5 Reasons Why Influencers Are Turning Down Your Campaign Offers

You are in the midst of planning an upcoming influencer campaign. You have developed creative briefs for the campaign. You have compiled a list of influencers you hope to work with and have sent initial offers out to said influencers, only for them to reject your offer.

Why do influencers turn down campaign opportunities? There are a number of factors that go into deciding if a campaign will work out, from budget to scheduling.

Here are the 5 top reasons why we see influencers turn down offers and how to receive as few campaign rejections as possible moving forward:

1. The Rate Is Too Low

One of the most common reasons why an influencer rejects a campaign offer is budget. Influencers are running businesses, and they need to make money for their work. If the rate is too low, the project is not worth it.

To ensure the budgets you present are aligned with what influencers are charging, familiarize yourself with industry standards. 

If the budget you present is close to the going rate for a particular influencer, keep things open for negotiation. If an influencer comes back saying that an offer is far below their typical rate, reconsider how you are allocating your influencer marketing budget and what influencers you are targeting. Not every campaign will be able to afford a celebrity influencer, so think critically about your campaign objectives to select the right influencers that also fit within your budget. 

2. The Usage And Exclusivities Are Extensive—And Not Properly Compensated For

Related to rate, influencers will charge more for extensive content usage. Reposting an influencer campaign photo on your brand’s Instagram feed is one thing; using influencer content to create a major television ad spot is quite another. The more usage rights you request, the more expensive the influencer’s fee will become. 

Your agreement with the influencer should list out specific usage rights, including both where you intend to use the content and for how long. Usage “in perpetuity” will be more expensive than one year of usage rights, so the more specific you can be about usage, the better. 

Similarly, wide-reaching campaign exclusivities (meaning, restricting the contracted influencer from posting about brand competitors) will also drive up rates. Say you represent a candy brand: requesting exclusivity for a year in the “food” category will cost exponentially more than requesting a week-long exclusivity period strictly in the smaller “candy” category. Additionally, asking an influencer to stay out of a broad category for a long time will also give them pause.

Define the exclusivity of your campaign to be specific enough that direct competitors are not talked about in close proximity to your campaign—you can even list out specific brand competitors—to avoid increased influencer rates or rejections on campaign offers. 

3. The Creative Brief Does Not Align With The Influencer’s Content

We have run across all types of creative briefs here at Lytehouse, from the extremely vague and open-ended to the deeply specific. The best creative briefs usually meet in the middle: specific enough that the influencer knows what your brand is looking for out of the content they deliver, but not so narrow that it removes all possibility for an influencer to create content that he or she feels is authentic. After all, you are hiring a content creator, so there should be a little flexibility within the creative brief to allow for original spins on the campaign.

Need more tips on developing a strong campaign creative brief? Check out our guide here.

4. The Turnaround Is Too Quick

It can be something as practical as scheduling; influencers are busy, and oftentimes a last minute campaign just will not fit into their schedule. When things come up last minute, it can be hard to avoid scrambling for influencers, so avoid this predicament by planning out your influencer campaigns well in advance and starting negotiations early. 

5. The Brand Is Not A Fit

At the end of the day, sometimes a brand is just not a fit for an influencer. For example, a budget fashion influencer may turn down an offer from a luxury brand because she knows her audience won’t respond to the campaign.

Influencers want the campaigns they participate in to succeed just as much as brands do, so if an influencer cites “brand alignment” as a reason for rejecting a campaign, it is because they do not see their audience resonating with the brand.

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As experts of influencer relations, Lytehouse can help you through every step of the influencer campaign process. Partner with an agency like Lytehouse to help negotiate and secure influencers for your next influencer campaign. 

Why You Need To Work With Influencers That Have Instagram Business Or Creator Accounts

There are a lot of considerations to take into account when selecting influencers for a campaign: budget, demographics, following, content style, and so on. But there is one additional consideration that you should take into account when vetting potential influencer partners: do they have an Instagram Business or Creator account?

A professional Instagram account provides several key benefits, both for the influencers with said accounts and for brands looking to partner with them. 

Here are the key reasons why you should partner with influencers who have a professional account:

Gain Access To Advanced Metrics

Influencers with Instagram Business or Creator accounts will have access to detailed analytics on their posts. They can view breakdowns on how users engage with their content and how the post is being discovered across Instagram, as well as metrics on demographics and overall account performance. 

When you partner with an influencer, include a note in your partnership agreement so that you can view these backend analytics. You can also invest in an analytical tool that provides access to this data, but again, influencers will need a professional account for those metrics to be visible. 

Need a more detailed breakdown on Instagram post analytics? Check out our blog post here.

Use the Official Partnership Transparency Tool

Transparent partnerships are essential for creating audience trust and should be a top priority for both brands and influencer partners. In order to improve the clear identification of sponsored content, Instagram introduced the Paid Partnership Tool. This allows influencers to add a special tag to their post that clearly indicates that it was paid for by a brand. Influencers with Business or Creator accounts can add these tags to branded content with your brand account’s approval. 

Strategically Amplify Content Via Whitelisting

The ability to promote posts and stories on Instagram is a huge draw for brands, and partnering with influencers with Business or Creator accounts increases the ways in which content can be promoted. 

Boosting content is exactly what it sounds like: putting budget behind an existing post and “boosting” its viewership to expanded audiences, including an account’s own audience

Whitelisting allows brands to strategically amplify an influencer’s content on Instagram and Facebook and target specific audiences. Unlike boosted posts, whitelisted content does not have to appear in an influencer’s own feed, but does always appear to targeted audiences. Whitelisting gives brands larger control on how the promoted content is shared, as they can add specific “call to action” buttons like “Shop Now” or “Learn More” and can tailor captions and images to fit their marketing needs. 

Allow Influencers to Tag Your Products in Their Post

In 2019 Instagram unveiled a new feature called Instagram Shopping that allows e-commerce businesses to tag shoppable products directly on Instagram posts and stories. Does your brand utilizing Instagram Shopping? If so, you have the ability to partner with Instagram Creator accounts and allow them to tag shoppable items on their accounts. If you track link clicks and sales conversions as a priority of influencer campaigns, you can capitalize on this partnership ability by activating Creator accounts. 

Note: At this time, only users with Creator accounts can add shoppable tags from other brands to their posts.

Our 2020 Approach To Influencer Marketing Success

While it may feel like the world of influencers and social media marketing has been around for a while, at the start of the decade, Instagram had just launched and was far from the massive social media platform that it is now. “Blogger” was the preferred term over “influencer,” and the fashion and beauty industries were still figuring out how to treat these digitally savvy newcomers. Influencer marketing has rapidly changed over the decade, and will continue to grow exponentially over the next ten years.

Here’s how we’re approaching influencer marketing this year:

Invest In Technology That Delivers Transparency

Influencer marketing is no longer the Wild West; it is a full-scale industry that has allowed for the emergence of an economy of apps, platforms, and technological resources that facilitate all aspects of campaign management. While the innovative content that influencers create is what drives this industry, the data behind each post is what empowers influencers and marketers alike to understand the effectiveness of each post or campaign initiative. 

As you make influencer marketing a crucial part of your digital strategy, it is important to invest in technology that tracks social media analytics holistically and accurately. We have seen an influx of technological platforms that promise efficient end-to-end campaign management from influencer discovery to campaign reporting. At Lytehouse, we've tested the majority of these platforms and invested in those that we strongly feel deliver.

Investing in analytical reporting tools will also ensure that you are working with influencers who have verified followings and authentic engagement. Now that there are industry standard benchmarks of engagement numbers, you can use reporting tools to identify potentially fraudulent followings and engagement.

Not only will these platforms help you manage campaigns, but it will also free up time and energy so that you can scale up your campaign efforts as well. Good technological tools only increase efficiency and productivity, so we highly suggest investing in these tools, or at least an agency like Lytehouse that has these tools at their disposal. 

When It Comes to Influencer Content, Pick a Side

As the influencer industry has evolved, we have seen two major types of influencer dominate in terms of delivery for brand clients:

• Art-focused: This type of influencer is creatively minded and features elevated, curated photo and video content. They more than likely work as a creative professional (photographer, graphic designer, editor, etc.) but their emphasis is on creating content that they feel is art. For the art-focused influencer, visual platforms like Instagram and dot com’s syndicated to Pinterest reign supreme. 

• Highly relatable and day-to-day: This type of influencer, on the other hand, emphasizes casual content, often created in real time with their phone. Their content is typically less polished than that of art-focused influencers, and there is more emphasis placed on establishing a strong, sincere, and oftentimes vulnerable connection with their audience. For this type of influencer, they do incredibly well engagement-wise on Instagram, but are also quick to adopt new platforms to better connect with their audience like TikTok.

Identifying the differences between these two influencer types will help you decide which direction to head for your influencer campaigns and initiatives, depending on the goals of your campaign. Are you seeking elevated content to feature on your brand channels? The art-focused influencer will help create and curate beautiful content for you. Are sales and impressions your main goals? Then you will find success working with relatable influencers that have proven conversion records. 

Maintain Creative Control

Your brand identity should extend to all aspects of your digital marketing efforts, and that extends to the influencers you activate. Think holistically about the message you are trying to convey across all your platforms and with your brand partners. Every single campaign, whether it’s a single social post or a yearlong ambassadorship, should tie back to your central brand identity.

When working with influencers, this means that you should be selecting influencers who truly align with your brand messaging, rather than letting outside trends and publicly displayed numbers guide your selections. At Lytehouse, we encourage our clients to develop creative guidelines that mirror their brand identities. 

At the tail-end of the decade, more and more of our clients have invested in social amplification: a service we provide and something we recommend all brands do to target the right audiences and optimize for conversion. When a brand is amplifying contracted influencers’ posts to new audiences, the visuals need to properly reflect the brands values and it's the influencers’ jobs to ensure that the content being amplified is an authentic portrayal of their own brand as well. This healthy balance of creative control — the brand's and the influencers’ — is crucial to influencer marketing success.

Scale Your Influencer Programs

The influencer world is only growing larger. With hundreds and thousands of individuals now identifying as “influencers” across social media platforms, brands are looking to scale their influencer marketing efforts to reach a wider swath of customers. 

Brands used to prioritize macro-influencers with millions of followers, but instead of spending a large budget on a single influencer, brands are realizing that they can reach more markets by spreading that same budget across a group of influencers with smaller audiences. Scaling your influencer campaigns is essential to maximizing target audience reach, with the added bonus of more content and economically testing new markets. The right technology platforms like the ones Lytehouse has access to make scalability possible, providing you with tools to discover the right influencers — whether it’s 10 influencers or 1,000 — and efficiently manage them throughout every step of the campaign process.

Adopt An Audience-First Approach

Traditionally, we have seen brands do the reverse: select specific influencers based on audience size and creativity in hopes of reaching a relatively high percentage of their following. When brands solely execute upon this strategy, ROI can’t be maximized because the brand is essentially shooting in the dark, hoping some people take notice. Sometimes this strategy works; oftentimes, it doesn’t.

Instead, define your target audience first by having a clear understanding of exactly who they are. Then, find influencers that speak to and create engaging content for this audience consistently. To do so, we recommend using technology to study influencer demographics and brand affinities. Once the influencers post on your behalf, amplify the content to further promote it (well beyond the influencer’s followers) to more consumers on social media that fit your target audience exactly. This approach to influencer marketing mitigates risk and maximizes ROI.

Planning Long Term Influencer Partnerships

The new year is the perfect time to start your influencer marketing strategy on the right note and partner with influencers for the year. Long term partnerships are mutually beneficial for brands and influencers. Brands are able to build long-lasting relationships with their influencer partners, and influencers are able to maintain trust with their audience because they promote the same brand over a long period of time.

Before you start a new long term partnership, however, you will want to take several key factors into account to ensure the program’s success.

Set Clear Goals & Requirements Ahead of Time

The more you plan ahead of launching the yearlong partnership, the smoother things will run. Take time to structure the program, from how many influencers you’ll be activating to how many posts they’ll be creating and what your key performance indicators are.

Be clear and upfront from the get go about how many social posts you are looking for, as well as the cadence of posts. No one likes to be blindsided with changing requirements, so the more clear you can be upfront about your expectations, the better.

Partner With Influencers Who Have Proven Track Records

If you are working with influencers for a whole year, you will want to work with creators who can help you meet your marketing and sales goals. Use analytical tools to measure engagement and reach metrics, and follow the influencers to see firsthand how engaged their community is.

Should sales be the primary objective of your campaign, you can request case studies or conversion metrics from potential influencer partners.

Need some more assistance deciding what type or types of influencer to work with? Check out our guide on influencer selection.

Know When To Switch Gears

As much as you should try to stick to your original game plan, goals may change over the course of the partnership. In that case—or in the case that an influencer’s content is not performing as well as you had hoped—it is okay to consider experimenting and changing tactics.

Perhaps it’s switching an Instagram post requirement to a set of Instagram Stories since an influencer’s audience engages more with stories, or changing the creative direction for a post. Within reason, it is completely acceptable to have a conversation with the influencer about changing the plan. If you are asking to add more deliverables, extend the timeline, or any other major changes, however, you may need to pay an additional fee to the influencer.

Work With an Agency Who Will Do the Heavy Lifting

Whether activating 1 influencer or 100, a long term campaign features many moving pieces. Partnering with an agency like Lytehouse can help take a lot of the work off your plate and allow you to focus on big picture initiatives. From casting influencers to coordinating posts to campaign reporting, agencies are there to help with large partnerships and can offer unparalleled expertise on best practices.

Holiday Content That Works

As we make our way into the heart of the holiday season, you are no doubt also in the midst of contracting and coordinating campaigns. Wondering what makes for a successful holiday campaign?

Here are a few of our favorite 2018 holiday campaigns from Socialyte talent to give you some insight on top-performing holiday content:

Multi-Blogger Programs

Coordinating a multi-blogger campaign is a common strategy, but bringing those influencers together for a single shoot is a great way to increase engagement, making it beneficial for both the brand and the influencers involved, as they can cross-promote each other as well as the featured product.

Aim For Authenticity

When creating branded content, there is a fine balance between showcasing the promoted item and veering too far into the staged photo realm. Candid shots that display the featured product in a natural environment hit that sweet spot. Encourage captions to focus on personal stories and anecdotes to further drive that authentic feeling home.

Think Beyond Just Christmas

Between now and the start of 2020, there are plenty of holidays to celebrate! Thanksgiving, Black Friday, New Year’s Eve, and more are great opportunities to highlight your brand and mix up the content from the typical Christmas-centered fare.

Let Each Influencer’s Creativity Shine

You’ll no doubt have creative guidelines for your campaign, as the number one goal is to let the featured product shine. However, you shouldn’t be afraid to let each influencer create the content that works best for his or her audience. 

Even though these three influencers promoted the same product line, each influencer put her own spin on the styling, creative direction, filtering, and so on.

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Want to ensure you receive the best influencer content? Read more of our tips for content guidelines here.

Planning Your Influencer Content Strategy

Influencer marketing is an effective digital marketing tool, but it is also a big investment. Make the most of your next campaign by creating a clear influencer content strategy so you can receive the best influencer content possible.

Select The Right Influencers

The first part of any influencer campaign is choosing what influencers you are going to work with. Based on your KPIs and budget, there are different categories of influencers to consider, but beyond sizing, you will want to consider the influencer’s content categories, location, aesthetic, and other factors.

Research the influencers you hope to work with, not just based on demographics and engagement numbers, but also so you have a general idea of the type of content they create. If you are looking for catalogue-worthy imagery, an influencer who only posts iPhone photos may not be the best bet.

Lay Out Clear Guidelines

A lot of brands are unsure about what exactly they are looking for in influencer content and leave the content guidelines vague, only for them to dislike the content that the influencer does end up creating. Avoid this frustration by being clear with what you are looking for from the start.

A good campaign brief should lay out key talking points, visual guidelines, and other important details. If your product has a prominent label, note that the label must be visible in all photos. If you want the influencer to be in the photo instead of a still product shot, specify this. 

Provide Examples

Have examples from previous campaigns that you absolutely loved? Share them! Providing influencers with concrete examples of the type of content you are looking for is the easiest way for all parties to get on the same page. Call out specifics of why you like a particular image, too; is it how the product is photographed? Is it the authentic caption? The more clarity you can provide, the better idea the influencer has of what you are looking for. 

Give Plenty Of Time

Nobody likes feeling rushed on a project. The more you can plan ahead and provide ample time to contract influencers and receive content, the better. Not only will the contracted influencers have time to think about and execute an amazing concept for the campaign, but you will also have plenty of time to make any edits or request reshoots, if necessary. 

Know When To Be Flexible

Of course, there is such a thing as being too particular, so know when to be flexible on content guidelines, too. An influencer partnership should be a two-way street, and if an influencer feels like your guidelines don’t fit with their content and style, or if they have ideas about what they think will work well with their audience, take these notes into consideration.

This goes for reshoot requests as well. If an influencer completely disregards your content guidelines and delivers a draft that has nothing to do with the campaign, you should request a reshoot (though hopefully if you are using these guidelines, your campaign direction will be clear). However, if there is a minor flaw in a photo, consider letting it go if it does not have an impact on the overall effectiveness of the content.

What Type Of Influencer Should You Work With?

Selecting the right type of influencer to work with can make or break a campaign’s success. It’s easy enough to think that contracting a celebrity influencer with millions of followers will get your brand the most exposure, but there are many other factors to consider when selecting influencers.

Depending on your brand’s KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and goals, working with a group of micro-influencers might actually be more beneficial. Here are a few of the most common KPIs we see amongst brands and the types of influencers best suited to meet those goals:

If your goal is brand awareness, work with…celebrity influencers

If high campaign reach and exposure are the numbers you care about, there’s no better way to hit those benchmarks than with celebrity and macro influencers. Typically a macro influencer is defined as having over 500,000 followers.

As strange as it may seem, influencers with larger followings don’t always have the strongest engagement rates (industry standard for macro influencers is around 1-2%, while smaller influencers have higher rates) but an uber-popular influencer or celebrity toting your product will do wonders for exposing your brand to new audiences.

When working with influencers of this size, you’ll need to prepare to put a large budget behind securing just one influencer, so be sure to consider engagement rates, brand alignment, and audience demographics when choosing which macro influencer to work with.

If your goal is sales, work with…micro and mid-tier influencers paired with amplification

Micro (10,000 - 100,000 followers) and mid-tier (100,000 - 500,000) influencers are known to build strong relationships with their followers. These are the influencers that consumers turn to when making purchasing decisions because they’ve formed trust with their audiences.

By combining these posts with targeted amplification, we can optimize programs for link clicks and promote sales conversions with highly targeted customers.

If your goal is engagement, work with…micro and nano influencers

Micro and nano (1,000 - 10,000 followers) influencers may have smaller reaches, but their followers are typically very engaged. If your campaign is focused on generating comments, DM interactions, and conversations, you may want to partner with micro and nano influencers.

Because they have smaller followings, you may need to contract a larger number of influencers (and prepare a large budget for a wide-reaching and heavy lift campaign) to have a large impact on consumers.

If your goal is content, work with…creators

Influencer campaigns are a form of digital advertising, so it makes sense that your brand may want influencer-created content for your own use. Maybe you’ll use the photos influencers create on your own social media channels or website. Maybe you’ll use their videos for an ad campaign. Whatever the case may be, if owning content is your goal, you’ll want to work with true creators.

Consider the content that the influencer create and how well it aligns with your brand’s voice and aesthetic. Beyond numbers and demographics, you’ll really want to find influencers who are a good match stylistically.

When contracting influencers to use their content on your platforms, remember that this may increase their fee. Additionally, you will want to clearly lay out where their content will be used and for how long.

When To Gift Influencers

Since influencer marketing has surged in popularity, there’s been a healthy debate about whether influencer gifting is valuable. Some argue that gifting is an important way to spread brand awareness, while others would rather spend their marketing budgets on guaranteeing influencer posts, but the truth is there is a time and place for gifting influencers.

Here are the benefits and setbacks to influencer gifting campaigns so you can determine if gifting is the right move for your brand:

Pros of Gifted Campaigns

Less costly than a paid campaign: This is the most obvious benefit to gifting influencers. If your brand does not have a lot of budget to devote to influencer marketing, shipping out press packages is a less expensive option. Even if you splurge on fancy packaging, the cost of shipping and materials will be far less than contracting influencers to post.

Builds organic relationships: When influencers received gifted products without any expectations of posting, they’ll oftentimes feel more comfortable posting about said product. More importantly, gifting is a great way to allow influencers to test out the product and determine on their own if they like what they’ve received. This is incredibly beneficial for new beauty brands or anything that an individual can test out firsthand, because it gets the product directly into the hands of the influencer.

Cons of Gifted Campaigns

No guarantees: When gifting influencers, you are leaving a lot up to fate. Gifting rarely includes contracting influencers, and without any formal agreements in place, there are no promises that the influencers you are gifting will post about—or even use—your product.

Can’t control the narrative: With that being said, you also cannot control how an influencer may speak about your product. Whether they use the wrong hashtag, create subpar content, or even speak negatively about your product, once the item is sent, you have zero control over how it is talked about as no contract is required without payment. This is a large obstacle for luxury brands, especially, who want maximum control over how their brand is represented.

Hard to work with bigger influencers: Gifting is most effective when targeted toward micro influencers, who will be more appreciative of a free gift and likely to post. Influencers with larger followings, however, likely have more paid partnerships under their belt and are savvier to the intentions behind gifting, so odds are they’ll hold out for paid deals and won’t give away valuable tagging for free. However, if your brand features high-value items like designer clothing or furniture, or if the influencer in question is a natural fan, bigger influencers may be willing to give a shoutout.

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The bottom line: gifting is a more cost-effective option and a great way to build natural relationships with nano and micro influencers, but there are no guarantees regarding the quality of the content created, or even that gifted influencers will post at all.

CGI Influencers: Why They Became Successful And Why They Won’t Last

CGI. What is it? How do we use it? Why is it relevant in influencer marketing? Computer Generated Imagery has been around for decades. We all remember the Atari game Pong, or the mobile-friendly Snake which came preloaded on every early-aughts Nokia cell phone. Nowadays, CGI takes form in highly produced video like Avatar or Black Panther and has even extended its reach to social media. 

The popularity of CGI influencers is hard to miss. From Lil’ Miquela to the new-and-improved Colonel Sanders on KFC’s account (a genius move on Wieden + Kennedy’s part), they’re nearly ubiquitous.

The rise of CGI influencers comes from shock factor. We’re sixteen years into the business of influencers: Myspace and Wordpress launched in 2003. People became attached to influencers based on their personalities and their senses of style - it was fully original and every standout influencer was unique.

The days of original style of bloggers is long gone: Bryan Boy, Man Repeller, Fashion Toast, Karla’s Kloset, Sea of Shoes all had exceedingly unique points of view and carved out their own version of success due to their eye-catching style. Most started as bloggers, and as our digital attention spans decreased along with content length, so did their focus. From WordPress to Instagram to Twitter to Snapchat - content length was shortened and there’s no doubt we’ve been attracted to shorter-form digestible content in order to consume more.

Now that ‘influencer’ is a legitimate job description, you’ll find young, ambitious internet stars on every corner of SoHo shooting near-identical imagery to each other. Filters are ubiquitous, captions are short, personality is lacking. Authentic audiences are coming harder and harder to find because there’s not much unique or eye-catching about this new type of content.

Enter the CGI influencer. They’re unique, offer shock value, provide a sense of camaraderie for outsiders looking in. Companies like Brud, the one who produces Lil’ Miquela, have started developing entire rosters of animated influencers to drive shock value and awareness (a great PR move, frankly).

Just as with anything that shocks, the CGI influencer will remain an intriguing fad and will end there. The draw of real influencers will remain for personality, for something unique, for a fresh perspective. The standout new influencers who offer that (Officially Quigley, Jera Bean, Orion Vanessa) will win in the long run for offering something that CGI can’t: a human perspective, a connection with readers, and a compelling reason to seek them out, again and again, like a digital best friend with great advice.

Why Female Influencers Are Killing The Game

The wage gap is no secret. For every dollar that a man makes, in the US, a woman makes $0.85. That gap becomes deeper (and darker - literally and figuratively) when we take into account the woman’s race. Intersectional feminism has never been more quantified.

When it comes to influencer marketing, though, we have been able to turn that wage gap standard on its head. Women influencers are consistently more successful, make more money, and in higher demand than men. Why?

Our team tells our clients that women consume and shop differently than men. It’s commonly cited that women control 70-80% of household spending. They buy for themselves, their household, children, male partners, pets, and parents. By hitting multiple target markets via marketing to women only, a brand is maximizing their potential for ROI as they reach 3-4x the intended target market.

This is backed up by the evidence we see in our influencer campaigns. Women influencers get better reception amongst their female audiences than men do with male audiences - controlling for size, we see higher click through rates, engagements, and conversion rates across the board.

Influencer marketing is one of the few industries where women command more dollars than their male peers. A tangential industry, one that’s not to be ignored here, is modeling. Women models consistently make more than men in their prime years. When income is based on body & appearance, women become the breadwinners. Influencers are an example of this in that their appearance (and their content) is the moneymaker; The rise of plastic surgery among the Instagram crowd is a result.

Combine a heavy focus on appearance with an appeal to the people who control the expendable income of most of the US’s consumer market, and you’re bound to find cashflow for women. Not only are these influencers running small businesses as simultaneous models, salespeople, stylists, art directors, and writers, but they’re also pursuing a gap in the market that traditional advertising was never able to: controlling your own media on your own platform and tracking sales of consumer-facing products... Now that’s entrepreneurial genius.

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.