Influencer Marketing is a more professional and disciplined field than ever. One huge barrier for brand marketers trying influencer marketing is: how much of their budget should be set aside to engage creators? What does an influencer actually want?
We recently interviewed 450+ creators of all sizes within our network to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Note: a creator minimum is only a baseline from which rate negotiations should start. Other factors brands and creators should consider when setting a price point are the results that sponsored posts are driving such as CPVs, total reach, campaign length, overall engagement rate, or clicks. Those are detailed in our 2017 Ad Spend Benchmarks Report.
Now, onto the numbers:
- 61% of Influencers reported that they charge less than $250 per post.
We took an additional look at industry to see if that had any weight on minimums as well:
Minimum Cost By Industry
Average rates generally hover around $300-800 per post, with Travel Influencers having the highest rate.
However, there’s a lot of variance here. For example, here are the max minimums across all industries:
Again, these are just benchmarks to begin a negotiation with influencers. However, the point here is that expect to hear anything from “200 dollars per post” to “1,000 dollars” per post when receiving a minimum rate.
Furthermore, the per post basis is only just a small part of the story.
What Influencers Actually Look For
Influencers prioritize alignment over compensation. Brands can’t just target any influencer. Smart marketers should research whether creators would actually be able to create content that actually delights their audiences.
In fact, one anonymous Beauty influencer 1M followers wrote to us:
One of the biggest struggles I have faced of the last eight years, is that brands hand us a set list of talking points and expect us to be chatting billboards. The reason that they want to work with us is because our audience respects our style of content creation and method of explaining experiences with certain products. Having brands that are so demanding and overbearing completely destroys both the sponsorship, and the positive sales outcome for the brand.
Authenticity is just as crucial as compensation. Brands should not only seek to prove out a channel for their goals, but they should also seek to develop relationships with influencers.
Another consideration is that most creators don’t just negotiate on a per post basis. Influencers often split their services into packages. For a travel blogger, brands that leverage influencer marketing could expect to pay $1,600 per two YouTube shout outs. A good way to reduce costs would be to negotiate with the influencer and package different services together. For example, it might cost $1,600 for two YouTube shout outs, but it might cost $1,400 for two mentions and an Instagram story.
Here’s what a typical rate card from a high-level influencer might look like:
Influencer Marketing is just like any channel in a brand’s toolkit. It requires hard work (usually from an in-house influencer team) in order to drive positive results for a brand. Influencer is a behavior, not simply a medium.
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