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Join for freePosted: Wed 28th Oct 2026
Influencer marketing continues to be huge, but that doesn't mean it's a good fit for everyone.
In this webinar led by Rhea Freeman, learn how to choose the right influencers for your business, research potential partners, understand costs and reach, and measure campaign success.
Discuss the different levels of influencers and how this might reflect in cost, exposure, exclusivity and everything else
How to assess influencers and the kind of research you can do before you even send a message
How to define success and work with the influencer so that everyone wins
Rhea is a multi-award-winning PR adviser, social media and brand expert, ILM Level 7 business coach and mentor, and author of You've Got This.
She is a Help to Grow: Management Course mentor, lectures at universities and is a regular speaker, giving two TEDx talks and presenting at events, including being a main stage speaker at Theo Paphitis #SBSEvent2025 and Enterprise Nation's own StartUp Show!
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I’ll be your host today. For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I’m very pleased to introduce Rhea Freeman, who is a business mentor and coach and an award-winning PR adviser. In this session, Rhea will show you how to choose the right influencers for your business, research potential partners, understand costs and audience reach, as well as measure the success of your campaigns.
If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please do post them in the chat or in the Q&A, and we’ll do our best to answer them at the end of the session. As always, today’s session will be recorded, so we will send this recording along with a few follow-up resources later today. Over to you, Rhea.
Rhea Freeman: Hello, everyone. I’d love to know, as always, where in the world you are – oh, Simon’s already on it, listening in Manchester. I’m in Worcestershire, and it is pouring it down outside.
Qatar – I thought we’d have someone from Qatar today, and I bet the weather is a bit nicer over there. I hope you’re all having a good day, and I don’t know if you’ve got half term.
Super rainy Birmingham – you’re in my neck of the woods, Emma. Irene has got it sorted in Qatar, and Coventry is my neck of the woods as well. It’s great to have you all here today, so thank you so much for coming along.
If you’ve got any questions, please do use the chat function. We’re going to talk today about influencers.
I’ve recently released a book called Big Brand Marketing, which you can grab on Amazon, and I’m going to pop the link in the box. It looks at strategies that big brands use and how we can apply them to small businesses, and one of those is about influencers.
So we’re going to look at whether you should work with influencers. I’d love to hand it over to you in the chat: who does work with influencers? Is it yes, no, would like to, or couldn’t think of anything worse?
Couldn’t think of anything worse, and you’d like to – I think this is the thing. There are some incredibly successful influencer partnerships out there in the world, and there are some that are a complete disaster.
Oh, you got it last time – thank you, Claudia. I hope you like it, and if you do, feel free to pop a review on Amazon, as it’s looking a bit sparse on reviews at the moment.
What we need to do is make sure that when we do decide to work with influencers, we’re working with them for the right reasons. We need to know what we’re looking for as a metric of success, and that’s going to really help our chances.
In today’s session, we’re going to cover three main chunky subjects. We are going to look at the levels of influencers, because you don’t just go from zero to Kim Kardashian – there’s a lot in between.
We’re going to look at how you assess influencers, because we need to research them to know whether or not they’re a good fit for what you want to do and whether they’re likely to push you in the right direction. We’re also going to look at the definition of success for you, because I see this quite a lot: people think, ‘Oh, I’ll work with influencers – it’s a silver bullet for all of my problems.’
It can’t be a silver bullet, because our problems have got different metrics of success. If we want to make sales, that’s one metric, and if we want reach, that’s a different metric. You could get them both together, but you might not.
If you want engagement because you’re running a competition, that’s not necessarily going to lead to sales, but it would lead to getting in front of more people. It’s been developing a lot over recent years, but it’s still a huge area. That doesn’t mean it’s right for every business.
Just because something works well for your friend or for a big brand that you see, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work for you. There’s so much that goes on behind the scenes that you don’t see, that I don’t see, that none of us sees when it comes to lots of marketing decisions that we make.
So let’s look at this in more detail: is it right for your business? It’s better not to work with the wrong person than to think, ‘Oh god, I’ve got to work with an influencer – this is the only option.’ It isn’t, and it never is.
It could be a really good fit for you if your customers follow and trust specific creators. If you think, ‘My target audience is completely obsessed with [insert name of influencer],’ and you look and they align with you, that could be a really good fit, because you’re essentially borrowing their credibility to help promote your brand and business.
If your product is easy to show, try or talk about, again, it could be a really good fit. If you’ve got a highly technical product or one that’s got lots of legislation around it, then it’s more difficult to work with an influencer.
It’s not impossible, but you would need to give them a lot of training so they can talk with knowledge and experience about your product. If it’s one that has got lots of red tape to jump through, you don’t want them to get into trouble – for you or for them – because they didn’t know. And if it’s a highly technical product and they’re on the fence, again, it makes it more difficult.
It can be a great fit if you’ve got the budget or product to invest, because sometimes you need to give budget and product. Sometimes, depending on the value of the product or the size of the influencer, it might just be product, but regardless, you’ve got to give something.
In all honesty, you do need to put a bit of time aside to manage it as well. Even really professional influencers that do this as a job will need a bit of support and steering so you get what you want at the end of it.
You also need to be happy to share creative control. I’ve seen something happen before – not for a while, thank goodness, but maybe that’s just because the algorithm has decided to serve me stuff that doesn’t annoy me – in quite a niche industry, where they basically had a load of influencers, let’s say 10, who put up the same image and the same caption at the same time.
I just thought, why pay for that? Why not just put up an ad and chuck a load of budget behind it? You’re not using their creativity or their experience of their audience – you’re just saying, ‘Post this to your followers,’ and you can do that by paying for an ad.
The most successful campaigns I’ve seen are the ones where the influencer does get a say in the creative. Yes, they know the objective, and you can put it through different processes, but they know their audience better than you do, so why not tap into that?
Think twice if you need the sales next week. If you’re not prepared to give it a bit of a go and let it work through, you might be better off with something like a straightforward ad.
The same goes if you can’t say clearly who your customer is, because different influencers have got different audiences and followings. Sorry, that was obnoxiously loud. If we’re not sure who we’re aiming at, it’s very difficult to pick the right person.
If you want to script every word, again, I wouldn’t do that. Absolutely tell them the key points and the things they can and can’t say, but don’t make them read a script – it’s not them, and it’s not natural.
If it goes incredibly well – your success metric is sales, you’re working with a big influencer, and you’ve put some budget behind it – and you’re not prepared for anything positive that’s going to happen, maybe think again. You don’t want to create the interest and create the sales, and then not be able to deliver on your promises.
Now let’s look at the five levels of influencer, because we don’t all have to go up to Kim Kardashian. We probably don’t all have the budget for the mega influencers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a highly effective campaign with a smaller level of influencer.
Let’s start at nano. These have between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, and these figures were just pulled from the internet, so treat them as rough guidelines of how much we’re looking at paying people.
With nano and micro, and maybe even sometimes with mid depending on the product you’re giving, you might not have to pay for a post – you just give the product, depending on what it is. If you give them a pencil sharpener, you’re paying. If you’re giving them some really expensive, luxurious bedding that costs hundreds and hundreds of pounds, maybe you don’t.
So with nano, we’ve got between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, and you could be looking to pay £50 to £250 per post. Whilst they have got a smaller number of followers, they will have a community that feels like they know them, and that can really improve the trust factor.
They can be more open to gifting, and the exclusivity depends on lots of things. Often, people at that level who want to be influencers will be trying to work with lots of different brands to increase their revenue and their credibility.
So exclusivity is a stretch, but it’s something you need to be really aware of when you’re thinking about your contracts or agreements with them. If you sell boots, and on Monday they talk about your boots being the best thing in the world, and on Tuesday they talk about your competitors, does that dilute what they said about you? I think it probably does.
Micro is the next level up, so we’re looking at between 10,000 and 50,000 followers. The rate you pay goes up as well, because they’ve got more of a following and more of a reach, in theory. It’s still quite a niche following; you’re expecting to see high engagement, and it can be a really good sweet spot for smaller brands.
Mid-tier is 50,000 to 250,000 followers. You pay more – you can see the jumps going up, because we’re in front of more people, in theory. In the mid-tier, you’ve got reach plus relevance.
You might find at this stage that this is what people do for a job. Often with the nano and micro levels, these are people who just do it as a bit of a side hustle for a few extra pounds or something a bit fun.
As you move up from mid to mega, these can be people for whom it’s a significant chunk of their income. When that happens, you might be dealing with a manager, and you might find that the cost jumps up again a bit because there’s a third party.
The next level is between 250,000 and one million followers, and the price has gone up as well. You get bigger awareness, in theory, and exclusivity will cost you more because it’s worth a lot of money to them. We’re usually looking at managed people here.
As we go up, we can be talking about a lot of money. You get mass reach and a broader audience, but there’s less personal connection.
Now, I should say there’s one influencer in the mega category who I think does an incredible job. It says here ‘less personal connection’, but I think she nails it, and that’s Lorna – she used to be Lorna Luxe, and she’s now just Lorna. I’m sure she’s well over a million, and while she has got huge reach and a broad audience, she has maintained that personal connection because she spends a huge amount of time in the community.
So these are just markers, but they’re not hard and fast, and there are lots of different variations. Don’t be wooed by the number alone.
When you’re assessing influencers, we need to look at lots of different things, and the number is just one of them. Look at what you could achieve, because you could find that a smaller influencer packs a much bigger punch.
Now, when we’re thinking about costs, this can be really prohibitive. Some influencers will work for product, and some will work for product and a bit of money, but there are lots of different reasons why these are variable.
One is whether it’s their job or whether it’s just a fun side hustle – that can be a big thing. Another is usage rights: are they creating content for their own platform, and maybe you can share it or be a collaborator? Or can you use it as your own – for ads, for your emails, for your website?
Then there’s exclusivity: are you asking them not to work with anyone else in your space, and how long are you asking for that for? The longer you ask, the more you should have to pay. Niche and expertise matter too – specialist audiences can cost more money.
The format as well: are you wanting them to do reels, long-form video for YouTube, stories or just the odd post? The product value matters too – again, pencil sharpener versus, oh, I don’t know, a car – let’s go big.
Timing and agency fees come into it too, so there are lots of different variables. This is an example that Claude, bless his heart, put together for me.
He reckoned that for a micro influencer with 30,000 followers, if you wanted a reel and three stories, you could be looking at between £1,000 and £1,500. If you wanted to add paid ad usage, so you could use that content in your own ads for three months, that could add up to 50% more.
If you wanted to add exclusivity, that can add more. If you wanted to book something so it wasn’t just a one-off, that could reduce the cost per insertion – well, insertion would be a magazine, sorry – per piece of content.
Now, gifting versus payment. Gifting is when you give the product, and this works if it’s desirable. It’s better for smaller influencers – you’ve still got to give bigger influencers the product you want them to talk about, but there can sometimes be a standalone payment as well.
It can work well if there are no fixed posting demands. Although I would say, even with a gifted product, I would explain what I wanted, because whilst you’re not giving them cold hard cash, you’re giving them a product with a value that you could sell, so it’s important to still have this in writing.
Another benefit of gifting is that it can be a good way to test the waters before you put a lot of money behind it. If you’ve got a lower-value product and you’re happy to give a few away to see what people do as a test before you invest more, that can be a good way to do it.
When it comes to paying, that’s for when you’ve got really specific posts, dates or messages and you can’t have that amount of variation. It’s also for when you want usage rights or exclusivity, and when their time and skill are a big part of the value.
Some brands use influencers instead of photographers and videographers, because they get such good-quality content out of them. When you bundle that together with the promotion as well, it’s incredibly good value for money.
Remember that a gift still counts as payment, so it’s still an ad. The ASA have got some really good guidelines on this – I’m sure we’ll touch on this a bit later on – and I would go and have a look and make sure anyone you work with is also labelling things properly.
So, doing your homework before you message. Let’s say you’ve found some people that you think could be interesting – we need to make sure we’re researching them, and we can do this before we reach out.
I’d go back through months of their content and just start to look at it. Is it good quality? Are the images good, is the audio good, is the messaging good, is the caption good, or is it full of spelling mistakes?
Then have a look at the comments: are people commenting, and are they replying to the comments? You can look at all these things and start to get a bit of a picture, because I think it’s quite good to look at people’s ups and downs through different seasons and different campaigns.
You can ask your customers who they follow and what matters to them. This can be really good to help you build up a database of names to look into.
Check their previous work. You can do this by just looking through their feed, or you can look at posts they’ve collabed on, and if you know any of the brands they’ve worked with, that can be a good way of doing a bit of research as well.
Then I would move to the engagement level, where I’d start liking and commenting on their content. Maybe I comment on their stories, or maybe I send them a direct message to see if they respond.
If I’ve got somebody out there waving the flag for my brand and business, and someone asks them a question and they just ghost them, that is going to affect any possible conversion. If I’m happy with all of this, you can then start to enter into that conversation.
You could start with direct messages, although be aware that some people’s DMs are wild. It’s best to find the right email address, which is usually quite easy to find if people want to work with you.
Ask for their media kits. These should show insights such as how many people they’re reaching and what the engagement is, and they might have some nice testimonials in there. They should also have the rate cards, and there are third-party tools you can use if you want to double-check their follower counts.
When we’re scrolling through all these things, we’re assessing a lot of different things. We’re looking at audience fit, so we’re crystal clear on who we want to appeal to, and we’re making sure that there’s a decent overlap.
Think about where they live, potentially, if you’re geographical. If you’ve got a coffee shop in Hereford, it’s a bit wild to be working with somebody who makes local content over in Cumbria – it’s not going to do the same thing, unless you’re selling by post, at which point, absolutely.
So look at where they live, their age and their interests. Think about your target audience and the audience you want to grow.
Look at their engagement. Are they having real conversations, or are people just putting weird comments on and they’re answering with a thumbs up? Are people commenting, sharing and saving?
It’s not just about the likes – the shares and the saves are more valuable and more powerful. Do they reply to their followers?
Assess their content for tone, style, values and how they behave online. Would you be proud to say, ‘I’m working with this person’? Or would you think, ‘Oh god, I hope none of my customers find out’?
These can be values that are important to them, but it can also be the language they use. If, for example, you’re selling a product aimed at children, or aimed at grandparents and parents, and you’ve got someone who effs and blinds, that might work for you – but it would make me a bit nervous, depending on my product.
Look at who they’ve worked with before and how that did. Did they post the word ‘ad’, and did they disclose it properly?
There are things that can definitely be trained in terms of ‘we need you to do this’. I work with a brand as an ambassador, and every time I post a piece of content, there’s a list of criteria I have to fulfil. If I don’t do that, I don’t get paid, so you can be quite specific with that.
Now, red flags we need to look out for. With their audience, has it been quite consistent growth? We like that.
If you look at their followers, do they look like bots and spam accounts? Are they in the right country – the country that you actually cater to? If they’ve got a huge following and a tiny reach, that could also be a bit of a red flag.
Look at the quality of engagement: what are the comments like, and is it the same people commenting every time? Watch out for sponsored posts that no one engages with.
You will often see that sponsored posts have a lower engagement rate, because people see the word ‘ad’ and it repels them. That’s flipping annoying, especially when people do it correctly, but it is what it is.
Make sure their behaviour’s okay as well. Are they labelling ads, and are they doing back-to-back competitor posts? I don’t love that.
What are the replies like? Read them, and slightly obsess about it.
Think about setting a clear brief as well. What do you want, what’s the goal, and what’s the message? We don’t want to script, but we want to be clear.
What deliverables are you expecting? If they say they’ll post a few times, you might think a few means 10, and they might think a few means two, which means no one’s going to be happy.
So we need to be clear on the brief, the objective, the timeline, the deliverables, the platforms, the dates, the disclosures and the tags. Think about everything you need from them.
Then we need to think about whether it’s a fee or a gift value, and when you’ll pay them. Do you have an approval process, or are you happy to trust them? What are the usage rights, and is there an exclusivity?
Get this nailed. I’m not a solicitor, but contracts can be incredibly useful here, so everyone knows what they’re doing, and everyone’s got a clear plan. That can be really useful for managing expectations.
Now, don’t forget that gifts count as payment – whether you pay, you lend or you give them a product. Read the ASA guidelines – if you Google ‘ASA influencer guidelines’, they’ll be there, and there’s a really good PDF about it, which I’d make sure everyone I worked with was reading.
Label it as an ad upfront, before people click on ‘more’. ‘Gifted’ and ‘collab’ aren’t terms the ASA particularly like – if you read the guidelines, they have the terms they’re happy with, because some people won’t know what ‘collab’ means.
‘Spon’ was one as well. People put ‘spon’ on everything, and I knew what it meant, and I’m sure you knew what it meant. But for people who didn’t know that ‘spon’ was short for ‘sponsored’, which actually means they were paid – not so good.
So go through that list and make sure you’re comfortable with the wording that the ASA are suggesting. Platform labels might not be enough alone, and you should all be in it together.
We all want to do it fairly, because we shouldn’t be looking at this kind of stealth selling. If it’s an ad, it should be an ad, and you should be proud it’s an ad.
Before you even set the brief, think about what success looks like. Are you going for awareness – so reach, impressions, profile views and new followers? Or are you going for engagement, where we’re going to major on the saves, the shares, the quality of those comments, DMs, questions and sign-ups?
Are we going for traffic and sales? Is there a discount code, an affiliate code or a specific tracked link?
Then there’s content and credibility. Do you want content you can reuse, or are you looking to tag onto them for that credibility? Do you want social proof and reviews, and what’s that long-term trust angle?
These are all very different success metrics, and because of that, we’ve got different things we’re looking for. We can’t go for an awareness campaign and then be cross when no one’s clicking on the tracked links, because we’ve gone all over the place with what we’re looking for.
I’m also really passionate about making anything like this a win for everybody, because if we make it a win for everybody, that goodwill and positivity carries on even beyond the campaign. That means being clear and fair when it comes to payment, value, timescales and so on, and paying them on time when they’ve done what you want.
Listen to and value their ideas. They know their audience better than you do, and you know your audience better – there is a lovely piece of the Venn diagram that overlaps, but you need to work with people on their ideas.
You can share results with them, and you can thank them. Yes, you might be paying them, but a thank you goes an awful long way with people.
Give them room to be creative as well. If you just want someone to read a script and do exactly what you say with exactly the same creative, just pay for an ad – it’s a lot easier.
The point is that you want them to use their tone and how they understand people to get to their audience in a way that they’re going to understand. It should be collaborative, and it should never be exploitative.
I’m amazed we got through that! Thank you very much, and please do pop your questions in the chat. Those are some guidelines about whether or not you should work with influencers, some questions to ask and some things to look at.
I would love your thoughts on this. Is there anything there that you’ve picked up and thought, ‘Oh, you know what? That’s a good way to think about it’? We’ve got the Q&A, and we’ve got the chat.
‘Is there a good database you recommend to research influencers by their interest sector, and are there any free databases you know of?’ I would just get really scrappy on it. I would look at the platform and study it.
You can look by hashtags or search by specific terms. I would ask my fans and followers who they like and who they’re interested in, because I think that’s a better way to find people – although I’m assuming there will be databases.
You can put it into AI – you could put in ‘the best influencers in the home baking space’, and it’ll come up with a whole list, and you can absolutely use that. But I would then use that list and start to do my research. Hopefully, that has helped – oh, I’m going to press loads of buttons here.
Beth: Thanks, Rhea. Speaking of niches, there’s a question in from Emma in the chat. Emma said, ‘I think I’m struggling to find an influencer in my niche,’ and for context, Emma sells singing lessons for adults and digital singing schedules.
If someone on this call has quite a niche business, can they still work with influencers? And how do they go about that?
Rhea: Definitely. Actually, Simon said, ‘I’d use AI,’ and I absolutely would – I’d ask AI or Claude (I use Claude, but other ones are available, obviously), ‘Can you produce a list of influencers who are known for their singing?’
Then I’d also just start listening and watching. At the moment, there’s this massive trend – I don’t know if you’ve seen it – with Jamie Miller and Babydoll, I think the song is. All these different celebrities and influencers are dancing along with him, and it’s more lip-syncing, but I’m sure some of them do actually sing.
I would look for trends where people are singing, and you could start by messaging them. It’s a long shot – it’s a wild one – but Alison Hammond did it, so you could say, ‘If you’d like a singing lesson, did you know I did this?’
You could also go slightly wayward. Maybe some people are thinking of Christmas and lots of carol concerts – is there anyone going to those that you could help?
Beth: I typed it in for singers, and it lists multiple singing influencers.
Rhea: Perfect – AI is a great place to start. Hashtags are a bit iffy at the moment; they used to be really useful, but not so much anymore. But you could also look for specific hashtags if you wanted to and just start researching them.
What I often find is that I’ll find a person, and then I go off down a bit of a rabbit hole and find more and more people as I start looking. If you find an influencer, look at the people who have commented on their content, because that can start to build up your potential list.
Beth: That’s great. And, yes, love Alison Hammond – what a queen.
Rhea, you mentioned the example of Lorna Luxe earlier, that big influencer. How can businesses tell whether an influencer’s audience is genuine and engaged, especially with a big account with a big following?
Rhea: With Lorna – we’ll pick on Lorna because we like Lorna – if you watch her stories, I think she definitely comes over as very genuine. Whenever she puts up a question box, she gets lots of questions, and when she posts something, she gets loads of comments. They’re not just nice thumbs-up comments – they’re actually comments that show people care.
So it’s a case of going quite Poirot on it – not with a moustache, if you don’t want to go that far – but really doing that work. If you see people just going ‘nice’, thumbs up or smiley face, you think, ‘Oh, great.’ But when you see people asking genuine questions and putting the time in, that to me is a really positive sign.
Beth: Yes, that people have actually taken the time to send a thoughtful response and reply – that’s great. I know we’re nearly at time, but are there any red flags businesses should watch out for when considering an influencer?
Rhea: Absolutely. If they don’t align, I think that’s a massive red flag, and the same goes if their following is made up of a load of bots.
If they have a massive following but no engagement – I mean, we know engagement is brutal on social media at the moment, so I’m not saying look and go, ‘Oh, they’ve only had four people like it.’ But if they’ve got a million followers and one like or no likes, that’s a red flag. What the heck has gone on there?
Look at the quality of that content, the quality of the engagement and the frequency of the content as well – you’re just starting to build up a picture. Some people’s red flags might not be red flags to others, but it’s a case of building up that picture, because you don’t want your brand associated with somebody you don’t believe in, you don’t like, and you wouldn’t be proud to say, ‘Oh, yes, I work with Jane.’
I think that’s a really important thing as well. Your gut feeling – I’m not saying base it on gut feeling, but genuinely, it’s quite good.
Beth: That’s great. We could just round off with one more question, if that’s okay, Rhea. You mentioned earlier that smaller influencers can pack a bigger punch, so in your opinion, is working with smaller, more niche influencers sometimes more valuable than partnering with someone with a much larger following?
Rhea: Definitely – don’t overlook the smaller influencers. Often, they’ve got a really strong community and really good connections, and if they’re people looking to grow, they can be really hungry for it, so they’ll do a really good job. Whereas if it’s people who are very established, they will do what’s on their contract and then move on to the next one.
That’s not a trick – it just is what it is. You’ll also get a lot more for your money, which means you can work with more people and you can experiment more, which is also a really big part of the battle.
Beth: That’s fantastic. Thanks so much, Rhea – that was a great session, and there are lots of thank-yous in the chat. Just as a recap, we’re going to be sending this recording out, so don’t worry – you’ll get that later, along with a few further follow-up resources.
Do connect with Rhea – her LinkedIn and Enterprise Nation profile are in the chat, so please do reach out with any further questions. Thank you very much, and we’ll see you in the next one. Bye.
Rhea: Thank you very much. Bye.
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