Following influencers is now one of the primary ways people consume content on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. According to PEW Research Center, four out of ten adults in the U.S. follow at least one influencer and 75% of them have made a purchase based on a creator’s recommendation.
That’s the power of influencer marketing: content creators are not just entertainers, they are trusted sources for product discovery and lifestyle inspiration. Their authentic voices and niche appeal often make them more persuasive than traditional advertising channels.
In industries like beauty, fashion, health & wellness, and tech, influencer collaborations have become key drivers of consumer behavior and brand loyalty. They offer subtle yet impactful ways to connect emotionally with audiences, increase brand awareness, and boost ROI.
As part of a modern digital marketing strategy, evaluating the strategic fit between your brand and the influencers you partner with is essential. From analyzing content quality to audience demographics and engagement metrics, the right partnerships can keep your brand top of mind and top of feed.
Influencers are people who create, edit and post content (videos, pictures, audio, etc) on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Youtube and more. They post regular content, meaning that over time they have established a growing audience who follow the influencer in a parasocial relationship.
This relationship between the influencer and their audience is characterized for their credibility and audience trust.
What makes them powerful is their capacity to reach large amounts of possible customers by influencing purchasing decisions, fashions and communism trends through their content and personalized recommendations. By learning about social media, they have developed a niche expertise on how these platforms function to algorithmically push content to viewers.
The most important thing to note is that working with unreliable influencers can significantly impact your campaign’s ROI. Artificially inflating key metrics that don’t reflect real connections or results with your products is one of the main factors that negatively impact ROI in influencer marketing. Here you can read our investigation about how key metrics impact ROI in a negative way.
In other terms, partnering with these influencers can ultimately result in lower-than-expected engagement metrics and interaction with the brand. As a consequence, both the brand’s and the influencer’s credibility ends up compromised.
For this reason, conducting a fake follower audit is especially important for businesses and marketers who rely on authentic engagement and want to ensure that their influencer campaigns are truly worth the investment.
Moreover, working with trustworthy influencers gives you more reliable results for monitoring and reporting, and helps build a long-term growth marketing strategy from genuine metrics.
Nano influencers (1K–10K followers) have very high engagement and strong authenticity. Their hyper-niche reach makes them ideal for driving conversions and community engagement. They typically work for free products or low fees, but content quality can be limited due to lack of experience.
Micro influencers (10K–100K) offer high engagement and a good balance between reach and trust. They’re affordable, produce solid content, and are great for building brand loyalty and driving sales.
Macro influencers (100K–500K) provide wider exposure and high-quality content. Engagement is moderate, and costs range from $500 to $10,000 per post. They work well for campaigns focused on visibility and professional content.
Mega influencers (500K–1M) offer big reach but lower engagement and authenticity. They charge $5,000 to $50,000+ per post and are best for boosting brand awareness with polished, broad-appeal content.
Celebrities (1M+) bring massive visibility but the lowest engagement. Their high rates, often $50,000 or more, are suited for large-scale campaigns focused on positioning and reach rather than interaction.
Jack Edwards uses TikTok as his main social platform but he also has a Youtube and an Instagram. With over 742K Followers (which makes him a mega-influencer to partner with) he posts videos in the category of Booktok, a niche community on TikTok centered around reading.
Jena Frumes is a model that posts different things of her daily life on Instagram, like makeup, food or family. Currently, she has over 5M followers, which categorizes her as a celebrity. This means she will have an amazing reach, but not as good engagement or authenticity.
Kimberly Ann Jimenez is a youtuber who posts videos once a month talking and teaching about business and marketing tactics. She’s recentlyhit 85K subscribers, which means she’s a Micro Influencer. Here you can see an example of a specific niche to target depending on your brand.
As we explain more in-depth in this Ultimate Influencer Marketing Guide, Influencer Marketing is a new marketing strategy that originates from the rise of digital and strong personalities online. In Influencer marketing, brands partner with content creators who have strong audiences on their social media to connect with a certain type of consumers.
While traditional ads can be useful depending on the format and type of product and audience you want to reach, by involving influencers in your marketing campaigns you can start a different type of connection with the audience in a more genuine and personalized way. According to SproutSocial, this is because consumers prefer honest and unbiased content, making them more likely to engage with influencer content by 67%.
Choosing influencers who specialize about specific topics can enable your brand to reach niche audiences who will value your product on a more personal level. As we’ll se below, micro influencers generate high engagement with their niche audiences.
While traditional advertising needs high investment with little-to-no immediate return on the short run, influencer marketing campaigns do not represent significant costs for companies, making it a perfect option for small and starting brands, marketers and niche products and services. Currenltly, 26% of marketing agencies and brands allocate more than 40% of their marketing budgets to influencer partnerships. This is because businesses earn an average of $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing; the top 13% see returns of $20 or more.
By interacting online and impulsing creative content that relates to your brand, you are showing versatility, modernity and genuinity. All of those factors position the brand with an overall good sentiment and top-of-mind.
By asking influencers to generate content for your brand, you have an immediate mediator between your brand and possible customers. This mediator personalizes the experience of shopping in a way that directly speaks to your desired audience. This content later can be utilized in your own social media, or for paid advertising. This is because 93% of marketers report that user-generated content (UGC) performs better than traditional branded content.
Influencers are a great way of connecting potential consumers to brands without the need to invest large amounts of budget into traditional advertising. Even with no budget at all, brands can create gifting or affiliate campaigns that help achieve two main objectives of influencer marketing: brand awareness and conversions.
With influencers creating branded content on demand, there is a synergy where the brand receives several valuable elements at once: varied and high-quality content from professional creators, constant communication and visibility with their audiences, and genuine connections.
It’s not only about communicating your brand’s mission or benefits, but about building relationships within the industry that enhance your brand’s image and attract emotional connections with potential consumers. Brands need these elements to stand out and secure their space in the market and on social media platforms.
Sending a product as a form of payment in exchange for some content where the product is featured and reviewed. This type of collaboration is usually done with small-sized influencers or to test the affinity with the brand as a first time collaboration.
Make sure to clarify that you want content in return from the beginning, because gifting does nos guarantee posting in most cases. This is usually called “No strings attached gifting”
The influencer is provided with a personalized link and/or a discount code and will receive a percentage of the sales they achieve through posting. They become an affiliate of the brand granting them between 10-20% of commissions and a discount to incentivize their following to purchase.
In these cases, the link is substantial because it’s the key to track all sales and attribute them to that specific influencer.
You pay an influencer based on follower count and/or type of content you ask. All followers have a set of prices they can send you, but there’s plenty of ways to calculate and set a price that works for both parties.
Generally, the market pays 10$ for every 1000 followers. But, as we mentioned recently, paying only by followers is not a good practice. There are different ways to calculate payment for influencers.
When an influencer becomes brand ambassador, they start representing your mission and values in a profound way. It’s a form of long-term relationship where the influencer advocates and shares the vision of your brand as a whole.
This type of arrangement does not only promote a single product or a line of products. It amplifies and benefits both parties.
An influencer is sent a selection of products, vouchers or discount codes to distribute through their followers in the form of a giveaway hosted on their profiles. Usually, the influencer will ask their interested followers to interact, follow and reshare a specific post announcing the giveaway to enter for a chance to win.
This type of collaboration is a win-win, because it enhances reach and interaction for both the influencer, the brand and the collaboration. Want to know more about how to gain more than 50k followers with giveaways?
A hybrid form of collaboration where the influencer either appears on the brand’s social media platforms, appears in a livestream or works with the interal team to create the content together.
It’s a great way to make the brand’s presence online more informal and decontracturated by bringing fresh voices into your content.
With the influencer’s permission, they grant you access to their business accounts to run ads for your company through their profiles and with their own content. We’ve studied this can have many benefits, like allowing your brand to target new audiences that originally can’t be reached through your main social media channels.
When talking about social media influencers, take into account which social media they prefer as their main and as their secondary platform. This will give you key information regarding where to launch your Influencer marketing campaign.
As we see, Instagram dominates the field of creators and marketers in 2025, as well as LinkedIn, TikTok and Youtube. Influencers usually have between two and four accounts where they post their content.
In case you are taking on a paid campaign, there are three major ways on the industry to calculate a fixed rate for an Influencer post. Of course, this will all depend on your brand’s set budget for the campaign. In case you need rates divided by platform and by influencer type, you can find additional information on our Influencer Pricing Guide.
Independently of the market’s fees, with a small budget you can develop great relationships and deliver great results.
You pay a fixed fee based on the size of the influencer’s following. This is a factor that also helps determine other types of payment, but by using this method you need to be aware of the influencer’s full metrics and analytics to make sure that their following is organic and not fake.
As said before, the base industry formula is to give 10$ for every 1000 followers. Of course, this gives you a based estimate because you will need to adjust based on analytics, niche, region and more. In these cases, it’s good to take into account follower count and match it with the type of post, CPM or other payment type.
As shown in the table, Nano-Influencers usually cost between $10 and $100 per post. Micro-Influencers charge between $100 and $1,000, while medium-sized influencers can ask up to $1,000. Macro-Influencers range from $5,000 to $50,000, and those with over 1 million followers can charge more than $50,000.
You pay a fixed amount depending on the deliverable you ask. While a set of stories tend to be on the cheaper side, reels and long-format videos are one of the highest priced pieces on the market because of their qualities explained below.
Generally, influencers offer different packages of posting options that combine different formats and social media platforms.
By paying a fixed fee for a specific post type, you can also negotiate and determine from the start if the fee you pay includes content usage for paid advertising or organic posting.
You pay a number based on the estimated or guaranteed impressions For this, we use this formula after the post performance to determine payment to the influencer:
Formula = (CPM rate × impressions) / 1,000
This will allow brands to pay exclusively for the reach and visibility the influencer provided. For more information on How to Calculate the CPM of your posts, here is this helpful article.
Certainly, you can combine a lower based fee and match it with a gifted product, commissions and bonus based on performance after posting.
This is a good method for small brands starting on the industry. With hybrid payments, brands can motivate influencers to promote products in a more consistent and authentic way.
Define the main key aspects to achieve. Based on this, you can choose the ideal type of influencer marketing campaign. If you’re interested in conversions, maybe suggest affiliate marketing, but if you’re only interested in awareness or content-creation you can opt by gifting or giveaways or similar. This will also depend on your budget.
Make sure that your goals are not isolated, but that they have a broader structure and are integrated into the general marketing strategy of your marketing department.
Not all influencers are a match towards your brand, neither good to partner. Take into account everything mentioned before and start looking for influencers. Need more advice on choosing the right influencers? We’ve got you covered.
For that, we recommend usign an online tool like Influencer Hero that helps with every part or process involved in an Influencer Marketing campaign.
Inside Influencer Hero, you’ll have a database with over 16 million influencers across all main social media platforms, and you can use different filters to make the process easier. After that, you can automate the outreach and organize the negotiations based on their status. Finally, the software automatically captures all posts related to your brand and calculates results, giving you a report in seconds.
Also, you can manually check their profiles or use online tools to check some basic metrics, like engagement and audience credibility. Beware of these influencer common practices that may affect your brand:
Once you’ve selected the ideal influencers that match your brand’s mission, key messaging and image you can define methods of payment and set aside the budget for the campaign. It’s important to be transparent with payment methods to give a good image to the influencers.
A good brief should include a short description of your brand, key messagings, deliverables expected with timelines and do’s and don’ts with the content. If you can include some guides with links that give visual examples of what you expect, results and overall quality will be better.
Finally, the brief should be general enough to give influencers options and let them choose what matches best with their style and audiences.
Be genuine from the start with your campaign goals, proposals and incentive. Have clear agreements on deliverables, deadlines, usage rights, content ownership and payment terms.
In some cases, like in paid partnerships, long campaigns and brand ambassadors we recommend using contracts or written agreements to ensure both parts understand and align with the expectations.
Take into account key performance indicators (KPIs) like reach, engagement, clicks, conversions, and content reuse. Also analyze the content quality and the match towards your brand.
After gathering and measuring results, you can decide to nurture relationships with those content creators who performed well. The key to interacting with Influencers is to understand that what you’re developing is a relationship, not just a temporary transaction.
We recommend that brands actively continue developing relationships through different reonboardings, proposals and benefits. This way, brands can also start to maximize influencer-generated traffic in more ways than one.
Nurture relationships by:
Beauty and Fashion:
Beauty influencers created a boom in the makeup industry and often grow into celebrity status. They’re a perfect match for all beauty, skincare, accessories, and bathroom-related product. Fashion influencers promote clothing collections, styles, and aesthetics. They help accelerate fashion cycles and are ideal for online shops, shoes, accessories, purses, and beauty-related products. Fashion and beauty top influencer marketing niches, capturing 21.6% of the market.
Tech & Gaming:
Best reached on platforms like Twitch, these influencers share gameplay, reviews, and launches. They intersect with sci-fi, comics, and programming, making them ideal for software, tech gadgets, gaming accessories, and VPNs. This category is a complete success on Youtube, and headlines the chart with over 11.9% of influencer campaigns.
Fitness & Health:
These influencers promote healthy living by sharing gym exercises, diet routines, and nighttime habits. Ideal for sports and fitness brands, sustainable clothing, supplements, cooking appliances, natural skincare, and bedtime products. Instagram is a popular platform for health and fitness content, with a median of 979$ rate per collaboration.
Travel & Food:
These influencers review activities, cultures, and cuisines while sharing bucket lists, recipes, and travel tips. They’re ideal for hospitality, luxury travel items, cooking goods, creative experiences, and tourism services. TikTok is increasingly being used for this niche, and in total it account for 7% of influencer marketing niches.
Finance & Business:
These influencers offer financial advice and business content. It’s key to work with trustworthy creators. Great for promoting online courses, financial software, formalwear, luxury goods, and tech-related luxury items.
The clothing e-commerce brand Fashion Nova always has an influencer marketing campaign running. The brand became well-known six years ago after flooding the internet with pictures of different models wearing their products. They started with several micro-influencers and with product exchange, but later used celebrities like Kylie Jenner and turned them into Brand Ambassadors. These ambassadors were called “Nova Babes.”
Now, Fashion Nova has more than 22M followers solely on instagram, and was able to expand the brand immensely into other clothing areas like swimwear, plus size fashion, sportswear and men’s clothing as well.
A key aspect of their campaign is that they reuse the content in their website product pictures and on their social media.
The coffee and delicacy US store used a micro-influencer campaign to compete against Starbucks in the city of Philadelphia. Their objective was to be as authentic as possible and to convey a natural connection between the influencers and their audiences. To achieve this, they only recruited influencers with 50K followers or less, who created organic posts simply sipping Dunkin’ coffee in key spots around the city.
As a result, they reached over 1 million potential customers and achieved an overall engagement rate of 5.2%, making their influencer strategy a success.
To promote their new launch in 2020, Burger King took advantage of pandemic dances and asked popular TikTok creators Loren Gray, Avani Gregg, and Nathan Davis to make a video tutorial for a Whopper Dance. The idea was that the audience would copy them and post their interpretations of the dance, reaching even more people.
As a result, the hashtag #WhopperDance became viral on the app and the Whopper ended being one of the star products of the Burger King menu.
Brands already have very clear branding, key messaging, and benefits they want their audience to know. What usually will happen is that brands that have a very strong visual identity and imprint often have a hard time finding and choosing the ideal influencers to partner with.
This is because influencers generally do not have very curated content (they do what’s popular or what will attract views), and as a result, there will always be something that isn’t a perfect match with your brand.
That’s why we work to find middle ground with brands while curating a social media influencer marketing campaign. Concentrating on certain key elements and messaging will make it easier for brands to collaborate with various influencers who can bring different approaches to promoting their products. In this next article we help you define some categories on how to find the ideal influencers to work with.
Choosing the right platform, deliverables and content guidelines will go a long way in strengthening relationships and getting the results you actually want out of social media marketing.
A social media influencer is a content creator who builds trust and credibility with their audience by consistently posting content on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. They influence purchasing decisions, fashion, and social trends through genuine recommendations and lifestyle sharing.
Brands should collaborate with influencers because they offer higher engagement, access to niche audiences, cost-effective campaigns, stronger brand credibility, and valuable user-generated content that can be repurposed across marketing channels.
Brands can collaborate with influencers through gifting/bartering, affiliate or commission-based partnerships, paid campaigns, brand ambassadorships, giveaways, live collaborations, co-branded content, and whitelisting for ad access.
Influencers are categorized as nano (1K–10K followers), micro (10K–100K), mid-tier (100K–500K), macro (500K–1M), and mega/celebrity (1M+), with each category offering different levels of reach, engagement, and pricing.
Influencer payment can be calculated based on follower size, type of post requested, CPM (cost per thousand impressions), or a hybrid method combining a lower fee with commissions or bonuses based on performance.
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