Are influencers worth the rates they charge? Isn’t that the most frequently asked question among brand managers when it comes to influencer marketing these days? The answer, as always, is that it depends. 
It depends on what they charge versus what the brand gets in return. Determining that depends on a variety of factors. How many followers does the influencer have. What’s their engagement rate, which indicates how many people actually interact with the content. What’s the conversion rate of those people to purchase the product in question? 
And if you know all of those numbers, the answer of the influencer’s worth is still, “it depends.” Because you also need to know how much the average order value of this segment that converted was. Then you can compare the influencer’s rate to the financial return.
But even then, the answer is still “it depends” because one influencer program’s return might be fantastic margins for a low-margin company. That same number could be disaster for brands that typically have high margins.
And we’re just talking about transactional goals here. Influencers also bring content creation talent to the table, which is of value outside of any measure of their audience or conversions. You’d have to pay for that creative with a freelancer or internal employee’s time and resources otherwise. 
Focusing however on the transactional goal -- we want influencers to drive sales of our product -- the financial equation is easy to understand, but often hard to implement. I’m going to break down the basics of the equation for you today using industry averages and standards so you at least have an idea of what an influencer costs versus what type of sales numbers you need for them to be worth the investment.
Note: This podcast episode has an almost required reading companion that includes an important chart I talk about. Visit the episode's blog post at jason.online/influencermath to follow along.
Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Tagger. They reached out to me recently and asked me to give their influencer marketing platform a try. I set up a campaign with a client project and kicked the tires. I wasn’t sure an influencer marketing platform could really impress me much anymore, but boy was I wrong.
I was so impressed, I’ve switched to using Tagger for client projects.
Here’s what got me: I didn’t do a demo or training session. I just jumped in and tried to hunt and peck my way to figure it out. Within an hour, I had a campaign set up for a client, a campaign brief loaded, five influencers invited to authorize into the platform for automatic reporting, including Instagram Stories by the way, and two customized reports for my client. One for assessing influencers, the other for measuring the campaign’s success.
The client saw that report and said, “This is what I need to show to senior leadership!” I call that a win-win!
The drag and drop customizable reports took me about five minutes each to set up. And I can either create new ones for each client campaign, or I saved the first two as templates I can plug any client into. 
We’ll be talking a lot more about Tagger in the weeks to come here on Winfluence. They’ve just built a better mousetrap. So I’m in.
You can see more at jason.online/tagger.
Tagger is the new influence marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too. Jason.online/tagger.
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