How to set an influencer marketing budget

Three ways to spend

Every influencer budget splits into the same three lines. Small brands should fill them in this order.

If you’re new to creators, put most of your first months into gifting. You’re buying information as much as posts: who fits, who posts, and what kind of video works for your product. The order is laid out step by step in our influencer marketing strategy.

Step 1: Work out your cost per kit

This is the number most brands guess. Price the product at what it costs you, not at retail: you’re spending inventory, not lost sales.

• Product at cost, for everything in the box.
• Packaging and inserts: mailer, tissue, the printed card, the handwritten note.
• Shipping, including the creators far from your warehouse. Check duties if you ship abroad.
• Replacements: a few kits will go to old addresses or get lost. Budget a small buffer.

A made-up example: a serum that costs $9 to make, $3 of packaging and a card, and $8 shipping. That’s a $20 kit. Forty of them is $800 plus a buffer, call it $1,000 for a wave.

Step 2: Set the gifting budget

Your gifting budget is creators per month × cost per kit. The limit is rarely money. It’s how many creators you can find, message and follow up with properly. Twenty to 50 a wave is plenty for one person to run well.

For a sense of scale, Traackr’s 2023 survey of 305 marketers found 28% spent $10,000 to $50,000 a year on influencer gifting and 25% spent $50,000 to $200,000, while 38% sent fewer than 100 packages a year. Those are brands of every size, so don’t treat them as a target. Start smaller, measure, then grow what works.

Then plan for most of those kits not to produce a post. The same survey found 61% of marketers said fewer than half of the creators who receive a product end up posting. That’s why the number to watch isn’t cost per kit, it’s cost per post: what the wave cost ÷ the posts that showed your product. Our product seeding ROI calculator shows how much the post rate changes it.

How much do influencers charge?

You’ll find rate tables online that say a creator with this many followers charges this much. We don’t reproduce any here: the ones we checked didn’t say where their numbers came from, and they disagreed with each other. A rate table also prices followers, and followers aren’t what you’re buying.

What actually moves a creator’s price:

• Their typical views. Not followers. Views are the audience you’re renting.
• What you ask for. One video, a video and Stories, three videos over a month.
• Usage rights. Running their video as your ad, or on your site, is worth more than a post on their account. Agree how long.
• Exclusivity. Asking them not to post a competitor for a while costs extra.
• Their demand. Creators who get lots of offers charge more, and that’s fair.

So ask creators for their rate, and check it against what the views are worth to you. That second part you can calculate.

How much to pay influencers: price from views

A fair fee for a post is roughly what you’d pay to get the same views another way. Here’s the math:

1. 01

   Find their typical views

   Open their last 10 to 15 videos on the platform you want and take the median, not the average, so one viral video doesn’t set the price. Skip videos younger than a week; they’re still growing.

2. 02

   Decide what 1,000 views are worth to you

   Use your own ad account. What you pay per 1,000 impressions on TikTok or Instagram ads is a good ceiling, since that’s the alternative.

3. 03

   Multiply

   Typical views ÷ 1,000 × your value per 1,000 views. That’s the base fee for one post.

4. 04

   Add the extras

   Usage rights, extra videos and exclusivity on top. Product you’ve already sent is part of the deal, so count it.

A made-up example: a creator’s last 12 videos have a median of 8,000 views, and your ads cost you $12 per 1,000 impressions. The base fee is 8 × $12 = $96. If they quote $400, you’re paying for something other than views: usage rights, their editing, or demand. That can still be worth it. Now you know what you’re paying for.

The influencer rate calculator does this for you, and shows how much of a fee a gift you’ve already sent covers. To measure a creator’s typical engagement as well as views, use the engagement rate calculator.

Compare everything with cost per view

Gifting, paid posts and ads cost different amounts for different things. Cost per view puts them on one line. After a wave or a deal, divide what it cost by the views it got, measured at the same point (say, 30 days after posting).

The paid post in that example looks expensive per view, but it came with a date you could plan a launch around. Cost per view isn’t the only thing that matters. It just stops you from comparing a gift with a fee by gut feel. For a dollar figure your reports can use, read what EMV is or try the EMV calculator.

A first-quarter budget, made up for illustration

Say a skincare brand has $3,000 for creators this quarter and $20 kits:

• Month 1: gift 40 creators. About $1,000.
• Month 2: gift 40 new creators, and send a second product to anyone who posted in month 1. About $1,000.
• Month 3: pay two or three creators who posted unpaid and got steady views, priced from their views. Put what’s left behind the best organic post. About $1,000.

By the end, every dollar of the paid spend went to someone with a track record, and you have two waves of numbers to plan the next quarter. If you’d rather buy content to run as ads than posts on creators’ accounts, read UGC vs influencer content. For boosting, see whitelisting and Spark Ads.

The costs people forget

• Your time. Finding creators, messaging, packing, following up. Count the hours.
• Tracking. Checking every creator’s videos for a month after each send is the job that stops scaling first.
• Kits that don’t post. They’re part of the cost, not a waste. Budget for them up front.
• Usage rights. If you plan to run a creator’s video as an ad, agree and pay for it before you do.
• Disclosure. Paid and gifted posts both need it. The FTC’s guide for influencers says “free or discounted products” count. Check posts with the disclosure checker.