Your Top Creators Aren’t Leaving for More Money. They’re Leaving Because No One’s Talking to Them.
If you’re a brand with big ambitions but not a huge budget, one of the smartest things you can do is actually build real relationships with your creators, influencers, and athletes.
Not the surface-level kind where you pay them, get the deliverables, and move on. When people feel like you genuinely value them as humans and not just as content machines - they stick around. They’re way less likely to get poached by a brand with deeper pockets. Negotiations on rates and appearance fees tend to go smoother. And more often than not, they’ll happily throw in extra content without charging you for it to help you take advantage of trends and retailer promos.
Most brands just throw money at talent and hope it works. The ones that actually show up as real people usually get a lot more out of the relationship.
I’ve seen this play out time and time again. A creator might be on your roster at a solid rate today, but if the only time they hear from your team is when a campaign brief drops, how invested do you think they really are? One of the sharpest observations I’ve seen on this came from Navi Singh, who put it plainly: your top creators aren’t leaving for 2% more commission. They’re leaving because no one at your company has texted them in a month.
That hits harder than most brands want to admit.
The transactional trap
It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating creator partnerships like a series of transactions. You find someone, negotiate a rate, get the content, pay the invoice, and repeat. On paper it looks efficient. In reality, it’s fragile.
When the relationship is purely transactional, a few things happen:
Creators feel like interchangeable assets. The second a competitor offers slightly better terms, there’s nothing keeping them loyal.
You miss out on the “extra” stuff — the unprompted stories, the last-minute content, the willingness to jump on something because they actually like working with you.
Communication becomes robotic. Everything goes through briefs and spreadsheets instead of real conversation.
Meanwhile, the brands getting the most out of their creator programs are usually the ones investing time, not just money. They check in. They give feedback that isn’t just “approved” or “needs revisions.” They remember personal details. They treat creators like partners, not vendors.
What this actually looks like in practice
You don’t need a massive team or big budgets to do this well. You need consistency and intention.
Send the occasional text or DM that isn’t tied to a deliverable. “Saw that post you did with your kid — genuinely made me laugh.” It takes 30 seconds and it matters.
Involve creators earlier in the thinking, not just the execution. A lot of good ones want to contribute ideas, not just execute briefs.
Be a human when things go wrong. Campaigns get delayed. Creative gets killed. How you handle the messy parts says more about the relationship than the smooth ones do.
Celebrate their wins publicly and privately. People remember who roots for them when they’re not paying them to post.
The data backs this up too. Influencers are significantly more likely to offer better rates for ongoing partnerships than one-off campaigns. They’re also more likely to go above and beyond when they feel like they’re part of something instead of just another line item.
The competitive advantage hiding in plain sight
In a world where bigger budgets can always outbid you on paper, relationships become your real moat. They’re harder to copy than a rate sheet. They compound over time. And they turn good creators into advocates who bring other good creators with them.
The brands that figure this out early — especially the ones without massive marketing budgets — end up building stronger programs than the ones just throwing money around. They keep their best people longer, get better work out of them, and spend less time constantly replacing talent that walked out the door.
It’s not complicated. It’s just not easy to scale if you’re only willing to treat it like a transaction.
If you’re in the middle of building or rebuilding how your brand works with creators, this is the part most people underinvest in. Get this right and a lot of other problems get easier.
