UGC Retainers

Everyone wants it—the ever elusive retainer. In the beginning of your UGC journey a retainer seems like the golden ticket. This is especially true if you’re used to having a stable income; the reliability of a retainer makes your UGC career feel more real and established. After having a few retainers, I have a slightly different perspective. But before getting into all of that, let’s discuss what a retainer is and how to best position yourself to pitch for one.

What is a retainer?

A retainer is when you have a client who pays a fee in advance for a specific service. For UGC, this means a monthly fee for a designated amount of content. This is different from return clients in that there is no formally established agreement for rate or content delivered with a return client. For a retainer, you’ve established a contract on what you will deliver each month and what the client will pay.

There are really no set rules for what a retainer can include and you can customize it to exactly what your client needs. A retainer can just be content, SMM, or both. It can be as small as 3 videos a month all the way up to 30 videos a month.

How to Get a Retainer

Let’s start with how to not get a retainer: I would never cold pitch a retainer unless you have direct knowledge that they’re looking for one. Cold pitching a retainer comes on too strong—think of it like meeting someone you want to date and immediately asking them to be exclusive. It too much commitment too fast!

Instead you want to do warm outreach. This means you pitch to clients whom you’ve already created content for. I typically pitch to clients who have purchased large packages or have returned for content multiple times.

Before pitching to these clients, I always do some research and look into whether they need organic content (they’re not posting consistently) or if they needs ads (they run new ads often). You’ll start to get a feel for which clients would be up for a retainer based the amount of content they ask for and whether they’re easy to work with. Do not get into bed with clients that you don’t like working with!

If I can tell there is potential for a retainer, I plant the seed early for a good relationship by providing free content each time I work with them.

Here are a few things you can give free that doesn’t take much extra work:

• Quick trend videos (use raw footage you already have)

• Evergreen content less than 15 seconds (think those IG videos that have value propositions pop up over B Roll)

• The original content you created for them w/out text overlay (this allows them to test multiple text angles)

• Extra hook or CTA

• B Roll of hero shots

• Static images

The goal of this is to get them so used to receiving content from you that it will feel detrimental to them to not have it. You want them to begin to rely on your content to the point that a retainer just makes sense.

This works so well that last year I actually had a client pitch me a retainer at the same time I was drafting an email to pitch them a retainer 😂. And if you need more convincing, I have only had to pitch 1 of the 4 retainers I’ve had. 3 of 4 have asked me for pricing on retainers.

Why? Because I poisitioned myself as a part of their business before ever actually being a part of it. I made it clear I was invested in their success through words and action. Action being the extra content, and verbally I would use phrasing like “we.” For example, I might say “I think we should try this hook angle in addition to the script provided.” This will subconsciously establish yourself as part of the team.

If you don’t like the idea of giving free content, think of it as an investment. And just like any other investment, do it wisely. Don’t give free content to every single client—only give to those you see as potential return clients or retainer clients.

Retainers are all about building relationships!

One last note here—all of my retainers have come from doing outbound. Finding brands that have needs is really important for preparing for retainer

How to Price Retainers

I think this is what everyone needs the most help with and you might be disappointed with what I have to offer, but I want to be honest. Pricing retainers is really difficult and I don’t have a standardized package that I can share.

This is because I base my retainer pricing off the established rates I had in place with the client I am pitching to. What I can tell you is that I almost always offer 3 packages with a variety of content and services. Typically you should offer a discount to your retainers in exchange for the stability a retainer can provide, but you don’t technically have to.

If you’re struggling to price a retainer, add up the content for each package with your real times rates (the rates you would give to a new client) and then discount it by 10-30% from smaller package to larger package. I would also price differently based off the content you’re providing: trends, organic, and ads should be priced differently.

The biggest mistake I’ve made with a retainer is pricing too low. The problem with this is that the longer you have that retainer, the less you will make. As you become a more established creator, your rates will increase but that retainer will stay the same. This can cause you to resent the retainer and it might start to feel like you’re losing money.

To prevent this, I strongly suggest implementing safe guards in your retainer contract/proposal:

• Rate locked in for 6 months (this makes it sound like a deal for them but also opens the door to discuss rate increases)

• Minimum 3 month contract (especially for SMM, it takes time for results—after 3 months you can let it go month-to-month)

• 30 day cancellation notice (safeguards you to begin pitching more and gives you 30 days to makeup that income)

What no one tells you about retainers

It’s not that anyone is keeping anything secret on purpose, but it’s hard to talk about publicly without sounding ungrateful. Talking about the less glamours side of retainers doesn’t exactly lead to more retainers. But the truth is there are definitely downsides to having one. I already discussed one above with pricing and feeling locked into rates. This is just my experience and maybe others don’t feel the same, that’s okay too. But even when you price a retainer correctly, there are some drawbacks that need to be discussed:

1. Complacency: the more retainers I had, the more out of touch I started to feel with the UGC creator community and my own personal brand

2. Lost Creatively: creating multiple pieces of content for the same product month after month can become exhausting. You can start to feel creatively depleted. This is usually a problem for brands with only 1-2 hero product.

3. Envy: seeing other creators working with new and exciting brands can easily awaken the green eyed monster. You might feel stuck and like you’re missing out on other deals

4. 9-5 vibes: a retainer can start to feel too close to a set work routine. If the appeal to being a creator was the constant change, then a retainer (especially SMM) can sometimes take away that excitement.

These aren’t true for all retainers! I’ve had retainers that give more creative freedom and had a variety of products to create for. The above points are to help you think through what brands you commit to long term.

Another major misconception I had early on as creator was that the only way to reach $10k was to have retainers, but it just isn’t true. When I looked back at my earnings, some of my highest yielding months were between retainers! Don’t let not having a retainer hold you back from reaching your goals.

Leave questions in the comments below or on X and I’ll get back to you. Have a great weekend everyone!

<3, Grace

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New Creator Course will be back next week since the info this week applies to both new and seasoned creators.