Important Influencer Marketing Terminology
If you are brand new to being an influencer or creator and need help understanding terms that brands or agencies are throwing at you, this post is from a series called Influencer Marketing Terminology.
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In this post you'll learn buzzwords and terms you’ll need to know to have a baseline understanding of influencer marketing, lots of lingo brands may throw around when discussing sponsorships, brand deals, key-metric, and analytics terminology for how brands will want to measure the performance of your content.
Important Influencer Marketing Terminology Every Creator Should Know
Nano to Mega Influencers
NANO-INFLUENCER: Someone with less than 10k followers on any platform
MICRO-INFLUENCER: Someone with 10k-50k followers on any platform
MID-TIER INFLUENCER: Someone with 50k-500k followers on any platform
MACRO-INFLUENCER: Someone with 500k-1M followers on any platform
MEGA-INFLUENCER:Someone with more than 1M followers on any platform
What Does FTC Mean?
What does FTC stand for? FTC stands for the Federal Trade Commission. This is the government body in the U.S. that issues guidance on the required disclosures influencers must use to let their audience know that this content is sponsored. They are the ones that mandate you use #ad or #sponsored in posts and could fine you if you don't.
Pre-Roll Video
This is the ad that rolls before your content on platforms like YouTube. The context you may hear this in as a creator is the brand may want to use some clips from the video you create for them to create a “pre-roll” ad.
Brand Awareness
When negotiating a sponsorship as an influencer, what does it mean when the brand says the main campaign KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is "Brand Awareness?” These are campaigns that brands run where the main goal is initial exposure to a product or a service or an event that most consumers don't know about.
Direct-Response
These are campaigns where the primary goal is to get people to take a specific action like purchasing a product. Often brands will provide promo codes or discount codes or tracking links so that they can attribute how many actions were generated by an influencer.
Experiential Campaign
Experiential campaigns in influencer marketing are where there is typically an in-person component like a meet-and-greet.
What is UGC?
What is UGC? User-generated content is when brands will want you to challenge your followers to create something themselves and send into the brand like on social media.
What Does ROI Mean?
What does ROI mean? ROI stands of Return on Investment or sometimes Return on Influence. It's a fancy way of saying what will the brand get in return for working with an influencer.
Creative Brief
What is a Creative Brief or Influencer Brief when it comes to Influencer Marketing? This is typically a 1-2 page document that outlines everything the brand wants you to cover in your content.
Key Messages
What are Key Messages or Talking Points in an Influencer Marketing campaign? These are usually bullet points or background on the most important things to talk about. Maybe there is a seasonal promotion or a newly released feature.
What Does CTA Mean?
What does CTA mean? A Call to Action is the final talking point where you encourage your followers to take a specific action like “Click the link in the description box” or “Swipe up” to visit the brand’s website.
What Does SOW Mean?
What is a SOW in an influencer marketing campaign? SOW stands for Statement of Work and is sometimes called the Deliverables. This outlines exactly what the brand expects of you during the partnership.
Native or Hard Posts
What does Native Post or Hard Post mean? This refers to a content post on your feed that stays up indefinitely.
Ephemeral Posts
What does Ephemeral mean? This is content like on Snapchat and Instagram Stories where it lasts for a very short time like 24 hours.
Flat Lay
What does Flat Lay mean? This usually refers to pictures on Instagram or Pinterest where a product is beautifully framed like on a marble countertop or farm table and shot from overhead. You’ll see lots of flat lays in food/recipe photography or fashion or DIY content.
Caption or Copy
What is the "caption" of a post or "copy" of a post? It's simply the text that accompanies your photo or video post. On YouTube, it could be your description box and on Instagram just the text beneath your post.
Overlay Text
What does Overlay text mean? This is the text that you put over your Snapchat or Instagram Story frames.
Dedicated Vs Integrated Video
What is the difference between a dedicated video and an integrated video in a brand deal or sponsorship? A dedicated video is where the entire video is exclusive to the brand while in an integrated video, only a smaller portion (maybe 2-3 minutes) is sponsored.
Syndication
What does it mean when a brand wants you to syndicate your post or do a round of social amplification? This is where you do a main post on your blog or YouTube, then a round of social amplification or syndication on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, etc.
Paid Media and Whitelisting
What does Paid Media mean? This is where a brand will put additional money behind your content to expose it to new audiences.
Dark Posts
What are Dark Posts? A dark post is where you grant brands access to your platform but instead of posting natively your existing followers see the content in their feed, it will just show up as an “ad.”
Usage Rights
What does Usage Rights mean? This is what you permit the brand to do with your content. Can they repost or re-share it on their social media? Can they run paid media with it? Broadcast (TV), OOH (Out of Home), Print (Magazines), Social/Digital (the Internet/Social media), etc.
Exclusivity
What is Exclusivity or Competitive Protection? This is where a brand prohibits you from working with its competitors for a certain time period.
Activation
An influencer “Activation” just means that a brand wants to partner with you to do something like create content or attend an event.
Always On Campaign
This is where a brand partners with influencers regularly like every month or every quarter doing sustained promotion rather than a “one-off” campaign. It means the brand never turns off their influencer marketing program. It is “Always-On.”
Repurpose
When a brand wants to "Repurpose" your content, what does that mean? It means they want to do something else with it other than the main purpose, which is to be uploaded to your platform. So, embedding on their website or reposting or resharing on their social media, and so on.
Lead-Time
What does Lead-Time mean? A brand will sometimes ask you how much lead-time you need to create the content, this just means how long will it take you to shoot the video, edit it, or write the blog post.
Engagement Pod
A Comment or Engagement Pod is typically related to Instagram and its private groups. Users will share posts with each other and everyone will leave comments and engage with everyone else’s posts. This is typically looked down upon by brands.
Media Kit
What is a Media Kit? A media kit is a well-designed visual document that outlines who you are, your main social media platforms, how many followers you have, your audience demographics, the types of content you make or services you offer, examples of past brand partnerships. It doesn’t need to be super long, it could even be a one-pager if you’re just starting out.
Added Value Post
An Added-Value Post is where you offer to make additional content or post for the brand, at no additional cost.
Screen Actors Guild
What does SAG stand for? Sometimes a brand will ask if you are a SAG signatory which means they have to pay extra money to SAG-AFTRA. This is usually the case if the brand is very large.
Net 30 or Net 60
What are Net 30 or Net 60 Payment terms? This just means how many days it will take the brand to pay you. Net 30 means they’ll pay you in 30 days and Net 60 means they’ll pay you in 60 days. Make sure to read the contract because some brands consider Net 30 to be calendar days but some will say 30 business days, so definitely clarify.
Engagement Rate
How can I calculate my Engagement Rate? This is a formula that looks at the number of likes, comments, shares, reactions, views on a post relative to your number of followers. You can also get an average engagement rate on an influencers’ entire platform by taking a larger number of posts and averaging the engagement rates on the individual posts. Engagement rate is a good way to compare influencers with different sized audiences to give an understanding of how engaged their followers are. These days a 2% engagement rate or higher is ideal.
Impressions Vs Reach
What is the difference between Impressions and Reach? An impression is how many actual people could have possibly seen a post -- basically how many times your post is displayed. So for example, if someone typed into YouTube search “holiday gift guide” and your video popped up, they could scroll by your video and not actually click it and that would still count as an impression. Impressions are how most traditional media measure success of Brand Awareness campaigns but for most practical purposes, “reach” is a more important metric. Instagram defines Reach as “The number of unique accounts that have seen your post.” This is different from impressions, because rather than being how many people could have potentially seen your post, this is telling us the actual number of eyeballs on your content, which is a much more accurate measurement of performance for a post.
Audience Retention
This is a measurement of the average percentage of a video that a user watches. On platforms like YouTube, increasing retention rates tends to feed the algorithm favorably because the longer people watch your content, the more the platforms think your content is good and will recommend it to others.
What is CPM?
What does CPM stand for? Cost per Mille or Cost per 1,000 Impressions - This is how a lot of traditional brands and agencies think about campaigns and the budgets associated with them. Virtually every other media that they buy is measured in CPM, whether it’s Out of Home, Broadcast, display ads, social media, and so on, so brands will also look at how much they’re spending on an influencer and try to assess how many impressions they’ll receive on a piece of content so they can try to compare apples to apples when determining the success of a campaign.
What is CPV?
What does CPV stand for? Cost Per View which is different from CPM or Cost per 1,000 Impressions! This is a slightly different metric related to video views. Some brands will want to pay you on a cost-per-view basis or basically tell you the CPV they’re trying to achieve. This is another term usually associated with how traditional media measures performance.
KPI
What does KPI stand for? Brands often talk about the Key Performance Indicators of a campaign with an influencer. This is just a fancy way of saying a particular factor is how we’re going to measure success and whether the content performs well or not. It could be vanity metrics like impressions, reach, views, engagement or it could just be that they have this great piece of content they can now repost on the brand’s social media -- that can be a major KPI for them!
Demographics
Where can I find my Audience Demographics on YouTube or Instagram? And what are Audience Demographics? Brands will often ask you to share a screenshot of your audience demographics before they will partner with you. This could be a screenshot of your YouTube analytics or your Instagram audience insights, and will show the brand more information about your audience like what countries they live in, how old they are, % Male vs Female, etc.