How To Price Out Your Influencer Programs

There are seemingly endless ways that influencers can price out their content. It’s no mystery that they’re making good money and there’s no real way to standardize payout. So how to you plan out your influencer campaigns?

Influencers charge depending on a number of different factors, some of which include follower numbers, engagement rate, influencer demand, interest in the product, brand alignment, or, quite frankly, an interest in doing work at any given time (influencers need time off too!). Further, per campaign, rates will also fluctuate based on total number of deliverables, which social channel(s) they’ll be posting on, usage rights, any exclusivities requested, creative control, and timeline.

As a general guideline, expect rates to land somewhere in the $12-25 CPM (cost per thousand followers) range. Further, as a trend, smaller influencers tend to have higher CPMs and larger influencers tend to have smaller ones due to an economy of scale (i.e. for someone with 10,000 followers you might pay $200 at a $20 CPM, but someone at 1,000,000 you might pay $15,000 at a $15 CPM). You'll get better value with a larger influencer because of this, but it'll limit overall number of pieces of content (assuming there are budget restrictions), and larger influencers can be more particular contractually due to their experience and overall demand within the industry.

These are ballparks and should not be quoted (as of course these rates are up to each individual), but can serve as a good general guideline to pricing structures for your managed campaign. To apply this to a conservative example at, say, $100,000, you should expect to reach about 5 million followers, in whatever way you'd like to divide that up: whether that's between 16 micro-influencers with 6 posts each (at 50,000 followers each on average), or with a handful of macro-influencers.