No matter if you’re a veteran in the marketing world or a novice – so long as you’ve never done an Influencer Marketing Campaign you’ve probably asked yourself the question “How do I pay my chosen Influencer”. This is a very common, complex and correct question to be asking, are you to treat Influencers as Digital Marketing Agencies or as Freelancers? Do you just ask or do you first pitch and demand a price? How do you calculate and evaluate the price? Don’t fret, today we’ll be looking at an in-depth guide, as to how you should pay your Influencers!
The Basics
Let’s start with the fundamentals – defining the term Influencer.
Influencers can come in many shapes and forms, they are the leaders in the modern, digital social world – setting the rules and upholding the image of what it means to be trendy. They can have from a thousand to millions of adoring fans, following in their footsteps by taking them as their idol. This is the prime reason they hold immense power in the marketing world – they have become the portal bridging Brands with their target audience like never before.
Influencer Marketing is the connection of the Brand and the Influencer – a multi-way beneficial cooperation. The way it works is, you contact an Influencer, set the price and then they post an image or video on their social media profiles, spreading it amongst their followers. These posts can either be temporary (like stories) or permanent (feed posts).
The Important Bits
Now that we have a rough sketch of what both Influencers and Influencer Marketing is, let us proceed to some of the more important bits of information you’re going to need to start evaluating how much you need to pay your desired, chosen Influencer.
When Influencer Marketing first started out it still hadn’t gotten itself a set of rules – most Influencers jumped from Brand to Brand doing one-off advertisements and got their payments up front. There are still some Influence who do this, but recently we can see a shift in the Influencer Marketing business as more and more Influencers are becoming the face of Brands and starting more long-term serious partnerships. This has changed the way Influencers are getting payed as well, whereas before it was an upfront decided one-off payment, now Influencers are getting payed based on the PPC RIO of the advertisement itself.
Evaluating the Influencer
Before we jump into the payment options, let’s first see what defines how much you should pay your Influencer. I would like to point out that each Campaign is unique by nature, every Brand has different goals and every Influencer has different ways to achieving them. But what are the core evaluation rules (outside of the Campaign specific needs) that you need to take into consideration before paying your chosen Influencer?
Well, taking only the followers of the Influencer into consideration can drastically damage your company balance. I’d love to be able to say that the amount of followers is the only metric needed to evaluate an Influencer – logically, it should be – but it gets a bit more complex.
The number of followers an Influencer has are just surface level details, this number can be constructed of dozens of different types of people, some of which might not even be in your target audience. The most important thing to look out for is engagement because it dictates how Influential an Influencer is.
At the end of the day, Influencers are just people too, so method wise, simply talking out a price is the best option.
I recommend using our Platform to find and communicate with Influencers near you and delegate your price with the included money-safe guarantee.
Payment Options
I personally believe the PPC ROI option to the best option when paying your Influencers, as it puts pressure on the Influencer to give it their all when it comes to payed sponsorships and it also levels the playing field between the Brand and the Influencers themselves. But what other options are there? Let’s look at all of them before we delve too deep into marketing mambo-jambo.
- One-Off Direct Payment
One-off direct payments are the backbone of one-off Influencer Marketing Campaigns. They leave no obligation and get the job done fast. You find an Influencer, evaluate and discuss the price with them, create the content, distribute it and finally pay them – and you’re done. Fast, easy and productive. However, this is not the best option, as the Influencer probably gets tons of these offers and won’t pay much attention to you or your Brand. Of course each Influencer is different and every Campaign has different needs and goals, but there are far better options if you’re looking for the max ROI.
- Product/Service Payment
Product/service payments are a very good option for start-up, smaller businesses. Instead of paying your Influencer with money, you can simply offer them a few of your products (or a monthly subscription) free of charge. If the Influencer agrees then they are more than likely satisfied with your product/service and will advertise the same full-heartedly. This can be great for Brand Awareness, as well as, your company budget as you’ll earn money without spending any in the first place.
- PPC ROI (ROAS) / Action Based Payment
As mentioned above, I believe this to be the safest and most productive option when it comes to paying your Influencers. PPC ROI is abbreviations, meaning Pay-Per-Click and Return-On-Investment, or you may stumble upon it as ROAS (Return-On-Ad-Spend). This is the most commonly beneficial option on the market as of now, what this means is the Influencer gets paid a fraction for each click or ‘action’ taken on the Campaign advertisement itself. You can delegate upon the price for each comment, like or pre-defined action (like sales). Some Brands do this by giving out special discount coupons – ex: Giving your Influencer a 5% sales coupon and for each coupon used the Influencer gets $5. This will surely push your Influencer to give their all on the campaign, as they have control over how much they get paid, or rather their effort does. This also protects you as a Brand – if you get low ROI that’s okay, your investments were small, to begin with – because you invested a fraction of what you got returned (If the Campaign was successful).
