Do you want to reach more people who are interested in your products and services? Are you looking to build a devoted customer base? If so, influencer marketing is one of the best ways to do it, and we’re here to help with a guide to influencer marketing costs!
There are influencers creating content for every marketing budget.
You can work with influencers who have a small following — think 10,000 followers or fewer or less — to celebrities with millions of followers.
Whether you’re a small or large business, influencer marketing is a great way to target users who will be excited about your brand! Research indicates that companies earn, on average, $6.85 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.
Below, we’ll show you exactly what to factor in when figuring out how much you should pay for influencer marketing costs!
Table of Contents
How much does social media influencer marketing cost?
When you start calculating influencer marketing costs, you’ll see many guides suggesting that you pay X amount per 1,000 followers influencers have.
But a word of warning: it’s possible to buy followers, so the raw numbers don’t tell the whole story! We like to look at a combination of factors, including engagement, which shows how much followers are interacting with an influencer’s content.
Factors that affect the cost of influencer marketing
Influencers who align with your brand and goals will be an ideal partner. Let’s dive into why we think each of these factors is important to consider.
Following
The number one thing to look at when pricing influencer marketing costs is followers. Generally, influencers with large followings get paid more, because they reach more people.
Influencers are categorized by the size of their following:
- Nano-influencers: Less than 10,000 followers
- Micro-influencers: 10,000 to 100,000 followers
- Macro-influencers: 500,000 – 1 million followers
- Mega-influencers and celebrities: 1 million+ followers
Here’s an article to learn more about the different types of influencers.
While it can be tempting to simply think that more followers equals greater reach, remember to be careful of influencers buying followers to inflate their numbers.
Influencers with huge followings aren’t necessarily the right ones to work with either. It depends on your goals, and whether the influencers’ audience is relevant. It’s more important to select influencers whose followers will be interested in your product or brand!
For many businesses, working with micro- or nano-influencers from the correct niche can be more cost-effective for their marketing budgets. Influencers with a smaller following generally cost less. They’re also often more flexible in the amount and type of content they’re willing to create.
For example, let’s say the goal of your campaign is content generation. You want influencers to produce high-quality content about your product or brand. You decide to work with micro-influencers instead of macro-influencers.
But why?
Because your goal isn’t to reach a bunch of people. It’s to create content, and micro-influencers will produce content at a lower price.
Then, all that’s left is to pick influencers with followers who will be excited by your product or brand. You’ll just need to check whether it makes sense for the influencers to promote your brand or product.
Asking beauty influencers to promote a sports jacket won’t resonate with their followers. However, influencers who focus on travel, hiking, adventure, or outdoors would be ideal to promote the same sports jacket.
Engagement
Second, you want to look at engagement. Influencers with higher engagement show that they have an engaged audience who’s more likely to interact with branded content they share.
Because of this, they’ll charge a higher price compared to other influencers of the same size.
When you’re selecting influencers to work with, compare their engagement rate to our benchmarks below. Generally, small accounts will have higher engagement. Engagement drops as accounts grow.
Standard engagement rates on Instagram are:
If you find influencers performing above these benchmarks, consider paying them more. Read more about what engagement rates and reach to expect for different follower sizes in our Instagram Benchmarks Report.
Content usage rights
Your total costs will also be affected by how long you want to rights over the influencers’ content.
You should always come to an agreement with the influencers before working with them. How long can you reuse their content? How long should they keep the content on their social media?
Generally, you’ll pay more for the right to reuse influencer content freely in ads, social media, or emails. Usually, there’s a set period of time, such as 2 to 5 years.
Influencers typically charge more for content usage rights, which will add to your total cost. Of course, shorter time periods will cost less!
Sometimes, influencers will also remove their branded content from their social media after a set period of time. You might have to pay more to have these influencers keep your branded content in their profile permanently or for a set time such as 1 to 5 years!
Direct partnership or through an agency
There are two ways to engage influencers for marketing: directly or through an agency.
Working directly with influencers means you’re handling your own influencer marketing campaigns.
Working through an agency means the agency is responsible for running campaigns on your behalf – from finding influencers to reporting on campaign performance.
You get more out of your influencer marketing budget if you work directly with influencers. The disadvantage is that it can take a lot of time and resources if you don’t have the right tools or expertise to run campaigns.
Agencies can help streamline the process of influencer marketing and save you time from, for instance, searching for influencers.
But in exchange for their services, they typically charge by the hour, or take a percentage of the campaign budget. This will need to be added to your influencer marketing costs.
Campaign
The complexity of the campaign will also impact influencer marketing costs. Generally, the more complex the campaign, the greater the cost.
Here are a couple things to keep in mind:
- Videos require more work and time to produce, so they’ll cost more than images.
- A series of posts, like Instagram carousel posts, will typically cost more than a single post.
- A full review or endorsement on a blog tends to cost more than a simple photo with your product.
You’ll also want to take any additional logistics into account.
For instance, if you ask influencers to go to a shop to buy your products, it can cost you a bit more. After all, the influencers would need to get to the shop, deal with potential out-of-stock issues, and pay for the products.
How much does influencer marketing cost?
Below, we’ve shared some influencer marketing costs based on influencers’ performance and number of followers on Instagram.
Note that these are just a starting point. You’ll need to adjust them based on the factors we’ve highlighted above!
On Instagram
Instagram is one of the best influencer marketing tools to reach a targeted audience.
That’s why we’ve calculated the estimated cost of influencers for Instagram campaigns below. The costs take into account the influencers’ expected performance too.
The prices are for one post on Instagram:
- 2-10k followers: €45 – €150
- 11k-100k followers: €160 – €850
- 101k+ followers: From €1,000
Remember, these numbers are starting points.
As a rule of thumb, we recommend always leaving room for negotiation.
If you want a series of posts or a combination of videos and posts, you can see if the influencers offer package prices.
To price individual influencers more accurately and see what results they can achieve, use our Instagram Pricing Calculator. This can be a starting point in negotiations with influencers.
To fully understand influencer marketing pricing, read our Instagram Pricing Guide.
Why we don’t recommend any of the following methods
Sometimes, businesses think it’s better to just pay influencers based solely on followers or engagement. But you’ll get a better influencer marketing ROI if you consider the other factors we mentioned above when calculating your influencer marketing costs.
For that reason, we don’t recommend:
Paying per 1,000 followers
We don’t recommend paying per 1,000 followers. Even if this is the most common pricing model you see, it’s not the most useful.
As we’ve learned in our Instagram Benchmarks Report, influencers reach a smaller percentage of their followers when they increase in size. This means you’ll get a lower ROI when you adopt this payment method and work with influencers who have large followings.
Paying per engagement
You also don’t want to pay exclusively based on engagement. Nano- and micro-influencers have very high engagement — much higher than bigger profiles.
It’s not uncommon for nano-influencers to have an engagement rate of 10-20%. You’ll end up paying them a lot based on engagement!
On the other hand, if you work with macro- or mega-influencers, they’ll have low engagement. If you pay per engagement, you’d be underpaying them. Many macro- and mega-influencers have an engagement rate of about 2%.
You wouldn’t be taking their influence or reach into account when pricing them.
While we recommend taking engagement into consideration, you shouldn’t solely pay them based on engagement.
In-house or through an agency
Finally, do you want to work with the influencers directly or hire an influencer marketing agency? Here are some pros and cons of each.
When you work with influencers directly, you’ll need to find and vet each one before inviting them to a campaign. You’ll want to ask for screenshots of their demographics for example, to ensure you’re reaching the right people.
But finding influencers is only one part of the process. You’ll also need efficient ways to invite influencers to campaigns, track how they’re going, and report on your success.
If you don’t have the time and resources to do this yourself, this can be very daunting and time-consuming.
If you don’t have time to run influencer marketing campaigns and you’d like to learn more about how we help companies succeed with influencer marketing, head over to our full-service page to get in touch with our team.
On the other hand, agencies take care of the whole influencer marketing process, so you wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. They can work with you to formulate a strategy that can help you reach your goals. But you’d need the budget to work with them.
But what if you don’t have the budget to spend on agencies? And what if you don’t want to spend countless hours manually running campaigns either?
You might want to consider one other option: working with technology platforms like inzpire.me.
For a subscription fee, you’ll access features that help you navigate every step of the campaign process, from working with pre-vetted influencers and messaging them, to tracking campaign progress and auto-reporting on your success.
This makes it a lot more simple to manage your campaigns.
Working with talent agencies?
Many larger influencers are represented by talent agencies. While it costs a bit extra, there are some advantages to working with them.
Influencers who are managed by talent agencies are likely credible. Talent agencies also do their due diligence with the influencers they represent, and they manage the ones they believe are most effective.
While working with talent agencies might be costly for campaign goals like content creation, they’re great for goals like brand awareness and conversions.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing puts your brand into the hands of consumers who will be excited about what you have to offer!
As you start working with influencers, we recommend pricing your influencer marketing costs on:
- Followers
- Engagement
- Content usage rights
- Campaign type
There’s room to negotiate, and it’s worth developing long-term relationships with influencers whose reach and audience aligns with your business!
