With influencer marketing, many influencers do not know what to charge advertisers and many brands do not know what to pay influencers. That is why we started Social Bluebook: to provide a starting social media value to influencers so they can have a price for negotiating with advertisers.
To get a starting price point for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, we recommend advertisers sign up to access our free SBB Search Tool or have influencers send them their prices and social media metrics via Social Bluebook’s verified Send Quote tool.
But let’s address the initial question: what do you pay an influencer? How much should an influencer be making for a YouTube video or an Instagram photo? The answer is both simple and complicated.
Table of Contents
Influencer Marketing Prices: It’s Complicated
For advertisers, there are many elements that should be looked at when deciding not only what influencers to use, but how much they should be offered. Influencers should also be looking at these same aspects to figure out how much to charge a specific brand.
Reach
An influencer’s reach has two definitions in the industry. It can regard the potential number of people a piece of branded content can reach or the number of people it actually reached. For the former definition, reach numbers are often based on the number of followers on the platforms doing the promotion. Reach is important to take into account for raising brand awareness. If an influencer is more likely to get a lot of impressions for a brand looking for awareness, their social media platform tends to be more valuable.
Engagement
While an influencer might draw a large audience, how much engagement is their social media creating? Does the influencer receive more likes, comments, and shares on their uploads more frequently than other influencers within the same follower range? Influencers with high engagement are valuable to every brand, but they are especially valuable to advertisers looking to draw acquisitions or conversions for their campaign.
Engaging influencers are also found across all tiers of audience reach; influencers with tens of thousands of followers may be a more valuable (and less expensive) investment than influencers with millions of followers, so long as they have an engaged audience.
Specificity
Just as important to consider as reach and engagement is the actual content on an influencer’s social media platform. How well does the content fit your brand? For instance, which influencer would a brand that sells fishing equipment want to choose: a family-oriented account that document many outdoor activities, or a social media account completely dedicated to fishing? While both can work for a branding deal, the fishing account fits the specificity of the brand more than the family account and may be worth a greater investment to that specific brand.
On the other side of the coin, choosing an influencer that usually promotes an entirely different message from the brand’s message can be detrimental to both advertiser and influencer in the long run. Say a brand is looking to promote energy drinks; this brand would be better off avoiding any influencers that are focused on eating and living healthy in the majority of their content.
Acquisition of Views
This influencer’s video has a million views! But how long did it take for that video to receive one million views? One week? One month? One year? If your campaign has a time-sensitive element, any potential influencers you want to work with should have their content’s views and engagement monitored to see how long it usually takes to get to a certain number. Influencers can also negotiate a better deal for themselves if their ramp up time is quick and the campaign needs these views quickly.
The Time of Year
Generally speaking, December is the highest-paying month for advertising. But would our brand selling fishing equipment find more value with influencer marketing in December or during the height of fishing season? Ultimately, that is up to the brand to decide. An influencer dedicated to fishing might end up charging more for branded content at the peek of fishing season as opposed to quieter months, as well.
An Influencer’s Popularity
How many branding deals is the influencer you want to work with currently receiving? If they are getting offers left and right, they are not only increasingly likely to charge a bit more because many brands desire to work with them, but also be more selective in which brands they work with. The last thing an influencer wants to do is water down their content with too many branding deals and drive down their audience engagement.
The Simple Answer
As you may have guessed, the simple answer is that there is no easy formula that allows you to look at an individual platform and calculate a price by plugging in a few numbers. Social Bluebook’s values are based on data acquired from API and real-world branding deals, with our statisticians using software such as R and Minitab to analyze the correlation between platform metrics and deal specifications.
The result is SBB’s proprietary, patent-pending algorithm, which designates a price point for each of the reach/engagement grade combinations on each platform. However, this price point is but a suggested starting point for influencer negotiations. The exact prices that a brand should pay and an influencer should charge can vary from one deal to another.
Want to find out the worth of your platform? Sign up for Social Bluebook– it is completely free to use for all influencers.