EP 7 Breaking Down Paid & Organic Usage

Sonia Elyss and I dive into the one add-on that pushed my rates from a side hustle to a full time income as a content creator: usage. From whitelisting to fair rates to contracting, you know we have a lot to say here.

Timestamps:

• [1:24] Usage - how can companies use your content?

• [3:22] Creators need to be more careful when signing contracts.

• [9:08] When should ad periods be discussed? Before or after?

• [11:16] What is your go-to pricing?

• [15:40] Whitelisting.

• [18:27] Organic usage - what is it?

• [24:09 Average branded content reach?

--

LINKS:

Find Harley:

IG: @theharleyjordan

Website: https://www.millennialescape.com/

Find Sonia:

IG: @Sonia.elyss

Website: https://www.soniaelyss.com/

Follow The Brand Meet Creator Podcast:
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00:00

Welcome to brand meet crater podcast a place where we pull back the curtain of what it means to be all in on social media. So get ready to kick start conversations about the social media world with a little leave nothing off the table transparency or maybe more than just a little you girl has yet to learn the art of a filter so talk in it's time to bring some solidarity to the influencer and brand space

0:28

this episode, Sonia Elise is back to chat about usage my favorite beauty marketing big wig. I love it when Sonia joins us. So get ready we break down the difference between paid and organic usage, what you need to know the industry norms and how you can charge the seven we're brought to you by upstart our podcast network, a podcast production company that manages all aspects of your podcast completely, virtually they can help anyone anywhere turn their passion into a podcast. If you're interested in learning more check out upstart pods.com or upstart or pods on Instagram. Per usual anytime Sonia and I chat. It's because we had a weird conversation about something that came to us in our emails before this in terms of influencer marketing, and we just need to talk about it, we need to share it with the entire world. So we're opening up the floor to chat about the hits and misses of usage in influencer marketing. Our culprit a lot of the time is usage. And my for my friends that are new to this world. As a creator, you own the rights to your content. So any content that you create is yours unless you sell slash sign away the rights and rights are typically so bendy. So instead creators, photographers, creatives in general, generally charge a flat fee for brands to use their content within ADS, website marketing, they don't generally sell those rights straight out. And the larger you are, the larger your account is, the more tricky this is, I know of creators that have come across their pictures in a store window without a single dime, because they signed away their rights and did not specify the usage was allowed by the brand not allowed by the brand. What specific usage was loud? And look if my face is going to be slapped on a billboard, I want to be paid for that, which I think is fully reasonable. So, Sonia,

2:34

I mean, agree.

2:36

What weird, you don't want your face on a billboard with no pay.

2:41

No, agreed Harley, I have to say that that is a nightmare situation. And I would feel so embarrassed if I was that brand. That didn't even give someone a heads up whether or not they legally signed away their rights to not even give someone a heads up, they're gonna be like on a billboard. That's a little bit shameful in my eyes. To me, it is

3:04

so shameful even that, I think it was it was a big company. And they put someone in their store window, literally in their content, took it, put it in the store window. And I think that's atrocious, to not let them know to not pay for it. Any bit of it seems like taking advantage.

3:22

Absolutely it does. And to me, this breaks out into two areas. One is that creators need to be more careful in signing contracts, looking at what the usage says in the initial contract, because I do know, multiple people who are quite sneaky who put it into the contract, it's never mentioned in the scope of work with the usage rights will be but it's in the contract that the brand has usage across any medium in perpetuity, which is essentially signing your life away in that image. So I think that the first big thing that I want to get across to creators is just knowing that usage exists, it should be in every single contract and it should be specified very clearly as to what the usage rights are. But look,

4:17

I don't have that conversation generally and it gets slipped into contracts or I didn't previously I wouldn't ask from the get go what usage are you expecting and every single time without fail it slipped into the contract of this is ours perpetually forever in anything irrevocable, transferable like the whole the whole works. So I feel like as per usual, you go above and beyond and you know this world from both sides and you're so fair and amazing about it, but as a norm it is the norm to slip it in.

4:55

I that makes me really sad to hear that people think that this is the norm because legally, it absolutely should not be, it should be a conversation that yourself as the creator or your manager has upfront before anything assigned, you know, what are the usage rights with this partnership? To me, it breaks down into two big categories, of course. One is what Harley is talking about, which is paid usage. So that is usage that we are using your creative in ads, that might be Facebook, Instagram, banner ads, emails, e comm. And it could all go all the way into printed goods, right, a billboard and in store as an end cap, etc. Okay, so if someone says, yeah, we'd like to pay for paid usage for 30 days, it's then your job to say great, what's paid usage mean? Do you mean printed billboards? That's something completely different than I'm going to boost this through the Facebook and Instagram paid ads algorithm. Right,

5:57

right. I know, I'm being dramatic with the billboard example, I'm fully aware.

6:03

Sure, but even still, I know creators who have said, okay, yeah, paid usage that it's $500 Extra for 30 days, and the image ends up in a Sephora, because that's wildly different than I'm going to use your Instagram image as an ad for 30 days, right. So I think it really comes down to being detail oriented and the communication because a brand might think that paid usage means we can put it anywhere that we like, and an influencer might think that paid means for social media ads only. So that sort of specificity is super important in a paid ads usage conversation. For me, I break out paid into two areas. One, paid usage, first and foremost is always social media advertising. So that would be Instagram, Facebook ads. Part two would be what we call in marketing out of home, paid an out of home means literally what it sounds like anything that's out of the house. So printed goods in a store on a billboard, etc. That kind of tags back to modeling and more old school influencer relations. And then you have your web paid, which is I'm going to put it on the website, it could be in an email, it could be on the our homepage, etc. That's all the three main buckets that I would break out in terms of pay to usage that you want to ask about when someone says okay, how much for paid usage, I would either have a rate in mind for each one of those or have a great in mind that in corpuses all usage and make sure you put a timeline to it. Most people say one year, some people say six months, if it's going to be for ads, we go for 30 days at a time, but definitely asked what what is the timeline here because you don't want them to have it for 10 years and be using it truly forever. So yeah, you want to be careful for that. And

8:05

let's, let's be realistic here, your picture probably isn't going to be used for forever. I really think the generic lifespan of a piece of content like that is what six months like it's really not. It's not that long.

8:20

For sure. I would definitely say six months is normally our usage period of time. Because if you think about like the weather change, the styles change. We're promoting something new at that point where like, it's all literally the season change. Yeah, literally, the season has changed. So six months is always like a good starting point. I think for paid ads. An effective ad in Facebook Ads Manager is normally 90 days long. So normally I asked, I asked an influencer, what's the paid usage right for 30 days, and then I have that on hand, reran the ad for 30 days. If it's not performing well, then I don't renew it. If it is performing well normally read we renew for the additional two months. So that's already all agreed upon upfront. Yeah. And it's pretty cut and dry at that point.

9:08

So another thing that I run into as someone that's looking for mutually beneficial partnership from both sides is do we solidify that now? Or do we solidify it later? Because you don't know if my content is going to perform? Well, you don't know from the get go what the effect on an audience is going to be. So is there ever a time where you solidify it after or like what are your thoughts on when that should be broken down?

9:35

I advise people to solidify in advance with a addendum to a contract or maybe it's sorry, I'm not a lawyer, but you know, like a little not an agenda and appendix. So he line you know 24 B and then in 24 B it says should the brand decide to Use this creators content in paid ads, the agreed upon rate will be and then that's where you're going to break out, it would be $500 per 30 days an additional $1,000. Should they like it to go into printed goods for you know, 750 emails and on the website, whatever you guys come to agreement on, it goes in there. Some brands may not want associate that way up front. And I'm not entirely sure why because when I first started negotiating for paid ads, we didn't do it upfront. And what I saw is that I would get raked over the coals by managers and influencers when I would circle back for the paid ads usage rates trip allotted on site creation fees, because now they know I want to use you like more. So that's why I always started to negotiate it upfront. Because you're right, we don't know when it gets delivered, if we're gonna love it enough to put it into paid ads. But I always think it's best to have everything timed up in the first contract right away so that no one feels taken advantage of later on.

11:16

What is your general pricing structure that you accept here, when I'm when I'm thinking about usage, my general rule of thumb, but again, pricing is an art. So like, it really depends on the project is 30% of that base rate per month of usage. So it really jacks up the price very, very quickly. If you're building out a package, if they're advertising long term, if they decide to continue usage, that partnership can really easily become, you know, triple triple what you were initially rating it as. So it really is a way for for creators to leverage and bring in more money. But what do you feel? Is your go to in pricing?

12:03

Yeah, for us, we always offer an add on 10 to 20%. upfront, and then we let people negotiate from there. I don't think that 30% is uncalled for, like I think it's it's fair as well. It's just not what we go in. And of course, like we're not trying to spend additional money, but we also don't want to delay. Yeah, exactly. We also don't want to, you know, we're not trying to cheat anybody out. And also for constantly, the paid usage that I'm negotiating for is only for Facebook and Instagram ads. I rarely am negotiating for out of home or print or billboard or anything else, which I could understand might be a much higher rate, because you're really using that creative all over the place. But yeah, we normally go in as a standard plus 10 to 20% per 30 days. And if a creator comes back with a higher rate than that, we always entertain it, and we try and meet it as much as we can. But one thing to keep in mind is that normally that usage rate is getting paid for out of a separate budget, we pay for it out of the budget created for ads specifically, at least that's how we handle it because it makes sense that way, right? The content creation is part of the content

13:21

creation and go ahead and thirst that appendix open and add your appendix to the contract.

13:38

Add that appendix to the contract up front. Yeah, the content creation comes out of a more of a marketing budget or a social media content budget. And then our paid ads usage portion, which is why we get the rate quoted separately comes out of the total ads budget that we're spending. Yeah,

13:45

the reason that I actually go that high is because a lot of the time I'm throwing in the inherent exclusivity into that rate, which is what I kind of book together. So if I'm working with a, let me give you a real example, if I'm working with a protein supplement, I'm not going to then go and work with another protein supplement. And I understand that exclusivity is a little bit weird, because there's categories of things that are really exclusive versus other categories that are so not like I can wear any shirt tomorrow and recommend a different brand A day later and no one cares even in the slightest. But I throw it up to that 30% Just to include like, Okay, I really can't, I can't I'm gonna look like a sellout. If I market another protein company. Well, this company is like really blowing, blowing this up this piece of content across social media.

14:46

I think that's a great point. That is an aspect that I was not thinking of, and it makes complete sense as to why you would go higher. For me, most of the partnerships that I'm talking about the Creator doesn't also have to promote the content. It's straight Get up. They're whitelisting the content, they're creating it and they're giving it to the brand. The brand is then using it for organic, social and paid as well. So that's where we don't need the exclusivity because they didn't promote it on their feed even to begin with. But I love her pointing at Harley Yes, like, if it is something that you're promoting on your feet at the same time, and then the brand is taking that and amplifying it either directly off of your feed, or within their own account, then yes, I could see how like, it would cause a bit of stickiness. If after six months, you were like promoting a bunch of other types of competitive brands, and they were still running the ad with like your face on it.

15:40

I mean, especially with whitelisting, where the brand is marketing your specific posts, like it looks like you are marketing, it looks like you are promoting the sponsor thing across all channels. It's that looks like I'm doing it, it looks like I'm promoting it endlessly. It doesn't look like the brand just has my content. It looks like that's me. And I've had I've actually had people that I know, in real life, follow me and message me immediately, and say, Hey, I thought I was following you already. Because I keep seeing this ad pop up of you. And I'm like, yeah, that that ain't me. But

16:20

oh my gosh, yes. And just to back up so that people who are listening aren't confused. Like what Harley's talking about is whitelisting her audience, which is a little bit different than whitelisting, just the content, right? So as we were talking about is like brands can whitelist your content, which means Harley makes the content she never posted, she gives it to the brand, they post it, they may or may not tag her done whitelisting her audience means that Harley creates the content, she posts the content. And then within Facebook Ads Manager, the brand connects into her Instagram account and pushes the content with our own budget through ads out to her audience or out to other audiences that they deem much more technical, much more tricky, but it is a very good ad strategy if you're working in paid ads. But definitely as an influencer charge way more for that type of usage if people want access to your audience, in addition, that should definitely go up to a much higher rate than just using the content and an ad on their own channels.

17:27

You know what? I'm shocked that you say that that's not as common because that's what I see. That's every usage included partnership that I've done is they're whitelisting. From my from my post, they're advertising from my post connected through Facebook.

17:43

I think not as many people do it because not as many influencers will allow it some people I think, get a little bit itchy idea of ads going out under their Instagram handle. And so I've had a lot of managers and influencers tell me know that they won't do it. Also, we have a lot of tech issues where like influencers don't know how to get into the ads manager, they don't know how to allow the access. And it becomes like a huge issue. So

18:14

I get a lot of DMS about that I get this brand wants access to all of my social like, Should I do it? They people are scared. And I'm like yes, yeah, get do it. charge for it. Go Go right ahead. So where this kind of pivot test let's talk about the original horror story that you saw on your page or your email that I also had a little blip about the other day too. Is this organic usage?

18:46

Yes, I do completely 100% support influencers charging more for paid usage. You deserve that money, the brand should be paying you I'm behind it. What I don't get behind is when I'm contracting an influencer for a promotion and the influencer or manager comes back to me and says for organic usage, which means essentially the brand is you repost your posts on their feed, nothing different no paid no boosts nothing else. We're literally just rebranding what we've already paid you to create. We're gonna have to charge more for that. And I don't understand why that would be more like the initial strategy if you pull way out on influencer marketing and we go back to the baby because the one on one is that we pay the influencer and then we also post what the influencer influencer posts like where in the world did we start charging people to repost what they already paid for you to? I don't get it and a lot of times we'll say Listen, it's six months organic usage, because we don't know when the organic social team is going to get around to posting it. So we want to give them like, that doesn't mean we're going to be reposting the same post on social media over and over again for six months. Like, that doesn't make sense. It's more like if you give me your post in May, I'm not sure where in the social media calendar, it's going to land for the organic team. And so we just say like, it'll be probably within six months. So what six months organic usage? And I recently had someone come back to me and say, Oh, for six months, it's $250 per month for organic usage. Did you not think when you gave me the price that we were going to

20:41

$100? Yeah. $12 to post to post in your feed? That makes no sense to me. I mean, even thinking about yourself, you're not going to repost the same post six times within six months. Like that's not going to happen. Like, realistically, there's, there's no way I never charged for organic usage, because I think it's a partnership, you know, so if you want to post my content, like, go ahead, like, show the world that we're connected, I agree to this, I posted it to my audience, that means I support it. That means I support it. I want to pick things I want to pick partnerships that are spot on to what I believe to so if if that relates to my ethos, then I don't care if you put it on your feed. I I just think that's absolutely atrocious.

21:25

Honestly, I like couldn't believe it. I was I almost to just show you the severity. I told the team and I was like, Do we really need this person in the cast? I was like, I just, there's so many people in the world. To me, this is like 1012, for me to approach you and say, Hey, Harley, what's the price for you to like, do this scope of work? Okay, great. Yeah, we're gonna confirm and just so that, you know, like, we're going to confirm for an additional paid ads usage of 30 days at the rate that you gave us, and we'll do organic within six months. And then you'd be like, Oh, by the way, like the organic for six months as an additional $1,200. I'm like, No, I'm good. I'm good. Like, there's so many influencers in the world. And that's not to like belittle influencers. It's more to say like,

22:13

there's so many influencers in the

22:14

world, tighten it up, like, I don't need that additional like, drop of $1,200 that no one ever discussed before, because you now feel that organic usage should be paid.

22:26

I mean, even if you have a huge following. I just don't think it matters, because a lot of the time as well, like the fact that you have a huge following does not mean that you're creating better content and more feed worthy content for you. So there's no there's no correlation. It doesn't make sense for me. I just think that's an above and beyond moment. And if we in this competitive industry want to be booked, you have to allow the things that make no difference to you and creating it and really just show off the Partnership for me that's above and beyond. Well, not even a beyond that's a that's a clear ad.

23:03

Yeah, I think that's a given. And that's one thing that to me, it all boils down to in your in my conversation is like when you're thinking of adding on an additional element that you want a brand to pay for, like stop and think before you say it, does this create extra work for me? Does this change the level of effort? And is the brand gaining something that is out of the ordinary by doing this thing and when we look at organic usage, like none of those boxes get checked, like Carly doesn't have to do any more work, she's not asked for more edits, like her face and likeness are not getting promoted more than they were previously like there's nothing added here as a reason why you would start to charge more so for me it's like a no brainer that it would not be an additional charge.

23:57

Also because it's organic you said you're only going to get the reach that that brand does typically with any kind of post and you probably have you've seen this much more than I have but what is the general reach on brands content because I doubt it's very high people don't interact with brands all that much if you have an Instagram or a brand with a pin following it that's not that's not normally interacted with those likes are probably very, very low.

24:25

Yeah, I would say the average brand is getting about 20% organic reach, which I think is like very typical, like brands want to know like why we only get such a low amount of reach compared to followers and like that's just how it is like I'm not sure why we do this. But unless there's like an outlier of some sort of like trending topic trending sound hashtag that just like hit gold which I think all of those are, you know possible but more rare. The average post and seen by 20% of the audience

24:59

forever That sounds like what we're all struggling with, which is why did the data that we push with pay usage

25:10

a brand without paid ads is like a sitting duck. Organic will only get you so far like paid ads. That's a whole other conversation. You know how I feel about paid ads? Very strongly.

25:23

I know how you feel about paid ads. I know how you feel about boosting and how it's absolutely useless. Oh my god, I have a can of worms.

25:33

I have a lot of feelings.

25:35

Just in general, I have a lot of feeling. So okay, takeaways here. What you got

25:41

takeaways understand what paid usage means and understand the verbiage of where paid usage could go so that you have rates and you know, clarity when it comes to contracts and quoting for that usage. Organic usage. Don't make Harley and I come after you because you charged for

26:03

our makeups we will that's

26:07

that's silly. And just in general, any sort of up charge for things think about those golden rules like did I have to work harder to do this? You know, is this jeopardizing? You know the vision of me like no then maybe it's not worth an upcharge for that moment.

26:27

Thank you so much, Sonia. You know, she will be back we already have a couple wild Instagram phenomenon jotted down that we are ready to dive into. So if you love this topic, if you love chatting, influencer marketing usage, pricing the works. Come find us on Instagram at Harley Jordan with two wise two ends and Sonia dot Elise and tell us what you want us to cover next. Our DMS are always open and ready for you. Of course, subscribe, review and share if you love it. See you next week.