Our Senior Brand Partnerships Manager, Taylor Kintop, dives deeper into the nuances of pricing for Influencer marketing.
Let’s dive in!
Influencer marketing combines so many different types of models in one – you are gaining valuable impressions, clicks, sales, authenticity, and real-time reviews. This type of advertising is different from what we’re used to in the digital marketing space. It’s the exact opposite of creating a traffic campaign on Facebook or launching non-brand keywords on Google. We are asking influencers to do it all – not excel in one area alone.
In other forms of digital advertising, every $1 invested into a traffic (brand awareness, video view, etc) campaign is being spent on visits to your site – nothing else. For every dollar spent in influencer marketing, you are capturing impressions, increasing brand awareness, driving traffic, providing reviews, getting video views, etc. To hit all of those objectives with a DSP, you are going to need to spend $1 in every one of those areas, and now you’re spending $6 to gain what you got from $1 in influencer marketing.
This is why when pricing influencer campaigns, you are doing yourself a disservice by only looking at one metric, especially ones that aren’t aligned with your goals. If you are running a performance campaign – does your CPM even matter? As with all forms of digital advertising, the more qualified your consumer, and the better placement, the higher CPM. Would you be happy if at the end of your $40 CPM campaign if you got $0 in sales? Or would you rather have a $100 CPM that drives 5,000 orders? If you are looking at generating brand awareness, why do you need a certain CPC? Your time is better spent researching the creators that organically align with your brand, and convey the values that you’re looking to share with your audience.
Not all creators are priced for every campaign, either. Those that have an extremely high influence and are known converters provide more value than just the impression. If you looked at their CPM rate, you might ask yourself why you’re not running an ad during the Superbowl, but you’re likely going to get more direct or last-click conversions, from your influencer campaign. If CPMs or CPCs were the only things that made the world go around, there would only be budgets for display advertising.
