What costs to expect for influencer marketing?

First of all, there are various ways to settle the financial part of social media influencer influencer. Here are the most popular ones:

• Barter. This is the cheapest way to promote your app via influencer marketing: an influencer is provided the services for free so that they tell about it. But take care. It’s usually only micro-influencers who agree to work this way. Plus, the terms of the barter should be made really clear.
• Cost-per-post. Most of the influencers prefer being paid for one post. This type of agreement allows companies to make one step at a time and control their budget better.
• Cost-per-campaign. Influencers who work with agencies often set a certain rate per campaign (a series of posts). Because agencies charge additional fees for each campaign, this payment method is often more expensive for brands.
• Cost-per-click. This payment model means that a brand is paying for every “click” on a link provided. This model is handy if you combine it with a referral program or in case you have serious budget restrictions.
• Cost-per-acquisition. Shortly put, in this case a brand pays for every new client made thanks to the influencers post. “A new client” can be seen as somebody purchasing the services, downloading the app, or using a referral code.

 

The prices for paid posts differ a lot and depend on several factors:

• The number of followers. Influencers with more followers tend to set higher prices. The average price of an Instagram promoted post from a western celebrity is about US $75,000. The point is, less promoted local bloggers ask less money and usually guarantee better effect, because the engagement level of small blogs is often higher.
• The local market situation. Just as in any other sphere of the economy, prices are very much depended on the average wages, expenses level, and the whole supply and demand thing.
• Hiring an influencer in person or via an agency. In general, the influencers who work with an agency set higher prices. However, most of the time you can approach medium-, small- and micro-influencers in person (yes, simply via social media 😉).
• The platform an influencer works with. For example, Twitter posts are cheaper than Instagram posts.
• Type of content you expect an influencer to post. Creating different types of content requires a different level of efforts, and this influences the pricing a lot.

Barter payment scenario is often cheaper for brands because it only involves providing the services for free and no additional payments. There’s one small trick here: it’s very important to define all the conditions of the barter exchange beforehand. Just sending around free promo-codes to random influencers without asking anything in return is a bad move, especially for a company only starting to develop brand awareness: only 20% of the influencers post about products or services they’ve got as a barter good without having agreed on anything concrete with a brand.

Formats and costs of influencer ads

Now, let’s see what are the most popular formats of influencer marketing posts. The content types vary per social media platform, plus the prices differ quite a lot. Here, we only name average prices for the most popular and effective social media platforms. There’s always a chance that the real price set by a particular influencer is slightly lower or higher than the “market benchmark”.

But we’ve got a couple of bonus-advice before you get to the content types!

Give influencers the freedom to express your brand. The influencers know their audience, have their favourite content formats, and are able to fit your brand into this format really good. An influencer post made this way looks a way more trustworthy than something totally different from the rest of the content.

Don’t be afraid if a blogger mentions the weak points of the service. Influencer marketing campaigns are not typical ads, and this is why people trust them. A real overview is always better than some shameless flattery.

Instagram

Instagram influencers set their prices according to their number of followers and the quality of the audience (the more followers engage with the posts, the better is the quality). The prices for Instagram influencer marketing activities start from $30 per posting for an account with 3,000 really engaged users, to $1,000 for an account with 300,000 not that engaged users. Watch out for celebrities here: they usually have a very wide range of followers, not necessarily located in the same region.

Content types:

• Service overview. An Instagram influencer posts a picture/video in the feed or in the Stories, where they tell about the service and share their experience with it.
• Placement. “Accidental” posting. Not the whole post is necessarily dedicated to the review of the service, but the blogger mentions it in a more natural way. Something like: “We went to the beach and wow we’ve seen you can rent a yacht via a handy app (YayYacht), this was really the time of my life!”. This kind of advertisement looks far more natural than any other type of influencer marketing content.
• Contest. This is the most interactive format of Instagram influencer posts, and it’s perfect if you want to get the potential clients active right away — for instance, before the launch. An influencer announces a contest and the conditions of it: say, downloading the app and subscribing to the Instagram account of your brand. You can run contests in partnership with other brands — this will draw even more people to it. You can also perfectly combine it with a referral program.

YouTube

YouTube is probably the most popular, effective and expensive channel for influencer marketing in 2018. Because video content is gaining popularity, the prices here are rather high. However, they depend on the format of the ad you choose for, and the quality of the audience.

How do you know the quality? Look at the average number of views for the videos a youtuber is placing. The prices start at $10 for a “1,000 views blogger” (again, locality is important here, in Western countries YouTube-influencers tend to have higher prices). The average price for an ad on the “100,000 followers” channel is about $1,000 per video.

Content types:

• Pre-roll ad. A pre-roll ad is a 10-15 second video playing before the blog video itself. It’s not Youtube that puts it in front of the video, but the influencers themselves. A pre-roll can be any type of a video ad: an overview, a placement, any other type of an advertisement matching your brand.
• A video overview of the services. The whole video is made solely to tell about the brand, study the services and share the blogger experiences with it. An honest review is a good thing: when your services are realistically compared with the once alike, it looks much more credible than a plain advertising.
• Integration. The blogger “integrates” the advertising of your services into the content. Some details about the service can be shared within this format, yet the advertisement is not the main theme of the video. This format also looks pretty natural for a viewer.
• Special project vlogs. The content an influencer posts in this case is completely branded by the company ordering it, and the blogger does something extraordinary (like driving a cab) to promote the brand and let the viewers to get a fuller picture of the brand. This is very much a “view from the inside” — the format fascinating for the followers and effective for the brand. This format is also the most expensive as the influencer has spend pretty much time on content creating.

Snapchat

Snapchat is a completely new way social media influencers can reach the audience and, consequently, promote brands they partner with. The concept of “snaps” allows influencers to share a picture or a video with their viewers. The content on Snapchat is accessible for 24 hours, after all the viewers have seen it, it’s being deleted.

Snapchat users are considered an extremely engaged community — because they only watch what they really intend to watch. That’s why this platform is especially good for influencer marketing. In fact, so good that brands do not hesitate to spend between $500 and $10,000 on Snapchat campaigns. However, the average price is about $40 per 1,000 views.

The costs for Snapchat influencer marketing posts depend on the number of active views. One cannot see the number of viewers an influencer has “from outside”, yet you can ask them to screen the account statistics for you: since February 2018, Snapchat users get statistics on unique viewers, total time spent watching, audience demographics and more.

Lesson takeaways

Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat are the most popular and effective platforms for influencer marketing in 2018. The influencer marketing costs differ per platform, content type (each platform has own formats), the size and the engagement level of the audience. There are several ways of paying for a partnership with an influencer: cost per post, per campaign, per click, per acquisition, barter. The exact costs of influencer marketing campaigns are influenced by various factors, from the local market situation to the duration of the campaign.