How Much Does an Influencer Make Per Post?
Working with influencers can be a complicated process if you have not worked with an influencer before. One of the most challenging things to engage with when partnering with an influencer is how much to pay them for a post. In this article, we will explore what influencer costs look like and how you should think about when negotiating with an influencer.
Is Influencer Marketing Right for your Business?
While assessing how much to pay an influencer to make a post for you, you should start off with creating influencer marketing plan for your business. The first thing to do when creating an influencer marketing plan is to set a budget for both your influencer spend and your creator whitelisting spend. Its important to work with at least ten influencers in a single campaign and have a decent sized budget for your paid social component. The paid social component will be important so that you can guarantee your reach and potential return on ad spend with the superior content that creators can provide. In our research, we have found that user-generated content outperforms studio-based content. Furthermore, user-generated content helps you build a solid foundation with your current and prospective customers. They are able to see how and why people use your product. User-generated content is extremely informative and is key to social selling.
Additionally, when thinking about whether influencer marketing is right for your business, you should think about which industries perform best with respect to social selling. We have seen that brands in the following industries perform well with social selling:
- Direct-to-consumer brands industry
- Fashion industry
- Clothing and apparel industries
- Footwear industry
- Sports industry
- Fitness industry
- Supplements industry
- Beauty and cosmetics industry
- Gaming industry
- Restaurant industry
- Packaged foods and goods industry
Determine Whether it's Worth Paying Them
Once you have determined that influencer marketing is right for your business, you will want to get a little deeper in terms of figuring how much do you pay influencers. Some of the factors to consider are what kind of content are you asking the influencer to create? Video content typically takes longer to create and edit. Because of that, creators may demand higher rates for video content – additionally length of that content will vary. For longer format videos, you will likely need to pay more for the content. On the other hand, short form videos for Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts are extremely effective channel formats. Furthermore, these videos can often cost significantly less than what a long format video would cost. Once you have identified format, the next thing you want to do is assess the performance of an influencer. You can quickly do this by looking at their most recent posts and analyzing their engagement rates, view counts (for videos), and comments (identify how engaging their audience is and whether or not the comments are real engaging comments and not just fluff comments). When looking at this, you should keep track of which influencers you are happy with so that you can revisit their performance when trying to put a price on their partnership.
But How Much Does It Cost to Get Them to Post About Your Brand?
Once you have put together a list of the influencers you like and how they perform, it is time to figure out how much do you pay influencers for a post. Typically speaking, you can do a rough estimate of influencer cost by estimating a cost of a permanent post on their feed at 25c per engagement they get. Engagement is the average number of likes and comments they get on a post. You should use this calculation as a starting point as opposed to a hard and fast rule. Most influencers have a general media kit that indicates what prices they want for each media type that they could create for you. You should compare that with the calculated price you have (through the cost per engagement metric), to see if its far above or below what the influencer is asking.
Calculate their ROI
The last thing to do is to calculate the return on your investment. Returns vary based on what you are trying to optimize for. Many brands opt to optimize for return on ad spend (ROAS). Return on ad spend is a metric that helps you understand for every dollar you spend on your advertising, how much are you making in terms of sales. Another ROI metric that brands like to use is cost per click optimization. This allows brands to understand how much efficiency they gained from an influencer in terms of the spend they need to allocate to get people to visit a landing page, website link, or other form of website link.
In general, influencer marketing can be the right strategy for many businesses. The important thing is to make sure to have an engagement plan on how you will execute your strategy and enhance your brand. Once you have that plan, determining how much do you pay influencers for a post that you want is the next critical step. Finally, calculate your return on investment and try to scale those efforts.
If you’re interested in taking your influencer marketing program to the next level and want a demo of our platform, head over here to book a call with us and we’d be happy to help! Schedule something now with us and we will help you make the right influencer marketing plan for your business.
