Unlike most Influencer Marketing

In the age of technology, it is being used as a weapon of brand promotion.
The popularity of social media has increased rapidly in the country. This has opened up new avenues of marketing for companies. One of these is influencer marketing. Who are influencers, they have nothing to do with any celebrity. Any person can be an influencer. This can be you too. Provided that the number of people who follow you on the web and social media is great. It could be a cyber security blogger tweeting this, or a photographer posting a photo on Instagram.

Companies feel that these influencers, who dominate social media, can influence consumer preferences for a single brand or product. Due to this, the wind of influencer marketing has started. In the age of technology, it is being used as a weapon of brand promotion.

Therefore, it would not be wrong to call the influencer the celebrity of the 21st century. Surveys conducted by Yaap and IAMAI show that 75 percent of marketing teams associate the success of their campaigns with who they have a tie-up with. There is a tremendous competition among companies to attract the consumer. Influencers help a lot in this. They act as a link in connecting the consumers with the brand.

Did you know that influencer marketing is one of the top forms of digital marketing in terms of ROI? For every $1 spent on influencer marketing, brands earn up to $5.78 in return. That’s why 91% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is an effective form of marketing (Influencer Marketing Hub, 2020). One of the biggest challenges brands face with influencer marketing is how to choose the right influencers for their marketing campaigns. Since there are so many different types of influencers, it can be daunting to figure out which type of influencer you need to improve your marketing.

In this article, we’re going to share 12 types of influencers, how to identify them, and share with you how and when to use them to improve your marketing campaign ROI.

12 Types of Influencers You Can Use to Improve Your Marketing:

4 Types of Influencers by Follower Count

Influencers are popping up all over the place. It makes sense considering influencer marketing ROI is one of the highest among traditional digital marketing channels. But what’s the difference between types of influencers? Which influencer is best for your marketing campaign? How do you find the right influencers?

Keep reading to get all of your questions answered. We’re going to cover 12 types of influencers:

• Nano influencers (1K–10K followers)
• Micro influencers (10K–100K followers)
• Macro influencers (100K–1M followers)
• Mega or celebrity influencers (1M+ followers)

Let’s get started!

1. Nano Influencers (1K–10K followers)

Nano influencers have from 1K–10K followers on their social media channels. They typically have a very engaged social media following and great engagement rates. Nano influencers are typically very vocal advocates of the brands and products they love and their followers appreciate their authentic recommendations and commentary. They have a very close relationship with their followers and take the time to engage with their followers to cultivate those relationships.

When to Use Nano Influencers

If you’re a small- to mid-size business with a limited marketing budget, nano influencers are a cost-effective option for getting started with influencer marketing. Nano influencers are also a great option if you want to test a product launch or test your products and services with a new niche.

Where to Find Nano Influencers

Instagram is a great place to find nano influencers. You can easily find them using social media listening tools that will let you know about brand tags and mentions.

2. Micro Influencers (10K–100K followers)

Micro influencers have between 10K–100K followers. Even though they have a pretty large following, micro influencers are still viewed as relatable to their followers and tend to have an engaged audience. At this level, influencers tend to specialize in a particular niche. They also typically have high engagement rates and a targeted audience. This makes it easier for brands to create specialized sponsorships with these influencers.

When to Use Micro Influencers

When you’re ready to start generating more focused leads, micro influencers can help you with that. While they tend to have the same close relationship with their followers as that enjoyed by nano influencers, micro influencers are more specialized so their audience is primed to hear marketing messages within that niche.

Where to Find Micro Influencers

Once again, social listening is a big help in finding micro influencers to work with your brand. It’s easiest to look at micro influencers who are already fans of your brand or by searching for hashtags that relate to your brand, specialty, or niche.

3. Macro Influencers (100K–1M followers)

Macro influencers have between 100K–1M followers and tend toward a broader appeal than micro influencers. Macro influencers are typically internet-made celebrities and might be social media stars, bloggers, vloggers, or podcasters. Macro influencers not only have a large audience but it’s likely that they’ve developed that audience over months or years of nurturing relationships while growing followers. Because of their larger follower numbers, they will probably have a relatively low engagement rate.

When to Use Macro Influencers

Macro influencers are great for bringing awareness to your brand, products, and services. You can use this relationship to increase your own engagement rates and boost your brand’s reach. Since macro influencers have a healthy number of followers, they can help you reach a larger audience and increase your brand’s reputation.

Where to Find Macro Influencers

Macro influencers are typically popular for being content creators like bloggers or podcasters or could be social media influencers on YouTube, Facebook, or TikTok. Look for hashtags that relate to your brand, industry, and niche to find macro influencers for your brand.

4. Mega Influencers (1M+ followers)

Mega influencers and celebrities have more than 1 million followers. Since they themselves are typically celebrities, you’ll have to have a healthy marketing budget to afford them. It’s important to understand that the audiences attracted by mega influencers are going to be very broad.

When to Use Mega Influencers

If you’re working on a brand awareness campaign and have a large budget, mega influencers can get your products in front of as many eyes as possible which is great if your brand has appeal across segments.

Where to Find Mega Influencers

Mega influencers are usually famous or very well known so it’s not hard to find them. Instead of looking for brand mentions and hashtags for your brand, product, or niche, you’ll be better off finding accounts that qualify as mega influencers and see if any of them work for your brand.

8 Types of Influencers Based on Content or Niche

Sometimes you need an influencer in a specific niche. Here, we’re going to share 8 types of influencers based on their niches that you can use for your next marketing campaign.

5. Gamers

Gaming influencers typically fall into one of these sub-niches:

• Game reviews
• Tutorials
• Game walkthroughs
• Montages
• Challenges
• Team matchups
• Game type (action, FPS, MMO, strategy, etc.)

Gaming influencers usually live stream their games on platforms like Twitch and YouTube and can garner millions of followers who are looking to improve their own gameplay or learn more about gaming. While they often promote video games and game-related products and brands, gaming influencers represent such a targeted niche that vehicle, clothing, shoes, and snack and beverage brands are likely to get great results with a gaming influencer partnership.

6. Sports and Fitness

Like gaming influencers, fitness influencers can cover tons of different niches:

• Yoga
• Running
• Weight lifting
• CrossFit
• Healthy lifestyle
• Weight loss
• …and more

Sports and fitness influencers are typically a source of motivation for their followers. They tend to endorse sports brands, food and drink brands that relate to the health and wellness industry, specific eating and workout programs, and more.

7. Bloggers/Vloggers

Bloggers and vloggers are the two most popular types of influencers. They’re typically macro and mega influencers thanks to their large follower counts on their blogs or YouTube channels. Bloggers and vloggers create high-quality content that keeps their followers engaged and sets them apart as authorities in their niches. In addition to the audience that follows their YouTube channel or blog, they’re likely to have a large audience on other social media platforms, too.

Bloggers and vloggers have SEO on their side and can usually result in high-quality backlinks and get a fair amount of referral traffic through sponsored blog posts and videos. These types of influencers can help you build brand awareness, drive website traffic, and improve your sales.

8. Photographers

Photography influencers who fall into the mega through micro influencer categories tend to be picked up by big-name camera companies to promote their cameras, lenses, and other accessories. These influencers are some of the best content creators around.

9. Travel

Travel influencers offer more than just a huge dose of FOMO. Many travel influencers offer travel tips, tricks, and hacks, as well as reviews on travel-related brands and recommended itineraries complete with places to eat. Travel, like gaming and fitness, can be broken down into several niches like gear, places to visit, how-tos, and more.

10. Beauty

About 43% of consumers follow beauty influencers. These influencers share beauty tips, product reviews, how-tos, and more, and can easily increase your beauty brand’s awareness and increase sales. Influencers of this type range from average people of any or no gender who love makeup to professional makeup artists.

11. Fashion

Fashion influencers focus on things like clothing, jewelry, shoes, watches, and other accessories, giving them a broad range of products to promote. They typically offer product reviews, promote products, work directly with fashion lines, post-shopping trip “haul” videos, and offer styling tips.

12. Parenting

Parenting influencers share tips and tricks for new parents, review products, and share their own stories about being parents—both successes and failures. Parenting influencers can promote products across a very large range of industries.

Fake influencers are everywhere. These are accounts that pay for more followers and engagement so they look like they’re influential. While some of them are easy to spot, others take a bit more discernment. When you’re looking for the right influencers for your brand, there are a few metrics you can look at to make sure that an account is actually as good as they seem:

• Engagement rate
• Comments (look for quality comments)
• How the account reacts to comments
• Who’s following them
• Who they’re following

As influencer marketing becomes more lucrative, it’s no surprise that fake influencers are popping up more and more.

When everyone can be an influencer, it can get complicated to find the right influencers to represent your brand. Here are some factors other than influencer rates to think about during your influencer search.

Audience Match

Once you find an influencer with the follower count you’re looking for, take a look at who those followers are. Do they match your target audience? If they don’t, the influencer will probably have a harder time sharing your brand message. If they do, great! Before you go signing them up, though, check out the engagement and read some of the comments and responses to make sure that the engagement is what you’d like to see for your brand.

Authenticity, Passion, and Knowledge

Does the influencer you’re considering speak knowledgeably about your industry? Does their audience engage with their content—even their sponsored content? Does the influencer create their own content in their promotional messages? The right influencer for your brand is one that comes across as a relatable person sharing information about their favorite products instead of a salesperson. It helps immensely if they also have a passion for the niche.

Goal Match

Your goal has a lot to do with the type of influencer you’ll want to choose. For example, if you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, macro influencers with larger fan bases are probably going to be the most beneficial to you. If you want to increase conversions, however, nano or micro influencers might be your best bet thanks to their typically high engagement rates.

Platform

The platform an influencer uses is important, too. If your audience loves stunning imagery, you’ll probably want to find an Instagram influencer. If your audience goes crazy for video content, a YouTube influencer might be a better option. If you’re a B2B business targeting other businesses, find a LinkedIn influencer to partner with.

Instagram influencer pricing

Say influencer, and most people  – at least for now – will think of an Instagram influencer. And where there are influencers, there’s marketing. Instagram influencer marketing has become the key part of many brands’ efforts – particularly when they’re aiming to target certain demographics. Indeed, the platform seems tailormade for brands wishing to interact with prospective customers, with 90% of its 1.1 billion+ users following a brand. In Q4 2020, the total value of Instagram influencer marketing reached $8 billion.

Naturally, we have seen prices rise in proportion as the platform has become ever more indispensable. And influencers have become more confident of their power to sell products for brands, as this form of marketing moved from informal arrangements to a central pillar of a long-term strategy. Obviously, the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have been a disruptive force in so many areas of businesses, and the influencer marketing businesses felt its heat as well.

Using a different influencer-marketing pricing model, a little more focused on results, brands might expect to pay somewhere in the $250 to $750 for 1,000 engagements (Digiday/WebFX).

We get a more precise measure by virtue of a 2019 survey of 2,500 influencers conducted by Klear and published in eMarketer.

On Instagram, influencer pricing adheres to the fairly simple formula of: more followers = higher cost. Prices rise fairly proportionally, until we reach the point of celebrity influencers (with over 500k followers). At this point, we see close to a fourfold leap up from power-influencers (with 30-500k).

In terms of formats, you’ll pay a premium price for a video – somewhere around 50% more than you would for a post. Stories are the cheapest, presumably due to their ephemeral nature.

YouTube influencer marketing pricing

One of the consequences of lunching a video sharing service such as YouTube back in 2005 was that over time the YouTube influencer phenomena emerged. Some of influencers have become one of the world’s biggest celebs in their own right, the medium itself was, and still is, very conducive for people to share all sorts of information and become known and recognized in countless number of areas. YouTube was, along with Instagram and Facebook, one of the earliest platforms for the Influencer phenomena to emerge.

So, how much does YouTube influencer marketing cost?

On the graph below we stack together influencer post pricing for multiple platforms to show you the striking difference between YouTube influencer post rates and the rest of top social media platforms.

Now, the graph covers the 2014-2019 time frame plus 2021. Such timing allows us to see clearly how the introduction of TikTok and the massive exodus of influencers from YouTube and Instagram to TikTok have changed the influencer marketing pricing landscape.

As you can see,  you’ll have to shell out big money for influencer marketing using YouTube videos – though 2019’s $6,700 is not the high point. In 2017 you’d have to spend close to $8,000 for the pleasure. Prices dipped in 2018 to $4,085 and rose up to roughly $4,500 in 2021 – again, the existence of TikTok leaves YouTube a smaller part of the influencer marketing pie.

This pricing is based on a charging $20 for every 1,000 subscribers an influencer has on her or his YouTube channel, a scale continued up to $20,000 for an influencer with 1 million.

Various factors could well play into influencer YouTube videos pricing fluctuations: influencers become better known, smaller influencers are brought into the marketing mix (much better for some brands, we might note), bigger or smaller brands invest, etc.

Now, the COVID-19 pandemic hit influencers really hard, many influencers who ran ad campaigns for the traveling industry had to stop and cancel any campaigns abruptly.

To take a more end product-focused view, marketers utilizing YouTube influencer marketing might expect to pay $50-$100 for every 1,000 views. To give you some perspective, in 2021 an average YouTube video CPM (cost-per-mile or cost-per-view) was about $27 per 1,000 views, so at that point it was about essentially doubling your expenses, if you decided to work with YouTube influencers, as opposed to running ads via the YouTube ad platform yourself.

Finally, in comparison, shelling out on a tweet ($422) or a Facebook post ($395) is very much a discount option.

A representative of influencer marketing platform HYPR quoted in the 2017 Digiday report added a little bit of complexity to the pricing model quoted above. Beyond 50,000 subscribers, we might add $2,000 per 100,000 followers (50,000 followers would be equal to $1,000 using the above scale). When we reach 1 million it’s a bit more complicated, given the level of celebrity. At this stage we might expect to see a spend of $25,000-$50,000 per influencer marketing video.

Referring back to the more precise eMarketer/Klear stats, we again see that celebrity influencer marketing commands a considerable pricing premium over mere mortal influencers. Indeed, you would have to pay nearly five times more for an influencer with over 500,000 followers as compared with one with 30,000-500,000 followers.

It does not quite follow, however, that more followers = higher marketing expense. For whatever reason, according to these YouTube influencer marketing pricing stats, it seems you will pay more for a micro-influencer than for a power-influencer. Perhaps a reasonable assumption might be that these influencers exert a higher level of influence over their fanbases. Potentially they are operating in specific niches in which they claim a level of expertise. There’s no hard evidence for it here, but potentially power-influencers might be able to drum up regular business, which means they can afford to charge less per post. The other less edifying possibility may simply be that the sample is smaller in this bracket.

At all levels, YouTube is the most expensive influencer marketing channel, at least for now when TikTok hasn’t risen to the same heights YouTube has. Yet. Perhaps we might assume a certain expectation that YouTube videos would have slightly higher production values than the more personal/intimate format of an Instagram video. That said, pricing is relatively similar between the two video platforms at the power influencer and celebrity level. Lower down the follower count hierarchy, the YouTube influencer marketing premium is considerably more pronounced.

Facebook influencer marketing pricing

As we mention above, in most cases, Facebook influencer marketing is relatively cheap compared to other platforms. This is according to Izea, who pins the price of an influencer Facebook influencer post at a relatively bargainous $395. While the cost of a Facebook influencer post cost more in 2019 than it has in previous years, the cost has not followed a steady upward curve. Indeed, like Instagram and YouTube (according to Izea’s data at least) 2018 saw a decline in the cost of influencer marketing on Facebook – again, we are free to speculate as to why.

WebFX, on the other hand, set Facebook influencer marketing rates a little higher than Izea (remember, Izea’s averages make a like-for-like comparison imprecise at best). According to this source, you might pay $25 for the services of an influencer with 1,000 followers, $250 for one with 10,000, and so on (up to $25,000 for an influencer with 1 million followers).

The Klear influencer marketing stats published on eMarketer show an interesting dynamic in terms of Facebook influencer marketing pricing (this only considers posts, not breaking down media types). At the lowest nano level, it is the cheapest; climb up to micro-influencers and it is in the mid-point – more expensive than Instagram but cheaper than YouTube (though recall at the micro-influencer level there is a considerable premium on YouTube).

It again becomes the discount option at the power level, barring Instagram Stories. Like YouTube, for some reason, influencer marketing is cheaper at the power than the micro level. Again we might speculate that it has something to do with engagement or sample size.

Then we have the celebrity level: here Facebook once again commands a premium over stablemate Instagram, though is considerably cheaper than YouTube. We might assume this is a consequence of wider reach relative to the former, but lower required investment to produce content than the latter.

2021 data from Influencer Marketing Hub gives you the Facebook influencer pricing range based on tiers. It starts with just $25 for a Facebook post from Nano-influencer and all the way up to Mega-influencer that would charge you more than $25,000 for posting about your product or service.

Snapchat influencer marketing pricing

WebFX reckon you might pay $10 for every 1,000 views for Snapchat influencer marketing, up to $10,000 for a Snapchat influencer delivering 1 million views. Until November, 2020, follower count wasn’t public on Snapchat, so back then this measure was the only really way to accurately gauge the reach (or influence) of a Snapchat influencer.

Several years ago influencer Cyrene Quiamco gave Digiday a slighter higher scale.

If we consider views to be analogous with followers, then this would put Snapchat influencer marketing at a similar price point to Instagram influencer marketing. In reality follower count will be higher, thus making Snapchat the cheaper option.

Looking all the way back to 2016 – since when Snapchat has endured several peaks and troughs (though 2016 and 2019 were both good years so hopefully there’s some commonality) – Captiv8 estimated a snap from an influencer with 3-7 million followers would cost around $75,000. A snap from an influencer with 50,000-500,000 followers would be more like $1,000.

On this scale you might expect to pay $11-25 per 1,000 followers for a big Snapchat influencer, and $2-20 for a micro-influencer, which puts it close to what you would pay as a marketer on Snapchat Ads.

Twitter influencer marketing pricing

Twitter perhaps doesn’t get the same sort of coverage as some of the other influencer platforms, but it remains to be one of the world’s most notable social media platforms with a monthly active user base of more than 330 million people – and where there’s social, there’s influencers.

According to the BusinessInsider stats above, the average cost of an influencer tweet is $284 (2021). Interestingly, while all other platforms saw a decline in terms of the cost of influencer marketing in 2018, the average price of an influencer tweet shot up, 6-fold, from $48.

Here the WebFX influencer marketing stats are in sync with those of BusinessInsider, with Twitter offering the lowest cost influencer marketing option, at $2 a tweet for a Twitter influencer with 1,000 followers up to $2,000 for a Twitter influencer with 1 million.

In the 2017 UK eMarketer survey, marketers said they would pay £1,351 ($1,779) for a micro-influencer tweet, and as much as £64,798 ($85,339) for one from a celebrity.