Stop Pricing Your Audience Like An Influencer

Giang Le: So a physician gets their first real brand inquiry. Some skincare company or supplement brand slides into the DMs, and the very first thing they do is Google a rate calculator. Follower count in, dollar figure out. I want to tell you right now, that number is wrong. Not a little wrong. Wrong in a way that costs you money whichever direction it's off. Sometimes it says charge way less than you're actually worth. Sometimes it says charge more than the deliverable can support, you send a proposal that gets rejected, and that brand never comes back. Either way, you're answering a question that nobody in healthcare should even be asking.

Giang Le: Here's the thing about those benchmarks. They were built for lifestyle and entertainment audiences, where the product is basically attention, and attention is interchangeable. A hundred thousand people watching one skincare routine are, to a brand, basically the same as a hundred thousand people watching a different one. Your audience does not work that way. People who follow a clinician for evidence based information have handed over a kind of trust a lifestyle audience never gives. They read further. They act on what you say at a different rate. And a lot of the time, they're exactly who a health brand cannot reach any other way. Patients with a specific condition. Caregivers. Other clinicians. That makes your audience worth more per person than the calculator thinks. It also makes it more fragile. One bad partnership can spend down years of trust in a way that a lifestyle creator promoting the wrong energy drink just does not experience. Higher value, higher risk, and none of it shows up in a follower count.

Giang Le: So if it's not follower count, what is it. A few things, roughly in order of importance. First, audience composition, not audience size. A specialist followed by twenty thousand people who share a diagnosis can be worth more to the right brand than a generalist followed by three hundred thousand. Second, the deliverable, precisely. And I mean precisely. Quote a post is not a deliverable. A single sixty second video with one round of revisions is a deliverable. Three pieces across two platforms over six weeks is a completely different one. Most pricing disputes I see come from a deliverable that was never actually defined, and most underpricing comes from a physician agreeing to a post and then producing something that took eleven hours. Third, usage rights. Can the brand run your content as paid advertising, on their own channels, for how long, in which markets. This is often the single biggest thing a brand is buying, and it's the piece physicians give away for free without realizing they've done it. Content made for your own page, now running as someone's paid ad for two years, that's a licensing deal and it should be priced like one. Fourth, exclusivity, whether you're agreeing not to work with competitors, and for how long, because that forecloses other opportunities and it has a real cost. And last, professional risk. This one has no equivalent in lifestyle pricing at all. Some partnerships carry more reputational exposure than others, and those should either cost more, or not happen.

Giang Le: Let me make this concrete, because it's easier to see the mistake in a story than in a list. Say a brand emails a physician and asks for a post about their new supplement. The physician quotes a flat number, based on what a calculator spit out for their follower count, and says yes. What actually happens next. The brand comes back wanting a short video instead of a photo post, because video performs better for them. Fine, the physician says, still one deliverable. Then the brand asks if they can also run that video as a paid ad on their own accounts, since it's already shot and it's good. Sure, the physician says, not realizing that's a completely separate ask. Six months later, that same sixty second video is still running as a paid ad, the physician's face next to a product, and they were paid once, for what they thought was a single post. That's not a brand acting in bad faith, most of the time. That's a deliverable that was never defined, and usage rights that were never priced, both slipping through because nobody asked the question up front. The fix is boring but it works. Before you quote a number, get the scope in writing. What exactly is being made, where it runs, for how long, and whether the brand can use it as an ad. Price the usage separately from the content itself. If a brand wants to keep it flexible, that flexibility has a price too.

Giang Le: Now, a rate card. People hear that phrase and picture a menu with prices on it. That's not what it is, and honestly, please do not publish a single price on your website. A rate card is a document you share in a conversation, and its real value is clarity before anyone's spent time on a proposal. It should spell out each deliverable in enough detail that a brand cannot misread it. What's included, revisions, timelines, platform, format, and what isn't. It should address usage rights and exclusivity directly, ideally in tiers, so a brand asking for more knows they're asking for more. And in healthcare specifically, it should say something about what you will and will not do. That part is not optional for us.

Giang Le: Here's the part that surprises people. When I evaluate any partnership, there are nine things I look at, and compensation is number four. Ahead of it, brand alignment, audience relevance, professional reputation. For a physician, clinical credibility and audience trust are worth more than any single campaign. A partnership that pays well and puts your name next to something your peers would question at a conference, that's a bad partnership at any price, and the right move is to decline it. That's a harder call than it sounds like when the money's real and the inbox has been quiet for a while. And one more thing while we're here. Earned editorial coverage and paid commercial work have to stay clearly separate, in both directions. A physician who lets a paid partnership look like an unprompted recommendation has a disclosure problem and a trust problem, and the trust problem is worse.

Giang Le: Most physicians who come to us have already done a few deals, priced by instinct or by calculator, and there's a nagging feeling something was off. Usually a few specific things. Usage rights given away for nothing. A deliverable that quietly expanded after the price was already set. One partnership that seemed fine at the time and now just sits awkwardly in the feed. None of that means bad judgment. It means the only tools available were built for a different kind of creator. So if you take one thing from this, price the thing you actually have. A specific, trusting audience and a professional reputation, not a follower count that was never measuring the right thing in the first place.

Giang Le: You are the medical expert. We are the marketing and business experts, and that includes making sure you actually get paid for the time you spend online, on terms that fit your ethics and your brand, not a generic template. If you are a physician or healthcare creator who would rather just create and let someone else handle the pricing conversations, the rate cards, the deal terms, book a consultation at studio germina dot com, and we will handle the business side with you. I'll put the links in the show notes if you want to look at how we work with clients directly. Thanks for spending this time with me. I'm Giang, founder of Studio Germina, and I'll see you next time on Beyond the Screen.