Many brands have seen success in creator collaborations (influencer hereafter). But when a marketing team which is on a budget start looking for influencer partnerships, they get to see all types of campaign structure and pricings, which has no benchmarking. This guessing game ends today with this post.
Influencers usually work on following models:
- Barter or Product Seeding: Nano and micro influencers
- Paid Organic Posts: Mid-tier influencers
- Shout-outs and Whitelisted Posts: Celebrities
Depending on brand’s campaign objectives, we can classify collaborations as:
Barter or Product Seeding
Marketers know that consumers are much more likely to trust their friends and family over traditional advertising when it comes to purchasing decisions. Therefore, the idea of using product samples to promote new offerings is increasingly common.
Barter Product seeding is where brands gift their products to influencers to build new audience and create awareness. It’s a great way for marketers to reach a wider, hyper-targeted group of potential customers without additional upfront costs like traditional influencer marketing. When you seed your products, send them to people you think would not only appreciate the gift, but has an audience with similar interests. The point being, if you’re running a vegan, ethical make up brand, you’d try to find influencers who have an interest in animal-free vegan makeup and an audience to match that as well.
Product seeding is a type of word-of-mouth marketing whereby the more people who hear about your product, the more traction it gains. As you share it with more influencers and they share it with their audience, you begin to generate consistent interest in your products, without additional marketing spend.
Ideal budget for Product Seeding
The strategy for product seeding differs with the stage of the brand and size of influencers you target. Usually, for a starter brand — the only cost to you should be paying for are the products you plan to send, and the shipping costs.
If you see the initial success with few influencers and plans to scale it up, then the agencies like Collab which has network of 1000s of Nano and Micro influencers can definitely change the community engagement game. In product seeding you’ll find greater success with less of an investment. Not to mention you’ll have genuine brand ambassadors rallying around your brand.
Organic Posts
Typically, influencers will have a press kit describing their rates and the types of partnerships available. Creating branded content involves time, labour, skill, and production costs. Hence influencer fee is combined cost of content creation (effort in creating particular content) and distribution to their network (follower size). Depending on the campaign, bulk content or special rates can also be worked out to reduce labor and costs.
In India, there is a long tail of mid-tier and nano influencers who also change their fee based on available supply in their niche. For example: Home-decor influencers get very few deals hence they have much less fee than fashion influencers. Another example are finance influencers which are less in number and they get lot of deals, which makes there fee significantly higher compared to other influencers.
While there is no standardized formula to decide influencers price and there are a lot of reasons why one influencer may charge more or less than another. Here we tried to segment our data by the most common factors: influencer (or brand) category, size of following, and type of post.
2021 Instagram influencer pricing: By type of post
2021 Instagram influencer pricing: By industry (for picture post)
2021 Instagram influencer pricing: By industry (for video/ REEL post)
Each type of post has their own unique benefits. A standard Instagram post typically includes a photo and caption. Photos can be further promoted in an Instagram story, where as a slideshow (carousel post) allows an influencer to build more of a narrative, or showcase the different product or use cases of your brand. Whereas Videos gives the influencer a voice, literally. Video and specially short form video (IG REEL) involves greater production costs than a photo, but the added investment can often translate into more than just added engagement.
Other factors that affect Instagram influencer rate
When you are looking for a quality partnership, brands should budget for these cost factors:
Usage rights
If you want to have the ownership of influencer generated content, so that you can use it on other platforms and ads, this will likely impact the influencer’s rate.
Production fee
Various production related fees such as props, clothing, hair, makeup, photography, editing and travel should be factored in the pricing.
Agency fees
For end-to-end managed campaigns, companies such Collab, Monk-E, or OML who either represent influencer or manage campaigns or both, typically charge handling fees.
Timing
Depending on how much time a brand gives an influencer to create content, a quick turn-around fee may be applied. Also during the events like Diwali, and Friendship’s Day; influencers have lot of deal in pipeline which makes there fee much higher than usual.
Brand fit
If an influencer feels that particular brand has high level of affinity with their personal brand, they may charge less and in case of lack of affinity, they may charge for what the partnership may cost them in credibility.
Other factors like Product type, Exclusivity, Campaign length, and agency x influencer x brand relationships also derive the final prices.
2021 Influencer rate guide: key takeaways
- Influencer pricings are art more than science. Best brands are aware that influencer rates fluctuates because they are partnership, not transactions.
- Categories such as Finance, auto, mental health has scarce supply which makes them highly competitive and volatile in terms of rates.
- Cost per view may be lesser with larger influencers (1M+) however influencers with small audience (10k-200k) may see high level of engagement and conversions (app installs, sales).
- Best influencers to watch for are those who have explosive month on month follower and engagement growth. Catch them early!
