It has played on my mind for a little while now and I’ve always wanted to give it a test run. Influencer Marketing via Instagram has been the buzz in the online marketing town, and like most strategies that are promoted and sold in tutorials, it’s is highly likely that it is all complete bs.

I have had a few clients ask me recently if influencer marketing is worth the money, and I never knew how to answer the question as I’ve never done it, until now. (insert evil laugh)

Platforms & Pricing

The one thing I found a little confusing across all the platforms was the budgets they were asking me to set. I did login to Tribe which has a minimum spend of $1000 to run a job ad. I got a call from them in the end that said “I think your business is a little too niche for us, come back when you add more products” which led me to another platform called The Right Fit.

After searching around The Right Fit I found a pricing calculator which I found to be very fair. Use this calculator https://theright.fit/pricing-calculator to work out what you should be paying for influencers, but use it as a guide, it comes down to what they can offer you.

Selecting Talent

Once you’ve created a shortlist then it’s time to start communicating. If you want some advice, provide as much information as possible to the influencers and judge them based on their reaction, not their follower count. Someone that is really excited to see your product has much more value than someone that responds “oh wow, yeah can’t wait” because they’re just looking for free stuff.

Once you have made your choices, then you can book the talent directly within the platform as the platforms themselves act as an escrow service: they hold the money and release it on job completion. The platform I used does not have a “release funds” option, so it really is based on a trust system.

Results

I’ve embed the posts below so you can see what activity the posts got, and I can tell you with 100% confidence that both influencers converted 0%. The only major activity I received was young influencers with 600 – 1000 followers asking me for free stuff. I did notice the follower count go up by 12 people in total, but from a reach of over 2500 people I expected a bit more.

My total cost for these two posts was $200, which is not a large budget in the overall scheme of things, but if you’re looking for an answer on where to spend your tight budget then I don’t recommend going down this path. You’re much better off paying someone to write amazing content an post it on their website with a link back to the product.

Of course I only used two infuencers and I can’t really judge the entire strategy as a miss, it really is a hit or miss, so I asked a few others if they’ve used influencer marketing techniques. I had one response…

“Nick, the experience was good, we used Tribe to source a lot of them and one of our staff had another list of contacts whom she reached out to directly. The overall experience was mixed with some giving more than was agreed and others not quite giving all that they had agreed to give. I can say that social followers went up as a result of the influencers tagging us in their posts and directing users to our profile to get the deals.
I can’t judge sales as it was a campaign done for a 48hr flash sale and it was the first time the sale was run & the first time we used influencers.” – Jodie Humphries

Conclusion

This is a good strategy if you’re looking for images and nothing more. You have a selection of talent with different photography and presentation skills. If you want to sell your product, then spend the money on advertising within Google Adwords.