The Truth About Influencer Marketing

If you’re thinking about including influencer marketing into your mix, a word of caution – influencer marketing is expensive and may not be appropriate for small teams with lean budgets.

What tends to work best with influencer marketing is saturation i.e. lots of micro-influencers over a month or two. Large whales (1+ million followers) are very expensive and you may not see the ROI on that investment, especially if they post about it just once.

So imagine it costs $2k for one post from an account with 80k followers. Now multiply that by 5 posts, then do this for a dozen or more influencers. You can see how that cost ads up.

Also, on most platforms, you have to state that the post is sponsored, and those get suppressed by the algo. So that post won’t actually reach their followers. Why? Because the platform isn’t getting paid on that transaction.

In order to have reach, you need to pay. So you’re paying for the influencer, AND the promotion on the platform (plus your time).

On many platforms, ads are skippable, so as soon as it looks or sounds like an ad, people skip. Sponsoring a series of podcasts may be good if the host weaves your product into the conversation, but that isn’t always easy.