Why will Influencer Marketing budgets pursue their booming in 2022?

Influencer marketing, a guarantee of effectiveness for brands

For a few years now, influencer marketing has been gaining momentum in the virtual commerce landscape. It is a fact that Internet users are attached to the recommendations of other users, especially those of influencers. Remember that 52% of online shoppers rely on reviews before making a decision. In other words, social proof triggers the purchase!

So today, the advantages of influencer marketing are undeniable:

• Better visibility for brands with a high engagement rate;
• New customer acquisition channel;
• Customer experience based on emotion and trust.

Investing in Influencer Marketing is choosing a wise, powerful and profitable marketing tool.

Key figures for Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has been posting record figures since 2020 and continues to seduce brands. This trend can be explained by a buoyant health context and the development of social platforms such as Instagram or TikTok.

An overview of the figures for the sector worldwide:

• 13.8 billion dollars spent on influencer marketing in 2021 with a projection to 15 billion by 2022 (Source Oberlo).
• Since 2019, more than 240 influencer marketing agencies have been created to facilitate the matchmaking process. Remember that in 2015, only 190 influencer platforms existed.
• More and more influencer campaigns: 2163 in the third quarter of 2020 and 2901 at the end of the same year. (Source Influencer Marketing Hub)

The ROI of influencer marketing

Brands are turning more and more to influencers, but why such a craze? Beyond all the arguments we mentioned above, there is one major one: the ROI or Return on Investment.

For those who take the time to measure their performance – 67% of companies – the results speak for themselves:

• According to the OBERLO study, for every dollar invested in influencer marketing, your added value is 18 dollars. That’s 11 times more than a traditional advertising budget!
• Most marketers agree that influencer marketing is far more profitable than SEO, emailing or social media advertising.

If ROI allows you, in a very significant way, to know the impact of your campaigns, you can also observe your EMV – Earned Media Value. This indicator reflects the visibility of your brand among consumers and influencers. Thus, the sum of the mentions granted will give you valuable information on the success of your influence strategy.

More and more budget dedicated to Influencer marketing

Budgets are exploding because the majority of marketers are using influencer marketing. The Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2021 benchmark reveals that 83% of companies dedicate a specific budget to influencer marketing. The correlation is therefore obvious!

What budget should be allocated to Influencer Marketing?

When reading all the reports on the overwhelming phenomenon of influencer marketing, it is clear that marketers are investing more in this strategy today. For example, 71% said this year that they want to increase their influencer marketing budget compared to 2020. In 2019, only 57% planned to increase their influencer marketing budget.

So with over 13 billion spent in 2021, how are companies allocating their budgets? More than half are spending 20% of their budget on influencer marketing and they are willing to invest €40,000.

Where are brands investing?

The trend observed this year is first and foremost the use of micro (between 10k and 100k subscribers) and nano-influencers (less than 10k subscribers).  Indeed, brands are prioritising quality over quantity. Their objective is to have an engaged community (even if smaller) rather than to gather a large number of inactive subscribers. Closer to their community, this typology of influencers can more easily multiply exchanges and shares.

Let’s remember here the importance of collaborating with influencers who already like your brand and your products, who correspond to you and share your company’s values. The engagement will be better and will guarantee the success of your influence campaigns.

Secondly, what are the biggest acquisition channels for influencer marketing?

• Instagram is by far the most popular platform for brands. Most marketing agencies use sponsored posts and stories for their influencer campaign.
• Facebook comes in 2ᵉ position, closely followed by YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat and then LinkedIn.

The choice of social network remains paramount in your strategy. Just because a particular platform is popular does not mean you have to be there at all costs. What is good for one company may not be good for another. Use common sense and analyse both your target and the choice of influencer.

Our advice for 2022: don’t neglect Tiktok… the fastest growing network today with the arrival of TikTok shopping. With its one billion users, TikTok is undoubtedly an interesting lever for your next campaigns. The number of influencers has risen from 35,528 to 106,104 in 2021 (source AFFDE).

Influencer marketing budgets explode in the face of influencer rates

The Influencer Marketing budget depends of course on a major parameter, that of the influencers’ rates. It is essential to note that they evolve according to the size of their community, their commitment, the scope of the device and the expected content.

What are the average rates?

Rates are essentially a function of the nature of the publication (post, live, reels, stories…), the social network used and the size of the influencer’s community. Overall, rates have skyrocketed over the last five years.

Here are some figures (taken from our Kolsquare study):

• an Instagram post costs between €150 (nano-influencer) and €5000 (macro-influencer) to reach more than €25k with an influencer with more than 3 million followers ;
• On Facebook, it costs between €40 and €800 for a publication – and more than €6,000 with more than 3 million followers;
• YouTube videos cost between €2500 and €18k – over €50k beyond 3 million subscribers;
• TikTok and Snapchat currently charge between €800 and €10k, rising to several hundred thousand euros for the biggest influencers.
• Finally, if you decide to sponsor a blog post, you should know that the average cost has risen from €6.5 in 2006 to €1,272 in 2019, an increase of 195 times!

Another way to get paid

While influencer fees can be scary, there is another way to pay them. Indeed, studies have revealed that a third of brands pay their influencers by giving them product samples. This practice highlights the fact that some companies prefer to work with micro or nano influencers. Influencers are happy to receive payment in kind rather than cash. Given the rates charged by influencers, it is therefore mainly the big brands that have the opportunity to pay influencers with money.

Influencer marketing still has great prospects ahead of it, but for brands, the budget issue remains delicate. Especially with the multiplication of social platforms, influencers and formats that can sometimes make analysis difficult.