is being sold to you on reach, and reach is the least reliable number in this channel.
- 01Is their audience in the countries you actually sell to?
- 02Does the age profile match who buys from you, rather than who you would like to?
- 03Is the engagement rate plausible for their follower count, rather than suspiciously high?
- 04Do the comments read like people, or like a pod trading engagement?
- 05Does the follower graph grow steadily, or in unexplained vertical steps?
- 06Have they posted for a direct competitor in the last six months?
- 07How many of their last thirty posts were sponsored? Past about a third, credibility is thin.
- 08Would you be comfortable with everything on their feed from two years ago?
- 09Do they disclose properly on existing paid posts, or hide #ad in a hashtag block?
- 10Does their content style suit a demonstration, or only a photograph?
- 11Have they asked anything about the product, or only about the fee?
- 12Will they grant usage rights, and for how long?
- 13Are they willing to be measured with a unique code or link?
- 14Could this run three or four times, or is it a one-off appearance?
- 15If the post underperforms, what does the contract actually say happens?
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Week 1–2
Brief and shortlist
What the campaign is for, then a shortlist built on audience overlap and engagement quality with the working shown rather than asserted.
- 02Week 2–3
Vetting and outreach
Audience audits, brand safety review and approach. Expect a meaningful proportion to decline or price themselves out, which is normal.
- 03Week 3–5
Contract and produce
Terms agreed, creative briefed, disclosure specified in writing, and content approved inside a window short enough not to kill the timing.
- 04Week 5–8
Run and measure
Live and tracked per creator, with amplification budget moved behind whatever is actually performing rather than spread evenly.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- A shortlist with audience overlap and engagement quality evidenced, not just follower counts.
- Contracts covering usage rights, exclusivity and what happens if a post comes down.
- Disclosure specified to ASA requirements, in writing, before anything publishes.
- Per-creator tracking with codes and links, plus a self-reported question at checkout.
- A renewal recommendation based on tracked outcomes rather than on how the post felt.
Tools and platforms
- Influencer discovery and audience audit platforms
- Unique discount codes and tracked links
- Meta and TikTok creator and whitelisting tools
- GA4 with self-reported attribution
- Contracts covering usage rights and exclusivity
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Six to eight weeks for a first campaign, most of which is vetting and negotiation rather than production. Results from a single post are usually modest and easily misread — the value in this channel comes from a creator mentioning you three or four times across a few months, by which point their audience believes they genuinely use the thing. Two honest constraints. If your product does not photograph or demonstrate well, this channel is weak for you regardless of budget. And micro-creators with a few thousand engaged followers routinely outperform large accounts per pound spent, which is inconvenient because they take the same effort to manage and cannot be presented internally as an impressive number.
Pricing model
Project, then retainer
Fixed fee for strategy, vetting and management, plus creator fees at the rate we negotiate on your behalf. We take no margin on creator fees and will show you exactly what was agreed.
Questions
Influencer Marketing questions
How do we know the followers are real?
Audience audit tools help, but the manual checks are better. Look at the follower growth graph for vertical jumps, read fifty comments for generic praise repeated across accounts, and compare engagement against reach rather than against followers. Purchased audiences fail all three within a few minutes.
Are micro-influencers better than large accounts?
Per pound spent, usually yes — smaller audiences are more engaged and the creator still replies to comments. The catch is management: ten micro-creators take roughly ten times the coordination of one large one, and that cost is real even though it never appears in the fee comparison.
What does the ASA actually require?
That paid content is obviously identifiable as an advert before anyone engages with it — "Ad" or "#ad" prominent and up front, not at the end of a hashtag block or hidden behind a "more" link. Gifted product counts if there was any editorial control. The advertiser is liable alongside the creator.
How do we measure influencer campaigns?
Unique codes and links per creator as the baseline, plus a self-reported field at checkout, because a good proportion of the audience will search your brand days later and arrive directly. Judging this channel on last-click alone reliably makes it look worse than it is.
Should we gift product instead of paying a fee?
It works with smaller creators and genuinely desirable products, and it buys goodwill rather than obligation — nothing is guaranteed to be posted. Anyone with a real audience treats their feed as inventory and expects payment. Gifting a large account and expecting coverage wastes both the product and the relationship.
Who owns the content the creator makes?
Whatever the contract says, which is why the clause matters. By default the creator owns it and you have no right to reuse it in ads or on your own site. Usage rights for a defined period and defined channels should be negotiated up front — retrofitting them later costs several times more.
How does this differ from affiliate marketing?
Influencer work pays a fee for the appearance regardless of outcome; affiliate pays commission on sales produced. Influencer creates awareness with people who were not looking. Affiliate mostly converts people already in the market. Some creators will work either way, and the choice should follow which job you actually need doing.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.