Influencer marketing glossary — the terms, in plain words.

A discount or tracking code unique to a creator, so the brand can attribute purchases to that creator's audience. It is often paired with a commission per sale, sometimes with a flat fee on top. In India the code matters more than the link, because much of the buying happens later on a marketplace or over WhatsApp, long after the viewer saw the post.

See: what to charge

A longer arrangement in which a creator works with one brand over months rather than per post, usually for a monthly fee and a set number of deliverables. It normally comes with category exclusivity, which is why a retainer should pay more than the same posts bought one at a time. For the brand it buys consistency; for the creator it buys predictable income at the cost of other deals in the category.

The Advertising Standards Council of India's guidelines require any content with a material connection to a brand, whether paid, gifted or barter, to carry a clear label such as advertisement, sponsored, paid partnership or collaboration. The label goes where it cannot be missed, in the video itself for reels and in the same language as the content, not buried in hashtags. Consumer-protection rules add that an endorser should have actually used what they endorse.

See: instagram influencer marketing

Where a creator's followers actually are, by city and country, as shown in Insights rather than guessed from where the creator lives. A Mumbai-based creator can have a pan-India audience, and a Nagpur creator can have one that is almost entirely local. For anything sold in a place, a clinic, a restaurant, a regional launch, audience geography matters more than follower count.

See: locations

A deal in which the creator is paid in product rather than money. It is reasonable for a single deliverable when the product is one the creator would have bought and the brand is a serious one, and unreasonable when it arrives with multiple deliverables, raw files or ad usage attached. It is still a material connection and must be disclosed under ASCI's guidelines.

Followers acquired through paid services or follow-for-follow schemes rather than earned through content. They inflate the count and depress everything else: reach becomes a small fraction of followers, likes arrive without saves or comments, and Insights show audiences in countries the content was never made for. Reach and saves expose them; follower count hides them.

See: engagement rate calculator

Whether a creator's past and present content, comments section and affiliations are things a brand is comfortable appearing beside. In India that includes political and religious content, unlicensed betting and trading promotions, and health or finance claims that regulators police. It is checked before shortlisting, not after posting.

The one-page document that tells a creator what must be true about the content: objective, audience, product truths, must-haves, don'ts, deliverables, timeline, usage rights and payment. A good brief gives truths rather than scripts and leaves the execution to the creator. Most bad sponsored content traces back to a brief that was either forty slides or two lines.

See: influencer brief template

An Instagram post with several images or videos that the viewer swipes through. Carousels get shown again to people who did not swipe past the first slide, which gives them a second life single posts lack, and they collect saves well for anything instructional: routines, comparisons, checklists. Weaker than reels for reach, stronger for depth.

An Instagram feature that publishes one post to two accounts at once, with a single shared count of views, likes and comments. For a brand it puts the creator's content permanently on the brand's grid; for the creator it borrows the brand's audience. It has to be set up when posting and agreed in the brief, not requested afterwards.

See: instagram influencer marketing

The mechanism by which a creator, who owns the content they make, lets a brand use it under stated conditions while keeping the copyright. A licence is defined by channels, duration, territory and permitted edits; an assignment, by contrast, transfers ownership outright. Most influencer deals should be licences, and UGC deals should be priced as the broader licences they are.

See: ugc content creation

Three ways of expressing what a campaign paid for: cost per thousand impressions, cost per engagement, and cost per acquisition or sale. They let creator spend be compared with paid ads and with each other, provided everyone is counting the same thing. They are lenses for judging a deal after the fact, not a fair way to price a creator up front, because a creator's audience is not ad inventory.

See: campaign budget planner

Rough follower-count bands used to group creators: nano at the smallest, then micro, mid-tier and macro, with celebrities beyond. The boundaries depend on who is drawing them and matter less than they appear to, because reach and audience fit vary by multiples within a band. Micro creators are usually the sweet spot for Indian brands: enough reach to count, audiences still specific enough to target.

See: micro influencer marketinghow to find micro influencers in india

Running content as an ad without it ever appearing on the poster's public grid. Brands use it to test many versions of creator content against different audiences without cluttering anyone's profile. When it is done from a creator's handle through whitelisting it is a paid usage right and should be priced and time-limited like one.

The exact list of what a creator is producing: how many reels and of what length, how many story frames, whether a link sticker is included, whether raw files are included. Vague deliverables are how 'one reel' becomes three drafts, a story set and a repost request. They belong in the brief and in the contract, with dates.

See: influencer brief template

How Sanero represents a creator: a numerical vector built from niche, audience, content style and engagement quality, so that similar creators sit close together and a brief, embedded the same way, lands near the creators who fit it. It lets the whole pool be ranked against a brief instead of an account manager's memory. A human strategist reviews the result before anything reaches a brand.

See: ?as=brand

Groups of creators who agree to like and comment on each other's posts to simulate engagement. The comments are generic, arrive in a burst and come from other creators rather than the audience, and none of it turns into saves, shares or sales. Reading the comments on a few posts usually exposes a pod faster than any metric does.

Interactions on a post, meaning likes, comments, saves and shares, divided by a base, usually followers or reach, and expressed as a percentage. It signals whether an audience responds to a creator rather than merely following them. It falls as accounts grow, so it should be compared within a tier and a niche, never against a single universal number.

See: engagement rate calculator

Engagement divided by the number of accounts that actually saw the post, rather than by followers. It is the more honest version: follower-based rates are dragged down by dormant or bought followers and inflated by pods, whereas reach-based rates describe how the people who saw the content responded to it. Brands who ask for Insights screenshots are usually after this.

See: engagement rate calculator

A creator's agreement not to work with a brand's competitors for a stated period in a stated category. It is a cost to the creator rather than a feature of the content, so it should be priced per month, the competitors should be named and the category kept narrow. 'Similar brands' for 'the duration of the partnership' is not a clause anyone should sign.

See: what to charge

The right to publish a piece of content first. Usually the creator posts organically on an agreed date and the brand's reuse follows; sometimes a brand wants to launch with the content itself and asks the creator to hold. Either way, the sequence and the date belong in the brief so that nobody's launch is spoiled by the other side posting early.

The number Sanero attaches to each creator on a shortlist: how closely the creator's embedding matches the brief, after filters for city, language, budget and brand safety. It ranks candidates; it does not choose them. A strategist reads the top of the list and signs off before the shortlist goes to the brand.

See: ?as=brand

The payment structure we recommend for creator deals: half the fee when the creator is confirmed and the contract is signed, half on delivery or within a stated number of days of going live. It protects the creator from producing for free and the brand from paying in full for nothing. Anything slower on the second half, ninety-day terms for instance, is a brand's cash flow problem being handed to a creator.

See: influencer brief template

The share of viewers who kept watching past the first second or two of a reel instead of scrolling on, sometimes called the thumb-stop rate. It measures the opening rather than the content, and it is the first thing to diagnose when reach is low: a weak hook means the platform stopped distributing before anyone saw the product. The retention graph in Insights shows it.

Instagram's built-in analytics for professional accounts: audience age, gender and cities; accounts reached with the follower and non-follower split; per-post reach, saves, shares and profile visits; story sticker taps. Brands ask for screenshots because these numbers cannot be read from a profile and are hard to fake. Uncropped, dated and recent is the standard.

See: media kit

The tappable link placed on an Instagram story, available to all accounts. It is the main way a creator sends viewers off the platform to a product page or a WhatsApp number, and sticker taps are the cleanest traffic metric a creator can show a brand. A reel drives awareness; the story with the sticker drives the click.

See: instagram influencer marketing

Real-time video on Instagram or YouTube where the audience comments and the creator responds. Lives suit product demonstrations, Q&A and launches where objections can be answered on the spot, and they convert well in India for anything sold through a link or a WhatsApp number shared during the stream. They are hard to brief and impossible to approve in advance, so they suit trusted creators rather than first deals.

A one- or two-page document that lets a brand decide in under a minute whether to shortlist a creator: who the audience is, with Insights screenshots, what content the creator makes, what has worked, and what is on offer. It is read fast and on a phone, so it should be scannable rather than impressive. Rates are optional; the terms around them are not.

See: media kit

Instagram's built-in disclosure tag that shows 'Paid partnership with' and the brand's name above a post or story. Adding it also lets the brand see the post's insights and, if the creator permits, run it as a partnership ad. It satisfies part of the ASCI requirement but not all of it: the disclosure for video should also appear in the video itself.

See: instagram influencer marketing

A creator's list of what each deliverable costs, often included in the media kit. Useful as a starting point and misleading as a final answer, because the price of a reel depends on usage rights, exclusivity, turnaround and the brand's category as much as on the creator. Rates in India vary by multiples for identical reach; a good rate card states what is and is not included.

See: what to charge

Reach is the number of distinct accounts that saw a piece of content; impressions is the number of times it was shown, including repeat views by the same account. Reach tells you how many people a post touched, and impressions divided by reach tells you how often. For creator deals, reach is the base for honest engagement rates, while impressions are mostly useful for comparing with paid media.

See: engagement rate calculator

Two Instagram interactions that signal more than likes. A save means the viewer intends to come back to the content, which usually means they intend to act on it; a share means they sent it to someone, which is how content travels beyond the creator's audience. For products, saves are the best proxy for purchase intent available in Insights.

Sending product to a set of creators with no obligation to post, in the hope that some will. It works for products that are genuinely good and visually obvious, and for brands willing to accept that most parcels produce nothing. It is not a barter deal, because nothing is promised; treating it as one and chasing creators for posts sours the relationship quickly.

The set of creators Sanero proposes for a brief, ranked by fit score, reviewed by a strategist and delivered within 48 hours. Each entry shows the creator's rate with our fee stated separately, so the brand can see what the creator is actually paid. The first shortlist is free for brands.

See: ?as=brand

YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are both vertical short video, and creators often post the same file to both, but they behave differently. Reels sit in a social feed and drive profile visits, saves and DMs; Shorts sit beside a subscribe button and a long-form library and are better at building an audience that comes back. Cross-posting is fine; treating the two as one placement in a brief is not.

See: youtube influencer marketinginstagram influencer marketing

A sequence of Instagram story frames, typically three to five, posted together and gone after 24 hours unless saved to a highlight. Story sets carry the link sticker and the conversational tone that reels lack, so they are where consideration becomes a click. In a brief they should be specified by frame count, whether a sticker is included and whether a highlight is expected.

User-generated content in its commercial sense: video or photography a creator makes for a brand to use in the brand's own channels and ads, without posting it to the creator's audience. It is a production job priced on output and licence rather than on reach, and it has no follower requirement. Distinct from influencer marketing, where the creator's audience is the point.

See: ugc content creationugc vs influencer marketing

What a brand may do with a creator's content beyond the creator's own post: on which channels, for how long, in which territory, with what edits, and whether it may be run as paid advertising. Organic-only and paid usage are priced very differently. Left unstated, usage rights are the most common source of dispute and the most under-priced thing creators give away.

See: what to chargeinfluencer brief template

How long viewers stayed with a video, shown as an average duration and as a retention curve. It is what the platforms use to decide whether to keep distributing a reel or a Short, and what a brand should read when a sponsored video underperforms: the curve shows the exact second people left, which is usually where the product appeared too abruptly. High watch time on a sponsored piece is the best sign the integration worked.

A brand running paid ads through a creator's own handle, so the ad carries the creator's name, face and comments. Instagram calls the mechanism partnership ads; some platforms call it spark ads. It consistently outperforms the same creative from a brand account, requires the creator's permission in the app, and is a paid usage right with its own duration and budget rather than something bundled with a post.

See: instagram influencer marketing