Here’s How to Choose and Accurately Price an Influencer
If it’s good enough for Kim K, it’s good enough for us. Influencer marketing – specifically pet influencer marketing – is making big waves in marketing. It’s been estimated by MediaKix that by 2025, influencer marketing spend will be at and above $10 billion, so the biggest question isn’t how much you’re going to spend, but rather it’s where you’re going to spend it: on human influencers, or pet influencers?
How do they compare?
The Case for Human Influencers
Human influencers can be a high-risk, high-reward investment. On the plus side, humans are able to relate to their audience on a more intimate level because they can offer their personal recommendation. People value a trustworthy opinion from someone they already like and follow.
Unfortunately, though, human influencers aren’t perfect. For example, they can make mistakes and get involved in Internet drama. All too many have found themselves ‘cancelled’ – some ‘haters’ going as far as changing their consumption habits to spite an influencer they dislike (e.g. if a consumer sees an influencer, they dislike drinking a Pepsi, they may opt for a Coke next time they are shopping).
In Favor of Pet Influencers
On the other hand, pet influencers can be characterized as a low-risk, high-reward investment. Pets have been going viral since the start of the Internet – it might be 2021, but we still can’t get enough cat videos. Animal content is some of the most viewed content on the Internet.
Animals are innocent – they’re not threatened by ‘cancel culture’. Plus, as animal rights activism has gained popularity, more people are actively invested in the welfare of animals. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t love their pet – so your potential audience of consumers is wide.
Here’s what the Instagram algorithm cares about these days: shareable, savable content. You’ll be rewarded when you share content that people add to their saved content, as well as when people send your post around or share it to their story. The good news is that animal content is some of the most shareable content on social media.
Younger generations who spend lots of time-consuming fun pictures and videos are growing in their care for animals and the environment. This is especially important as younger generations, like Millennials, have surpassed older generations in population. Millennials also account for the majority of pet owners.
The one potential downside to utilizing pet influencers is that they may not relate to their human audience as well as another human influencer. Consumers are smart and know that realistically, there is a human behind the animal account, but they still enjoy their fun, happy content.
After comparing these two types of influencers, your brand has a decision to make: which one are you going to use? When it comes to valuing pet influencers versus human influencers, you must decide what you’re looking to accomplish with an influencer marketing campaign.
How To Price Out an Influencer
As discussed here, there are many incorrect ways to price out an influencer. Most commonly, people assume that price per post should be based on follower count.
While Pets on Q is happy to share that our roster has a total of over 80 million Instagram followers, what matters more is our pet influencers’ level of authentic engagement. Human influencers have been known to artificially increase both their follower count through a variety of tactics including bots, purchased accounts, and engagement ‘pods’ with other influencers.
That is why we at Pets on Q utilize a proprietary formula based on authenticated engagement in order to price out our pet influencer bookings. When utilizing our booking platform, we can even show you how analytics and data can help figure out the pricing and valuation for specific accounts. Our booking platform allows access to all forms of analytics including followers, engagement rate, authentic engagement, and types of content, all so that you can create the best campaign possible.
The fact of the matter is that influencer marketing is a valuable tool that has become widely available to marketers across hundreds upon thousands of brands and products. Influencer marketing is a good strategy and investment, but with the right influencer it can become a great strategy and investment.
Oftentimes, finding the right influencer for your campaign is half the battle. For more information on tackling that challenge you can check out our blog post here or sign up for our Booking Platform to quickly narrow down the right influencer for your campaign.