Wondering how much to charge as an Instagram influencer?
For you to be able to understand how much you can/should charge per post, first you must understand which factors matter for price-per-post definition. Those factors are:
- page size/total audience
- engagement levels
- niche you are currently in
- past experience/portfolio with brand promotion
- type of promotion
- promotions regularity
Page size/total audience
Page size (or, total audience) and engagement levels: These ones are pretty self-explanatory, right?
The higher they are together (individually they don’t matter that much), the more you can charge, as it means you have a higher reach and impact/influence in your audience.
Niche
Although there isn’t really a rule of thumb for this one, usually there are niches with higher monetization potential than others.
In a broad sense, we can affirm that an influencer in the luxury niche can, admittedly, charge more for a sponsored post than an influencer on the food niche.
However, this generalization is dangerous because it will really depend on the type of partnership and quality of the influencer.
Past experience
Your past experience/portfolio with brand promotions is very important. Every single brand prefers to make a safe bet than to risk throwing money to the wind.
Influencers that can show previous similar partnerships with proven results are much more likely to secure the deal than someone with no experience.
The better your portfolio, the more you can charge.
That is why some influencers that are starting their first partnerships accept much cheaper brand deals simply to build rapport and case studies.
Many influencers work for free for first clients so that I could build results to present to future ones.
Type of promotion
Depending on the type of promotion, your price will be different as well. You will not charge the same for a swipe up story than you will for a post on the feed.
Sometimes you can even have a monthly contract with a brand, in which you will make a post per week with exclusivity (meaning that you cannot post any other brand posts until the contract of exclusivity is over).
Promotions regularity
This is an element that a lot of influencers overlook and it is something soooo valuable for the brands. Your exclusivity will be one of the determining
factors for how appealing you look for a brand. That is why it is so important to turn down brand deals that are not interesting/amazing.
If you accept every single brand deal, not only your audience will dislike that (no one likes to follow someone who looks like an advertising channel) and brands will avoid you.
With these considerations in mind, and using Vogue and Matt Crump of Later as a source, here’s how much some of the most well-known influencers charge per post:
5-10k followers: $100-500
10-25k followers: $500-800
25k-50k followers: $800-1500
50k-100k followers: $1500-2000
100k-250k followers: 2-5K
250k-1M followers: 6-10K
1M+: 10K+
Of course, other relationship elements would matter as well, but this can serve as a base for your calculations.
As you know by now, determining the price of an influencer rate per post is not something simple and Misty Gant (Senior V.P of IMA Agency) shared that they calculate the rates “based on the reach, impressions, engagement, and industry (niche) of the influencer”.
As a campaign owner, I find this way of measuring to be pretty accurate and this is how I personally consider influencers for marketing campaigns.
It is also important to put things into perspective, as probably many of you are now thinking that it’s ridiculous for people to charge so much simply for making one post. If that is how you think, let’s deconstruct that reasoning:
Advertisers spend up to 5 million dollars (excluding production costs) for a 30-seconds Super Bowl commercial, in order to reach more than 100 million viewers. In those 100 million viewers, surely millions will not even be the ideal targeted audience, which means that only a % of those 100 million will actually be a potential customer.
So investing a much smaller amount of money to promote your brand to thousands of people who are niche targeted makes a lot of sense.
The difference is that the money is going to someone else (in this case, to the Instagram influencer).
Does it sound so unfair if we put it like this? Because both the Superbowl and the Influencer are doing exactly the same thing: providing exposure to your brand.
Posts from 500k+ fashion bloggers have already sold entire product lines in less than a day. Influencer Marketing works and @christinagalbato shared that she charged $2200 for a post and $700 for a story.
I know I have been speaking a lot about macro-influencers but let’s talk about micro-influencers now (i.e, users with a page size from 10k-100k followers):
In 2018, micro-influencers were responsible for 84% of ALL THE SPONSORED POSTS WORLDWIDE. So yes, they surely deserve a special mention in this post.
According to NeoReach, influencers with audience sizes from 50k-250k followers deliver a 30% better ROI (Return on Investment) per dollar spent than macro-influencers, and 20% better than influencers with more than 1 millions followers!
Finally, many brands are also paying for influencer getaways, sending influencers on vacations across the globe so that they can produce content in amazing places worldwide.
And when those places are luxurious, they are VERY expensive and brands don’t usually hold costs to provide these experiences to the influencer.
Ravelist studied one beauty brand and made an estimate regarding the cost of the trip. Considering the private jets, food, drinks, accommodations, activities and some extra costs, the trip cost was around 340K (and honestly it was probably more, as Ravelist also mentioned this was a modest estimate and the trip most probably surpassed half a million dollars).
So why do brands pay up?
Because it works and brings a return.
Are you shocked by that amount? If you are, it means that you are not seeing the bigger picture yet so let me throw in some more statistics for you:
According to Statista, a regular 30 seconds TV AD on the US costs approximately 360K (in the year of 2018 the price averaged 433K). And here we are speaking about 30 seconds of exposure.
What you see in social media whenever influencers do a partnership is simply the final result of dozens of hours invested.
I could do a whole new post regarding the backstage work that no one sees made by influencers but trust me when I say that being an influencer is a full-time job and it is much more exhausting and work-intensive than what meets the eye.
It’s easy to have opinions but when opinions are backed up with facts they are harder to debate. That was the reason I went all in to bring you a solid and informative post about the topic.
I will finish this post by leaving a source below that you can use in order to calculate (just an estimate of course) how much you can charge per post with your Instagram account.
Calculate your estimate posting rates here:
If you are new to influencer marketing and need to build your portfolio so you can get bigger rates, I’d love to work with you in an Aloette campaign.
Contact me for more details by clicking below:
Pssst- I’m Suzy! I am building a team of abundance minded women who take pride in service leadership and doing things outside the box. Is that you? Reach out to me and let’s chat!
Learn about the brand:
