In my time as a freelance writer, I’ve written content for several major brands. But in most cases, these weren’t direct partnerships. There were agencies acting as an intermediary, providing valuable resources and guidance for writers while managing large-scale content production for the company. Without those agencies, odds are that things wouldn’t have worked out, especially if those big-brand clients didn’t have the necessary workforce or time to manage multiple freelancers.
The same goes for influencer marketing, which often involves collaborations with mega creators and global stars or multiple macro-influencers. Effective influencer talent management is essential to seamlessly manage these partnerships and ensure campaign success.
In this post, I take a closer look at how influencer management agencies turn star power into strategy. These agencies connect global brands with macro and mega creators through streamlined partnerships, polished professionalism, and smart campaign execution.
What is Influencer Talent Management?
Influencer talent management is the practice of helping influencers build their careers and manage brand collaborations. In other words, the talent management firm acts as an intermediary between influencers and brands.
While there’s some overlap between a regular influencer marketing agency and a talent management agency, the biggest difference is in the value they offer to creators.
An influencer marketing agency also connects brands with influencers, which means they help influencers find brand partnership opportunities. At the same time, they typically act on behalf of the brand, which means they don’t provide additional representation for the influencers.
For an influencer talent agency, it goes beyond simply connecting influencers to the right brand partners. They offer additional value to creators, which may include handling negotiations, managing communications, overseeing usage rights, boosting publicity, and generally protecting the influencer’s interests.
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So they take a more hands-on approach to managing influencers, guiding them to align their content to the brand’s unique needs. This serves as a major advantage for big brands as the management agency works closely with the talent to protect brand reputation and manage risks.
How It Works: Role of Talent Managers
As I briefly outlined above, talent managers offer significant value for creators by helping to protect their interests. Here’s a more detailed look at the role they play in managing an influencer’s career.
Vetting Brand Deals for Fit and Value
Perhaps one of the biggest roles that a talent manager plays is in vetting potential brand partnerships for the influencer. They’ll assess each opportunity to ensure if it’s the right fit for the influencer in terms of brand alignment and value. As such, they help influencers land brand partnerships that will positively contribute to their career.
Managing Negotiations
Talent managers use their expertise and experience to negotiate deals that are beneficial for the influencer. These negotiations go beyond fees but also include usage rights, deliverables, and timelines. They keep the influencer’s best interests top of mind to strike up deals that are favorable and profitable.
Acting as a Single Point of Contact
As an intermediary between the brand and the creator, the talent manager will also serve as a single point of contact for all things related to contracts, creative approvals, and performance feedback. So instead of having to juggle communications with multiple brands, influencers can rely on the talent manager to manage this aspect of their brand partnerships.
Balancing Brand Goals with Influencer’s Personal Brand
While talent managers also help brands to meet their campaign goals, they avoid doing so at the cost of the influencer’s personal brand. This is where the initial vetting process plays an important role, as it allows them to ensure that the opportunity aligns with the influencers’ voice and values. So they help to balance the brand’s goals while protecting the influencer’s personal brand.
For instance, Gleam Futures brokered Zoella’s partnerships with brands like ASOS and Topshop, ensuring the content matched both brand identity and creator voice.
Why Brands Choose Talent-Managed Influencers
Although influencer talent management agencies mainly serve to protect the creators’ interests, brands also get significant value from working with influencers under these agencies. Here are some of the main reasons why brands choose to work with talent-managed influencers.
Guaranteed Professionalism and Reliability
Working with an agency means working with professionals. From prompt communications to timely deliverables, there’s a certain standard of professionalism that an influencer talent agency can guarantee on a consistent basis. So brands can trust talent-managed influencers to maintain professionalism and reliability throughout the course of their partnership.
Access to Macro and Celebrity Creators at Scale
Influencer talent management agencies sign on hundreds of influencers to be a part of their roster. This involves an official agreement to be represented by the agency. So you get access to macro and celebrity creators at scale to achieve your campaign goals without the need to manually search and vet influencers yourself.
For example, UK-based Connect Management has hundreds of large-scale influencers in their talent roster. This includes names like Poppy Hollins (2 million TikTok followers), Luke Vernon (2.4 million TikTok followers), and Sophiena (2.6 million followers), among many others.
Elevated Campaign Production Quality and Consistency
When you work with a talent management agency, you’re working with experts in influencer marketing. As such, they can provide influencers with the guidance and support to ensure a high production quality for your campaigns. Even if the agency isn’t the one overseeing the campaign production, working with their managed talent will ensure campaign consistency.
Legal and Contractual Transparency
Influencer talent management agencies aim to maintain professionalism and avoid legal conflicts. As a result, they need to maintain transparency during the negotiation process. This results in contracts that outline all the important details of the agreement, ensuring protection from legal issues further down the line.
Check out our guide on influencer contract templates to learn more about the influencer contracting process.
Difference Between Agent-Managed and Freelance Creators
If you’ve worked with influencers directly in the past, you may want to continue the same approach. After all, what’s the big deal with agent-managed creators? In some cases, working with freelance creators may be a better option depending on the type of influencers you need.
Before you decide, let’s break down the key differences between agent-managed and freelance creators. So you can understand the pros and cons of each option and decide what works best for you.
Agent-Managed Creators
- Collaborations and communications are all streamlined through an agent. So instead of having to communicate with multiple influencers and coordinate them, you can leave it all to the agency.
- Influencers are handled by reps. This means that you have experts guiding them and providing them with necessary feedback to ensure that campaign goals are met.
- Agencies bring industry benchmarks using sophisticated analytics tools and influencer performance tracking systems. This allows you to easily monitor performance and benchmark against the competition.
- Talent management agencies have hundreds of macro and celebrity influencers in their influencer roster. So you get access to high-tier, celebrity-level influencers, which would be otherwise challenging to do independently.
- Since you’re working through an intermediary, you may have to pay higher fees. However, this comes with the added benefit of consistency and professionalism.
Freelance Creators
- Collaborations and communications are direct and often informal. You get to work with them directly, which may speed up the process. However, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get prompt and professional responses from every creator.
- Working with freelance creators often means working with emerging talent that’s not yet represented by an agency. While this gives you the opportunity to tap into unique talent and set yourself apart, it also means working with creators who lack the expertise and professionalism needed for successful brand collaborations. So they may need hands-on guidance and support to achieve the desired results.
- Freelance creators may lack pricing standards, especially if they’re still very new to the industry. This comes with unpredictability and inconsistency. In some cases, you may even see higher rates depending on the creator.
Red Flags for Brands Working with Agencies
In spite of the multiple benefits of working with influencers through a talent management agency, not every agency will be a good fit. Here are some red flags to watch out for when working with agencies.
Overpricing for Minimal Deliverables
While it’s natural for talent management agencies to charge additional fees for their services, some agencies may overcharge. Look out for agencies that charge considerably higher fees for minimal deliverables. Compare rates between agencies to get an idea of a reasonable fee.
Overly Rigid Creative Control
If an agency tries to have too much control over creative direction, it’s best to walk away. It’s reasonable to expect some scope changes and minor pushbacks since the agency will work to protect the influencer’s interests. However, an agency that tries to have overly rigid creative control will be detrimental to the influencer’s creativity and the campaign’s success.
Lack of Transparency in Performance Tracking
The whole point of working with an agency is to get good results. But some agencies may not be transparent enough with the way they track and showcase influencer impact. This could be because they lack the right performance tracking tools or simply because they’re hiding less-than-ideal results. Only work with an agency that can report on the influencer marketing metrics that matter most to you.
Reps Pushing Talent Who Aren’t a Good Fit
Influencer talent management agencies represent creators, which means that they’ll try their best to get these creators signed by a suitable brand. In their attempX4t to get work for their creators, some agencies may also try to push talent who aren’t necessarily a good fit for your brand or for your specific campaign.
Seven-Six Agency matched Rabanne with Archie Versarchie, a creator specializing in men’s fashion, lifestyle, and male grooming, to promote their One Million perfume. This makes for the perfect influencer fit since the creator’s audience aligns with the type of audience the brand wants to reach.
Best Practices for Working with Talent-Managed Influencers
Avoiding the above red flags can get you halfway there when working with influencers through agencies. Let me share a few more best practices to help you form a successful partnership with talent-managed influencers.
Start with a Clear Brief
A comprehensive influencer marketing brief sets the stage for a successful collaboration. It’s important to get as specific as possible with your instructions, outlining everything that you expect from the campaign.
This includes details like brand values, deliverables, goals, messaging, and so on. While being specific about your needs, it’s equally important to provide creative freedom so there’s room for authenticity. Tell influencers what to say but not how to say it. For example, you can specify the need to focus on a specific feature or benefit but don’t give them a script to copy and paste exactly as is.
You’ll also want to include the influencer marketing KPIs that you’ll be using for this specific campaign. That way, influencers and agents alike will know how you’re measuring performance.
Establish Timelines Early with Built-in Feedback Loops
Timelines help you stay organized and on track, enabling agents and influencers to schedule their tasks accordingly. Set timelines early on in your partnership, outlining deadlines for contract signing, brief delivery, draft submission, reviews and feedback, edits, and content publication.
Having built-in feedback loops will help you set aside sufficient time for sharing feedback and making improvements before you finalize the campaign content.
Be Open to Creative Pushback
Agencies protect the authenticity of their talent, which is where the magic is. So be open to some pushbacks in creative direction as they’re often intended to deliver content that’s closely aligned with the influencer’s authentic voice. This is why it helps to provide creative freedom from the start instead of taking over the entire creative direction.
Negotiate Usage Rights and Cross-Platform Bundles
When you’re working with an influencer talent management agency, you should expect a higher price tag. At the same time, try to get a good deal out of your spending by negotiating usage rights and cross-platform bundles. This will help you get a better campaign ROI and get more out of your influencer marketing spend.
Real-World Examples
To get an even better idea of how influencer talent management agencies have powered celebrity influencer campaigns for leading brands, let’s check out a few real-world examples.
L’Oréal + Talent Agencies
When L’Oréal partnered with influencers like NikkieTutorials (14.7 million YouTube subscribers) and Camila Coelho (10.4 million Instagram followers), they coordinated through reps. Since these are both mega-level creators with millions of followers, having reps to manage the collaborations was essential.
As a result, they were able to successfully pull off several multi-channel campaigns throughout the years, across Instagram, YouTube, and even in-store activations.
Coca-Cola + UTA
United Talent Agencies, the leading talent agency behind names like Alice Cooper and 3 Doors Down, worked with Coca-Cola to put together a winning global campaign. They leveraged celebrity creators and music influencers to promote the brand’s new flavor launches, syncing creator messaging with music licensing and creative storytelling.
Amazon + Select Management
When Amazon needed to launch an influencer campaign to promote Prime Day deals, they worked with Select Management Group to coordinate their influencer collaborations. The agency connected Amazon with relevant tech and fashion influencers, streamlining multi-country campaigns with synchronized timelines and disclosures.
Power a Star-Studded Campaign with the Right Agency
For brands that are looking to work with macro-level creators and mega influencers, having a talent management agency to coordinate your relationship makes a world of difference. Use the tips and best practices I shared above to build a thriving campaign with the right agency.