Is Influencer Marketing Society Worth Joining? My Honest Take After Testing It

Straight answer: Influencer Marketing Society is worth the £20 to £40 a month if you want structure, templates and other creators to talk to, but it will not get you brand deals on its own, and if you have under 5,000 followers I would spend that money on a course or a course refund elsewhere. The community can teach you how to pitch. It cannot make a brand say yes.

What Influencer Marketing Society is

Strip away the name and it is a paid membership community, usually hosted on a platform like Skool or a private Discord, built around influencer and content creator training. You get access to a feed, weekly or fortnightly live calls, a library of templates (media kits, rate cards, pitch emails), and a group of other members at various stages of building a following. Most of these communities charge somewhere between £19 and £47 a month, or offer an annual price around £250 to £350 that works out cheaper per month if you commit.

I want to be clear that I am describing the category as much as any one specific version of it, because these communities rebrand, change owners and change price points constantly. I have seen the same basic offer sold under five different names in the past three years. What stays the same is the structure: pay monthly, get community access, get some templates, get some calls.

What you get for the money

• A media kit template you can fill in with your own numbers
• Pitch email scripts for cold outreach to brands
• A rate card guide that suggests what to charge per post based on follower count
• Weekly or fortnightly group calls, often with a guest who has "made it" as a creator
• A community feed where members post wins, ask questions and sometimes trade tips on which brands are currently running influencer campaigns
• Occasional brand opportunity postings, though these are usually low paying and go fast

None of that is bad. A media kit template alone would take you two or three hours to build from scratch if you did it, so paying £29 to skip that is a fair trade. The rate card guide is handy if you have never sent a brand pitch before and have no idea what to charge. The problem is not the content. The problem is what people expect the content to do for them.

My own experience with this category

Back when I was building my own following, before I had 250,000 followers across platforms and before Forbes put me on their top social media influencer list, I joined something very similar to this. It was called a "creator collective" and cost about £35 a month, and I joined because a woman I followed on Instagram kept posting screenshots of brand payments from inside it.

I stayed for four months. I got a decent pitch template out of it, and I met two people I am still in touch with today. What I did not get was a single brand deal that came directly from the community. Every paid opportunity I landed in that period came from my own outreach, using the template I had learned, sent to brands I had researched myself. The community gave me the tool. It did not swing the hammer for me.

That is the pattern I have watched play out with dozens of clients since, in every version of this category I have looked at. The people who make money after joining are the ones who were already close to ready, who just needed the structure and the nudge. The people who join hoping the group itself will hand them work almost always leave disappointed, and quietly, because nobody posts "this did nothing for me" in a community feed where everyone else is posting screenshots of wins.

The uncomfortable part nobody selling these communities will say out loud

Here is the bit that gets left out of most reviews of communities like this. Brands do not check whether you are a member of anything. Not one brand marketing manager, in my fifteen years working across influencer and social campaigns, has ever asked me or a client "are you part of a society or membership." They ask for your engagement rate, your audience demographics, and proof that a past post moved product. A badge, a certificate, or a member number from a paid group carries zero weight in a brand's spreadsheet.

What that means practically is this: the value of the membership is entirely in what it teaches you and who you meet, never in the membership itself as a credential. If a community's marketing leans on the idea that brands are watching or waiting for members of their group specifically, that is the sales page talking, not reality. Treat the membership like a gym membership. It gives you the equipment and maybe a trainer. It does not lift the weight for you, and no brand cares that you have the gym card.

Who this is worth it for

• You already have 5,000 or more engaged followers on at least one platform and have never sent a brand pitch, so you need the templates and the confidence more than the numbers
• You learn better with a live weekly call and accountability than with a self-paced course you will let gather dust
• You want to meet other creators at your stage to swap notes, because the isolation of building an audience alone is real and underrated as a reason people quit
• You can afford to test it for one month without it denting your business budget, meaning you are treating it as an experiment, not a rescue plan

Who should skip it

• You have under 1,000 followers and no consistent posting habit, in which case the problem is content and consistency, not templates
• You are hoping the community itself will find you paid work, which almost never happens the way the sales page implies
• You are already comfortable pitching brands and just want more leads, since most of these groups post the same handful of low-paying opportunities that get snapped up in minutes anyway
• Money is tight and £30 a month is coming off a card you cannot pay off, because no membership is worth compounding debt over

How to test one in under a month

If you decide to try it, do not drift in and hope. Give it a fixed, measurable test.

• Join for one month only, on the monthly plan, never the annual one, until you have proof it works for you
• In week one, pull every template and save it outside the platform, since you paid for it and it is yours to keep and use
• In week two, send five real brand pitches using what you learned, to brands you have researched, not generic outreach
• In week three, attend at least one live call and ask a direct question about your specific niche, not a general one
• By day 28, count replies to your pitches. If you got at least one reply that led to a real conversation, the membership earned its keep. If you got zero replies, the problem sits with your pitch or your audience, and no amount of extra months will fix that on its own
• Cancel before the renewal date if the test did not deliver, and set a calendar reminder the day you join, because most of these platforms make cancelling three clicks harder than joining

That test costs you one month's fee and a few hours. It tells you more than any review, including this one.

Cheaper ways to get the same result

If the budget is the sticking point, you can build most of what the membership offers yourself for free. A media kit can be built in Canva in an evening using a free template. Pitch scripts are widely shared for free by creator marketing agencies and on platforms like Wikipedia's overview of the influencer marketing industry, which gives you the language brands use, which is half the battle. A LinkedIn or Facebook group focused on your specific niche, free to join, will give you the peer accountability without the monthly fee. The one thing money buys you is speed and structure. If you have more time than cash, you do not need the membership.

The honest verdict

I would join for one month before I would ever recommend joining for a year upfront, no matter how good the discount looks. The category is not a scam and most of these communities do deliver what they say on the tin, templates, calls, community. Where they oversell is the implication that membership equals income. It does not. Your following, your niche, and your willingness to send fifty pitches when the first ten get ignored equal income. The membership just hands you a slightly better set of tools to do that with.

Related: influencer marketing (this site).

Frequently asked questions

Is Influencer Marketing Society a legitimate business, not a scam?

Communities in this category are generally legitimate, delivering templates, calls and community access as promised, so the concern is not fraud, it is whether the content matches what you already need at your stage of following growth.

How much does a membership like this typically cost?

Most influencer and creator communities in this space charge between £19 and £47 a month, or an annual rate around £250 to £350, and pricing changes often, so always check the current offer rather than trusting a number you saw in a review or ad six months ago.

Will joining get me brand deals directly?

No community gets you brand deals directly, brands respond to your audience data and past performance, not your membership status, so the templates and pitching skills you gain are the real value, and you still have to do the outreach yourself.

What follower count do I need before joining is worth it?

Most people see genuine value once they have 5,000 or more engaged followers on one platform and have never pitched a brand before, since below that the bigger blocker is usually content consistency, not a lack of templates or scripts.