I’ve been wrestling with this for months now. We work with creators who have solid followings in both LATAM and US markets, and every time we come to the rate conversation, things get messy.
The thing is, the market rates are just… different. A creator with 100k followers in Mexico isn’t charging the same as someone with 100k in Los Angeles. But when they have audiences in both places, how do you actually justify the pricing? Do you charge a blended rate? Do you ask them to quote per-market? Do you negotiate based on engagement metrics instead of followers?
What makes it harder is that some of our best creators genuinely have authentic, engaged audiences on both sides. They’re not just reposting the same content to different regions. They’re actually creating locally-relevant variations. So the work is legitimately more complex.
I’ve tried a few approaches:
- Asking for separate quotes per market (creators hate this, it feels like undercutting)
- Using engagement rates as the baseline instead of follower count (better alignment, but harder to explain to clients)
- Negotiating a premium for cross-market campaigns (creators are more open to this, clients sometimes push back)
Realistically, the best leverage I’ve found is being upfront about the campaign scope from day one. When creators understand exactly what you’re asking them to do—whether it’s one post, a series, regional variations—they’re usually way more transparent about their actual rate.
What’s your actual process when you hit this? Are you working with fixed rates per region, or have you found a better way to structure these conversations?
This is where real data saves you. I started tracking actual engagement metrics across US and LATAM audiences for the same creators, and the numbers tell a story that follower counts don’t. A creator might have 80k followers in Mexico with 8% engagement and 50k in the US with 3% engagement—completely different value propositions. When I switched to pricing based on actual engaged reach (followers × engagement rate), suddenly the conversation became objective. Clients could see exactly what they’re paying for, and creators could justify their rates without it feeling arbitrary. The key is being transparent about the calculation upfront. Have you experimented with engagement-based pricing models?
Oh, I love this question because it’s so real. What I’ve noticed is that the best creators actually want to be paid fairly, and they appreciate when you approach it as a collaboration rather than a negotiation. I’ve started having conversations like, “Here’s what the client’s budget is, here’s the scope—what would make this work for you?” That reframes it. And honestly, when you show creators that you understand their market position (like, their US audience has different buying power than their LATAM audience), they’re way more open to creative rate structures—retainers, performance bonuses, or multi-post packages. It’s about finding the partnership angle. Have you considered bundling across markets?
Real talk: I standardized our approach by asking creators upfront whether they consider themselves a “LATAM creator with US reach” or a “bilingual creator.” That single question changes everything. A creator positioning themselves as bilingual typically wants premium rates and deserves them—they’re doing more work. A LATAM creator with organic US reach? Different conversation. We then quote based on their primary market rate plus a percentage uplift for cross-market work. Clients understand it better, creators don’t feel undercut, and it’s been consistent across our agency. The mistake most people make is treating it like a math problem when it’s actually a positioning problem.
We hit this exact problem when we were trying to scale our product across Mexico and the US simultaneously. What we learned is that you can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach. We ended up working with a few key creators who understood both markets, and we negotiated annualized retainers instead of per-post rates. It gave them predictability, gave us consistency, and the per-post cost actually came down. It’s a longer-term thinking approach though—requires trust and volume. But if you’re running multiple campaigns across both regions, worth considering. The upside was our messaging stayed coherent instead of fragmenting across different creators each time.
Okay from the creator side—and I think this matters—we DO charge differently for US vs. LATAM work because the work IS different. My US audience expects certain production quality, certain types of hooks, certain pacing. My LATAM audience responds to different messaging and different aesthetics. When a brand asks me to “create content for both,” that’s legitimately double the creative work, not 1.5x. So I quote accordingly. But I’ve had agencies try to negotiate me down by saying “it’s the same content,” which… it’s not. If agencies just accepted that from the start, the conversation would be so much easier. We’d rather work with someone who gets the value than negotiate endlessly.