How to Find and use CPM in Influencer Marketing

It could be the economy. Or opportunity. Or greed. But I’ve become fed up with the ever-increasing price tags influencers and content creators are putting on brand engagements. For you brands and agencies out there, I’m guessing you might be as well. 

In the most recent edition of my monthly email newsletter, I shared some tinkering I’ve been doing with ideas that might help us know when we’re being fleeced by an influencer’s inflated prices. It has involved posing and testing hypotheses around various analytics and whether or not we could use common language from other marketing channels to understand influencer costs and value more clearly.

I’ve gravitated to what I think is a fair assessment of the CPM, or cost-per-thousand impressions, an influencer may produce. But it’s not as simple as comparing it to CPM rates from other channels because those channels aren’t communicating messages of validation via a trusted third party. The channels are also not the same because the costs are very different. You simply can’t engage most influencers for the same cost as running a pay-per-click ad. Or sending an email.

Today on Winfluence, I’m going to share a lot of my thinking on how to adequately produce a CPM rate for influencers. Then I’m going to share several CPM rates of creators and influencers I’ve calculated based on rate cards and other information I’ve gathered from several creators across content verticals and social channels. 

I’ll point out the trouble spots and cautionary tales for how to use and not use this approach, too. 

My hope is that we can start to analyze and understand the cost and the value of influencer marketing engagements in a more sophisticated and analytical way … We can know when someone is charging far too much … and perhaps even start to convince those who hold the purse strings, be they bosses or clients … that there is a way to know an influencer or content creator is worth the investment.

A lot of the analytical data you’ll hear me talk about in today’s episode is information I’m pulling from Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing software platform that allows you to find, engage, book, collaborate, pay and measure influencers. Tagger is also the presenting sponsor of this podcast and the platform I use in my day-to-day work at Cornett to manage influence marketing efforts of our clients.

In fact, I wouldn’t be able to get as deep into these ideas without Tagger because it offers a couple of critical pieces of information for my calculations. I’ll explain more of that in the episode.

But I highly recommend you give Tagger a look-see. When I have a new project for influencers, I have my campaign up and running, build my lists of potential collaborators, spit out one-page profiles of each for my clients to review and load in contracts, creative briefs and more, all in just a few minutes, provided I have the briefs written, of course. Tagger is good but it can’t write them for me. 

When my creators post on their social networks, the data is pulled into Tagger automatically, so I can kick out analytics reports for our campaigns to give to our clients every day if need be. 

All I ask of you is to do a demo of Tagger. See it for yourself. Go to jasonfalls.co/tagger and sign up for a free demo today. It might just be the influence marketing management solution you’re looking for. It certainly does wonders for me, my team at Cornett, and our clients.

That’s jasonfalls.co/tagger.

The Winfluence theme music is “One More Look” featuring Jacquire King and Stephan Sharp by The K Club found on Facebook Sound Collection.

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