There are diverse influencer marketing collaborations and, therefore, different ways in which you can pay influencers to promote your brand on social media.
Although there are various payment methods, choosing the right one depends on various factors, including your campaign goals, influencer type and size, and budget.
An Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report published by Influencer Marketing Hub shows that in 2024, 41% of brands opt to pay influencers, while 31% just offer them a free product. Additionally, nearly 60% of respondents who spend on influencer marketing intend to increase their influencer marketing budget over the next year.
Overall, it’s essential to establish clear, fair payment structures to keep influencers motivated and foster long-term relationships. In this article, we’ll review the top 5 ways to pay influencers, helping you choose the best option for your needs. These are:
Compensation is one of the key factors in driving a successful marketing campaign. It not only affects the motivation of creators to promote the brand and their overall performance, but it also impacts ROI.
You need to consider key elements, such as your marketing budget and the campaign’s objectives when choosing the right compensation structure.
The chosen compensation model should be clarified from the initial outreach, as it will largely influence whether influencers accept or decline your offer. It is important for creators to feel valued for their work and efforts, so brands need to understand this and approach them strategically.
Additionally, it is essential to be flexible and open to negotiation instead of making strict offers, as this will be perceived more positively by creators.
A flat fee or fixed payment is one of the simplest ways to pay influencers. It is also the most preferred payment type for influencers, especially for those working with a brand for the first time. This means they will receive an agreed-upon amount regardless of their performance or the number of referrals made, unlike affiliate partnerships or performance-based structures.
Influencer rates can vary widely, making it hard to understand what is a fair and reasonable offer. Rates can differ based on influencer size and platform or content type, but they can range from $2,000 to $5,000 per Instagram Reel post for macro-influencers and $300 to $1,000 for smaller accounts.
Other criteria to consider include engagement rate and performance metrics such as audience growth. Influencers with high engagement with their audiences are more in demand and can be more expensive.
Finally, payment will be directly influenced by the scope of work, such as the deliverables requested, campaign duration, exclusivity, etc.
That’s why we typically suggest working with fixed payments only after identifying that the influencers are potentially good performers.
To do this, consider running other types of campaigns, such as affiliate and gifting, to avoid fixed payments initially. This allows you to test their performance first through trial posts.
Once you've seen that the influencer performs well and can drive sales, you can make them a fair offer for another partnership, such as inviting them to your seasonality campaign or brand ambassador program, based on their previous performance.
This approach will reduce your cost, increase your ROI, and help you build a strong influencer program, fostering long-term relationships with high-performing influencers.
Tamara McCleary, CEO at Thulium, emphasized the power of long-term and sustained influencer marketing efforts: “A long-term influencer program allows your brand to create true brand advocates, powerful brand evangelists, and raving fans!”
Fixed payments can be done in two ways:
You can pay influencers a specific amount for each post they make. You can either offer a fee for a specific package of posts (such as 1 Reel post, 1 feed post, and 1 story on Instagram) or make an offer for each new post. Be sure to clearly outline the deliverables requested in exchange.
Paying per post is great for testing a creator’s performance and adding more posts throughout the campaign if you see good results.
For example, influencer @stampoilsmama, who focuses on family and parenting content, typically partners with child product or maternity brands and charges them per promoted post. She has high engagement (3%) and over 140K followers.
Influencers with more than 100K followers are more likely to demand fixed payments, and especially those who need to show their children in the content.
How much should you pay per post or for a specific package of deliverables? This will highly depend on the selection of influencers and their size, their previous performance (if they have already worked with you), as well as your available budget for the campaign. Related to this, it’s crucial that you first try to understand how to calculate and plan your influencer marketing budget.
Paying influencers on a recurring basis each month in exchange for ongoing promotion. This is typically the case for a Brand Ambassador who posts frequently about the brand or product in exchange for a monthly fee.
This approach is ideal for brands looking to build and foster long-term partnerships.One of its main advantages is to create credibility around the influencer and guarantee their ongoing commitment to the brand or product.
Some of the benefits of paying flat fees to influencers include:
In both cases, we suggest creating an influencer contract to clearly establish the terms and provide legal protection.
Additionally, when working with fixed payments, it is important to outline the brand’s expectations and posting guidelines through a campaign brief. This clarifies the scope of work, including deliverables and timing, and ensures alignment to avoid any errors.
Affiliate marketing means paying influencers a commission percentage on the sales made through their promotional content (often called “referrals” or “attributed sales”). Therefore, their compensation is based on their performance or results driven.
This can be mutually beneficial: it prevents brands from paying excessive fixed payments without a guarantee of how many sales the influencer will drive, and it rewards influencers for their work fairly.
For instance, many Fashion, Lifestyle, or Home and Decor influencers share their favorite products from brands they have partnered with on their LTK, Flagship, or Amazon storefronts. They earn an affiliate commission whenever a product is purchased through these links.
Additionally, they often receive free products, which they promote through story posts. These posts include a custom link and discount code for their followers, from which they also earn a commission on all referrals. A few examples of this are the micro-influencer focused on Lifestyle and Family, @everydayextra_, and the macro-influencer focused on home organization, @ashleyrosereeves.
Commission based partnerships are a good way to engage influencers for long-term relationships. Most influencers are more open to affiliate marketing once they have already worked with the brand.
For example, Olivida, a skincare and beauty brand located in the Netherlands, combined a gifting and affiliate model in their initial campaign. They sent out hundreds of products to keep costs low while identifying top-performing influencers to maximize ROI. As a result, they achieved an impressive 7.2X ROAS (marketing costs included COGS for gifting, shipping, and affiliate payments). Additionally, they identified seven top-performing influencers who were subsequently invited to join their Brand Ambassador program for a long-term partnership.
Offering commission as payment motivates influencers to maximize their performance and, therefore put more effort into their content.
Additionally, it allows to track the influencer’s performance and therefore the campaign’s success in real time through a customized affiliate link, which attributes sales to the influencer.
Therefore, this approach is ideal for conversion campaigns aimed at driving direct sales and maintaining a positive ROI.
The percentage offer depends on your budget, which you should analyze in advance, but an attractive offer typically varies from 10% to 30%.
You should consider that the commission paid to influencers covers only attributed sales. The industry average attribution rate for D2C brands with affiliate marketing is around 70%. This means that, as with any other digital marketing strategy, a significant portion of sales made by influencers are unattributed.
Therefore, when preparing your offer, consider that the amount you’ll pay to them will be around 30% less than the value they provide, leaving more margin for your budget.
In addition to the affiliate percentage, a good approach is to offer influencers a discount code for their followers. This will help them feel valuable to their audience by giving them access to a special deal and encouraging sales.
For you, the commission you’ll pay to influencers will be on the final price of the order, so even though you provide a voucher code, this will decrease the commission amount.
Tip!: There are several influencer marketing tools that can help you scale and manage affiliate and gifting campaigns by tracking clicks and conversions using personalized affiliate links and discount codes.
Negotiation is a crucial step for the success of every influencer marketing collaboration. However, this is especially important to onboard influencers for affiliate campaigns.
Many influencers may not be open to this kind of compensation first, but we’ve found that after efficient and strategic negotiation tactics, they can end up agreeing to an affiliate partnership as an initial collaboration.
Gifting is when brands offer a free product or service to an influencer in exchange for promoting their product across social media.
For example, a restaurant could offer a complimentary meal for an influencer in exchange for a social media post, or a hotel could provide a free stay in exchange for UGC.
Basil Thai, a restaurant located in Austin, invited foodie and lifestyle influencers to enjoy a free meal at their venue in exchange for a social media post. This approach resulted in over 20 influencer partnerships within a month and generated over 100K impressions.
In addition, Beauty influencers frequently receive free and high quality skincare or makeup products to feature through an unboxing or tutorial video. This can result in genuine recommendations or opinions about the products. An example of this is @madisonmiller.
This method is great and the most cost-effective for brands, as it allows them to gain social media exposure through influencers’ credible and authentic voices and high-quality UGC that they can reuse at a very low cost.
However, it can be the hardest type of payment to achieve, as most influencers are seeking other forms of monetary compensation. Some influencers may even be offended by the sole offer of gifting, so it is important to approach the situation politely and strategically.
Performance-based incentives or bonuses involve paying influencers a specific amount only when they achieve or exceed certain goals or metrics. For example, this could include generating a specific amount of sales, referrals, clicks, or achieving a certain engagement rate.
For this type of compensation model, it is essential to rely on a tracking system or tool to assess performance accurately and compensate influencers fairly. For example, affiliate or subscription links, discount codes or influencer management tools.
Additionally, it is important to outline the campaign’s goals and KPIs that will be measured, ensuring the influencer is aligned with these objectives and motivated to maximize their efforts.
For instance, foodie and healthy lifestyle influencer @joyfulvegan may sometimes partner with cooking or food brands for a small fixed payment, plus an additional bonus based on performance, such as the amount of sales generated through her content.
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Influencers typically prefer to receive fixed payments to guarantee an upfront amount regardless of performance, while brands often prefer to offer commissions since they pay fair prices based on the results achieved through influencers. Therefore, a good ground in between is a hybrid model that combines all the compensation methods described above!
Brands can offer influencers a reduced fixed fee in addition to a commission or incentive based on performance. This approach can help keep both parties satisfied!
Additional incentives can include a commission or affiliate percentage on every sale made through the influencer’s affiliate link or a fixed bonus that they will receive if they achieve certain KPIs with their content, making it performance-based and previously agreed upon.
Therefore, additional rewards such as bonuses should be measured based on KPIs such as conversions, engagements or clicks, which needs to be clarified in advance.
Influencers are typically more open to performance-based commissions or bonuses when working with established brands in a long-term partnership.
It is important to understand that, while the previously mentioned compensation models can work for all social media platforms—such as YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok—they may operate differently on each platform.
For example, YouTube is one of the most expensive platforms. Therefore, it may be more challenging, though not impossible, to onboard influencers only for gifting or affiliate campaigns. YouTubers' standard rates are typically higher than those on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and they are likely to request fixed payments, usually on a pay-per-post basis. Of course, the rate will depend on the content type; long-form videos or full reviews are more expensive than shorts.
To give you an idea, a YouTuber with 100K to 300K followers could have a base rate of $2,000 to $6,000 per video post. In contrast, an Instagram Reel post for an influencer of the same size could cost around $500 to $3,000.
A 2024 survey from HubSpot about influencer preferences revealed that significantly more brands prefer to partner with smaller accounts, such as nano-influencers (44%) and micro-influencers (26%), compared to those focusing on larger influencers like macro-influencers (17.4%) and mega-influencers or celebrities (12.9%).
One of the main differences between micro and macro influencers is that micro-influencers are often more cost-effective. They typically have significantly lower rates and are more likely to accept gifting or affiliate commissions instead of a fixed payment.
If you are willing to work with fixed payments, determining a fair fee for an influencer involves considering several factors, including follower count, social media channel, content requested, and previous performance.
Follower count is particularly important in determining the appropriate compensation model. Let’s review first the influencers segmentation according to their size:
While nano and micro influencers are more open to working with gifting and affiliate payments, macro influencers often request a hybrid model that includes a fixed payment, and mega influencers or celebrities may always charge per post.
Additionally, influencer rates can vary widely. A micro-influencer may charge between $100 to $400 for an Instagram Reel or Feed post, while a macro or mega influencer may charge between $500 to $2,000 per post.
Managing influencer partnerships can be time-consuming. Beyond negotiating and communicating to reach an agreement and collecting their posts, you also need to track their performance to assess their earnings (in case of affiliate models) and process their corresponding payments. Whether it’s earned commissions or fixed payments, handling payouts for multiple influencers requires detailed attention. This is where an influencer payment tool can be extremely helpful to track performance and automate massive influencer payments.
For example, Influencer Hero, a SaaS platform designed to streamline the entire influencer management process, can assist with processing influencer payments through a personalized dashboard. It’s quite simple: influencers are invited to enter their bank details into a secure dashboard, and you can process payments through Stripe with the click of a button, using your credit card.
Regarding the payment method, the most popular are: Wire Transfer, Stripe, Paypal, manual transfer or a third-party payment service, such as Wise.
When working with fixed payments, it is ideal to draft a contract and have it signed by both parties involved to outline all terms and conditions of the collaboration. A contract helps align expectations, responsibilities, rights, and the scope of work, including the compensation the influencer will receive and the payment terms.
In affiliate and gifting campaigns, however, a contract is not strictly necessary and, in some cases, may be avoided. Since influencers are not offered a fixed payment, a contract in these cases can sometimes cause friction and lead to lost deals. On one hand, avoiding the paperwork benefits brands, but on the other hand, a contract can serve as a safeguard for content guidelines. Without a contract, the brand may have limited ability to enforce content requirements.
An influencer legal agreement also clarifies clauses related to cancellation and termination, confidentiality or exclusivity, and usage rights.
You can access our free templates to draft a successful influencer contract and read more about what key factors they should include and when they are necessary.
Additionally, there are several legal aspects to consider when paying influencers, including:
Back in 2022, the most popular influencer payment method was fixed payments, used by 49.6% of brands. This was followed by affiliate commission models, which accounted for 42%.
However, over the last two years, this has changed significantly. The most common method is now affiliate commissions, used by 49.6% of brands, while flat fees now represent just 24.1%.
There's no general rule on what type of influencer compensation model is most effective for every brand or partnership. It all depends on your brand’s segment or product, your campaign’s goals, and, most importantly, your available budget.
Additionally, it will largely depend on the creator’s preferences. However, strategic negotiation during the outreach communication is crucial for all types of payment models to determine your onboarding success.
Combining different payment methods—the hybrid model—is always a great approach and mutually beneficial for both parties. When working with affiliate, gifting, or fixed payments, try to combine them to keep your costs low and your budget predictable while also keeping the influencer motivated and satisfied.
The steps you should follow to decide on the best compensation model for your influencer campaign are as follows:
Identify whether your primary goal is brand awareness and reach or engagement and targeting a specific niche. This will guide you in selecting the type of influencers that will best achieve your objectives—whether micro or macro influencers.
Define the budget available for your influencer campaign, to allocate it wisely. Determine the maximum offer you can make to each influencer based on this budget.
Choose the platform that best aligns with your campaign’s objectives, product, and target audience. Is it a younger audience most likely present on Tik Tok or an older demographic using mostly Instagram?Consider also the type of content you wish to create, whether it should be long-form (e.g., Instagram Reels or YouTube reviews) or short and engaging (e.g., TikTok or Instagram Stories).
Use an influencer management platform or tool, or conduct manual searches to find influencers who align with your brand and objectives.
Before making formal offers, test influencers over time to assess their performance. During this phase, consider running affiliate and gifting campaigns. Distribute free products (if possible, hundreds of them!) and set up an affiliate program offering influencers a commission on sales generated through their content, in exchange for initial posts.
Based on the performance data you’ve gathered from the affiliate campaigns, invite your top-performing influencers (those who have made over 5 to 9 sales) to participate in a seasonality campaign. In this opportunity, offer them a fixed payment per post or a package of posts, calculated on their previous performance. This approach helps maximize ROI and build long-term relationships with high-performing influencers.
All things considered, starting with gifting and an affiliate partnership is one of the best approaches in influencer marketing during what we call the testing phase. Creating a successful influencer marketing program requires time and patience. It is crucial to evaluate influencers over some time to identify those who can drive sales first, so you can then consider other compensation packages for future collaborations based on their previous performance.
This typically represents a small portion of all the influencers you reach out to—according to the Pareto principle, around 20% of the influencers you work with generate over 80% of your revenue. However, this portion will compensate for most of your costs and bring the real ROI.
You can see this real example of how a brand spent the initial months testing influencers' performance through affiliate programs and gifting, and then invited the identified high-performing influencers to a seasonality campaign, resulting in over $100 K sales.
Influencer payment models include fixed payments, where influencers receive set fees per post or monthly retainers, and affiliate or commission-based payments, where they earn a percentage of sales. Other models include gifting, where influencers receive free products in exchange for promotion, and performance-based incentives, which offer bonuses for achieving specific metrics or sales goals. Hybrid models combine fixed fees with performance-based rewards.
To determine the right payment amount, consider factors such as the influencer's audience size, engagement rates, previous performance, campaign goals, and your budget. Research industry standards and negotiate based on the influencer's value and expected deliverables.
It depends on your campaign goals. Fixed payments offer predictability and are preferred by influencers, ensuring upfront compensation. Commission-based payments align the influencer’s earnings with performance, potentially leading to more motivated promotion. A hybrid model often balances both approaches.
Start by clearly outlining your campaign goals and expectations. Be open to negotiation and consider the influencer's previous experiences. Offer flexible payment options and be willing to adapt your proposal based on their feedback to foster a positive partnership.
The main risks include unpredictable costs and potential underperformance if the influencer does not generate enough sales. Additionally, influencers might prioritize brands offering fixed payments if they feel commission rates are too low or uncertain.
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