With the explosion of influencer marketing in recent years and a more saturated space, it can be hard to know your worth. Follower count is slowly becoming less important while engagement reigns king. It can be a fine line to walk between charging too much or undercutting all your hard work with such a low price. Whether you’re in the beginning stages of working with brands or it provides your full-time income, here’s a quick guideline for calculating influencer rates:

Get Comfortable

There’s a certain stigma in our society that makes us uncomfortable talking about money. Throw this idea out the window, especially if you’re trying to make this your full-time job. Once you’re comfortable talking numbers and not afraid to tell brands your rates, it will make negotiation SO much easier and less stressful for you.

Choose Your Platform

Many larger influencers focus most of their effort on the platform that has their largest audience. This will play a large part in calculating your rates because a 2 minute branded video will take much more time and effort than a quick Instagram Story. Use your platform as a way to negotiate and don’t be afraid to let the brand know an estimated time it would take for you to create the content they’re requesting. This can useful when dealing with brands who may not want to pay your full rate and can help them realize just what they’re asking for.

Know Your Stats

Since your rates are largely based on your stats, it’s important to research yours accordingly before setting your rates. While follower count is still important, it’s slowly been passed up by engagement rate in recent months. Brands are catching on to fake followers and are looking to partner with more influencers who have engaged, loyal followers to promote their products. Some of the most important stats to jot down are your reach, impressions and number of comments. This should all be relatively easy to find in your Instagram Insights if you have a business account or your YouTube statistics if you’re using that platform. 

Set Your Rates

Once you’ve estimated how long a project will take and what’s needed to make it happen, it’s time to calculate your rates. To be completely honest, this will be totally different across the board and even people with the same followers/engagement can set different rates for themselves. It all depends on knowing your worth and what YOU feel comfortable with. One standard we’ve seen across the industry for Instagram is charging about $100 for every 10,000 followers you have.

We recommend keeping a relative price sheet of what you’d charge for Instagram posts, stories, videos, etc. so you can refer back when a brand makes an offer or wants a packaged deal. You can also use sites such as Influencer Marketing Hub to calculate a good example of what your rates should be. However, these are more of a guideline so feel free to use these as a good baseline.

Leave Room to Negotiate

Possibly the most important part of setting your rates and working with brands is the negotiation process. Very rarely will you land a deal based on the first price. This also depends heavily on the deliverables and if the brand is wanting just one post or a packaged deal. We recommend quoting a little higher than your normal rates on your first go around since the brand will usually want to negotiate down. This also gives you room to stay around your base pricing and work with the brands if they want multiple deliverables. One thing that’s important to know is if the brand will also be receiving full rights to the content you create. If the brand wants to use your content for their website, social media, ads, etc. this is oftentimes a great add-on to your pricing if you’re comfortable handing over the rights.

Do you have any tips for calculating your own influencer rates? Let us know so we can share them in a future post!