The influencer marketing market has grown at a rapid pace in recent years. Previously associated only with a few celebrities endorsing a brand, this type of marketing is now omnipresent. Bloggers, YouTubers, podcasters, TikTok personalities—everyone is partnering with brands to promote them.
For content creators and influencers, it’s a significant revenue source, funding their brand and production costs. It’s a way for businesses to target potential consumers precisely and very directly. For example, a financial planning app teaming up with a vlogger specializing in personal finance will reach a clientele already interested in the topic and, therefore, more likely to subscribe.
Companies like Helix Sleep and NordVPN seem to have partnered with virtually every YouTube content creator at some point in the last five years. Finding a promo code for their products is practically as easy as opening a random YouTube video!
What’s Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that is particularly prominent on social networks. Content creators, also known as influencers, endorse brands or products and promote them through the content they create.
The concept behind influencer marketing—paying an influential personality to promote a brand—isn’t totally new, but its widespread use online is. We need only think of celebrities endorsing brands and becoming their spokespersons for years, such as George Clooney and Nespresso or Michael Bublé and Bublé Bubly.
The difference is mainly one of scale: brands pay smaller visibility contracts to several content creators whose audience is compatible with their brand. The distribution channels are also more specific and targeted than campaigns with spokespeople, which use more traditional means such as billboards or TV advertising. The latter often have greater potential visibility but target their audience less precisely.
Influencer marketing is particularly effective, given the high level of trust between influencers and their audience. In the consumer’s mind, if someone they listen to religiously every week and who shares their values endorses a product, it’s necessarily a good product for them.
Influencer Marketing in 6 Figures
21.1 billion dollars
That’s the estimated value of the influencer marketing market in 2023. This represents an increase of 29% over last year and 1100% since 2016. The exponential growth of the second half of the 2010s is losing momentum but remains impressive nonetheless.
For marketing companies interested in taking the leap, there’s still room to grow and prosper. The competition is fierce, however, and it’s hard to stand out from the crowd.
1,000 to 10,000 subscribers
That’s the number of subscribers needed to be considered a nano-influencer, the most popular category of influencer among marketers. The cost of partnerships with nano-influencers is more affordable than with celebrities and much more compatible with the financial reality of most companies.
Smaller communities generally reach their product’s target audience more precisely. They comprise a more homogeneous cross-section of highly engaged individuals than communities of millions, which are much more heterogeneous.
In fact, 69% of brands prefer to partner with content creators with nano (less than 10,000) and micro-influencers (less than 100,000). The latter have an average engagement rate almost three times higher than mega-influencers (1 million or more).
$5.20
That’s the average return on investment (ROI) for every dollar spent on influencer marketing. This figure can even reach over $20 for the most successful campaigns. This performance is excellent and ranks influencer marketing alongside e-mail and SEO (search engine optimization) as one of the highest-paying methods. The costs of these latter methods are particularly low, achieving an impressive ROI of 36:1 and 22:1, respectively.
A ratio of 5:1 is often considered ideal to keep the cost of marketing a product or service reasonable in relation to production costs. Influencer marketing achieves this ratio relatively easily with its more precise targeting of potential consumers.
9¢
That’s the average revenue a creator receives for each view of their sponsored content. That may not sound like much, but for a very popular content creator with tens of millions of subscribers, it represents partnerships that can be worth seven figures!
The influencer or content creator is paid either on a cost-per-mille basis, a cost-per-action basis, or a fixed fee per publication or mention. Whereas in 2022, the fixed fee was the preferred payment method in 49% of contracts, it now represents only 20% of agreements, and the revenue-sharing method has become the most popular in 2023, at 53%.
The cost of sponsorship varies widely between platforms and formats. An ad at the start of a YouTube video is more expensive than one at the end. A publication 100% dedicated to the product is, in turn, much more costly than an advertising message or a simple product placement on Instagram.
3.86%
This represents the average engagement rate among micro-influencers (5,000 to 100,000 followers) on Instagram, the preferred platform for a majority of marketers. This rate rises to 4.21% among nano-influencers (1,000 to 5,000) and drops rapidly to less than 1% among the largest influencers.
Despite Instagram’s massive popularity in terms of marketing investment, engagement is highest on TikTok, even among mega-influencers (1 million followers or more), who see rates of up to 10%!
32%
According to Hubspot survey results, this is the proportion of Gen Zers who have made a purchase after seeing a sponsored post on a social platform. Among millennials, it’s closer to 21% who have done so; among Gen Xers, it’s barely less, at 18%.
In addition, almost half of people rely entirely on the recommendations and opinions they find on social networks to choose a product. Influencers’ opinions, therefore, weigh relatively heavily in the balance when it comes to making a purchase.
32% is also the estimated proportion of companies’ marketing budgets that will be invested, on average, in social network advertising campaigns by 2023 in France.
Influencer Marketing at Crakmedia
Crakmedia certainly follows this trend: influencer marketing is everywhere, even here. Through some of our partnerships, we’ve had the chance to experiment with this approach, which paid off in 2022 when we won gold at the Influencer Marketing Awards in London. We were competing against major brands such as IKEA and Mastercard, making our victory all the more incredible!
Crakmedia has been growing steadily for several years and expects to continue to do so in 2024, with the projected addition of a couple of dozen new positions. Part of this growth is the direct result of significant investments in developing the influencer marketing sector and cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies.
Thanks to its expertise in affiliate marketing, Crakmedia is also ideally positioned to put brands and influencers in touch with each other and equip them to manage these partnerships using the most reliable and powerful technologies on the market.
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Would you like to discover the world of influencer marketing at one of the fastest-growing marketing companies in the country? Explore our job offers and send us your resume: crakmedia.com/carreers/
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