 Hey everybody, what's going on? It's your man, Kory. Welcome to The Digital Dash, where I'll be giving you guys tips on how to market your songs and get those numbers booming. Now, for those of you who don't know who I am, I'm a digital marketer myself. I specialize in helping artists like you guys get their songs heard through platforms like Spotify, Instagram, YouTube, and a bunch of others. Now, what I want to talk to you guys about today is how much you should be paying for influences. If you've watched any of my previous videos or just been paying attention to the current market and climate, you know that influences can be a very effective way to reach new fans organically and start to really push yourself out there. But the problem seems to stem from people not really knowing how much you should be paying for influences and long story short, there's no right answer. They tend to charge whatever they think that they're worth based on their current level of attention or the platform that you're reaching to. But what I want to do is give you guys a couple of things that you can look at when you do reach out to these influences and you get a number back to see if they're really worth the price that they're trying to give you Or if you should just take your time out, move on and find somebody else. So with that being said, let's get right into it. Now, one of the first things that you'll want to consider is the platform that you'll be using the influencer on. Some influencers have much stronger followings on other platforms than even the ones that they're using to communicate with their fans. So let's say that you hit up a YouTuber who has 1 million on their channel, but they only have 20,000 followers on their Instagram. They reserve the right to charge a lot higher for you to promote yourself on their YouTube channel, but not really the same on their Instagram. So consider the platform that you want the influencers to work on, when you're reaching out to them about their price, see if you can negotiate something depending on which one you want to go into. So if you would rather run a viral content strategy through their Instagram, posting memes or clipping your song or something, you can work it down a lot more than if you wanted them to post your whole video on their channel. Now, one of the best ways to get around this is to see if the influencer is active anywhere else other than where you know them from. Hit them up, get prices for working with them on each of their active platforms, see if it makes sense for your budget and your marketing campaign, and just go from there. Now, the next thing that you'll want to look at when trying to determine if an influencer's price is worth it is the amount of followers that they have. In marketing, we like to refer to this as total reach, so if you're ever working with a marketer and he's saying things like, this is the expected reach of the campaign, or this is the total potential reach of the campaign, they're basically telling you this is the amount of followers we plan to try and reach. So with that being said, a lot of these influencers really do charge based on how many followers that they have. So someone with a couple thousand followers may charge you 50 bucks, whereas someone with a couple million may charge you 5 grand. The trick is to look into the amount of followers that they have, see what your potential reach could be for the campaign based on the type of money that they're spending for it, and really determine if you'd be better off spending this money somewhere else as opposed to just spending your whole budget with this one influencer. Now, one of the next things that you'll want to look at, which in my opinion is a lot more important than follower count, is the engagement of the influencer's channel. So let's say that you have two Instagram influencers and a niche that you're trying to work into. Someone has 5,000 followers and they charge $100 a post, they get 3,000 likes per picture and about 100 to 150 comments per post that they make. The other influencer has 250,000 followers, they charge 300 for a post, they get roughly around the same amount of numbers. Now, in this instance, even though the one influencer with the most followers may seem like the better one to go with out first hand, I would actually go with the influencer with 5,000 followers just because they seem to have a lot more engagement on their profile. Now, one thing that you definitely want to look at when looking at these influencers is see what their engagement rates are like on their posts. Dig back through their recent posts, see how many likes they're getting, how many comments they're getting, how much of their fans are actively seeming to come back to each and every single post and really committing to their influencers page and to their influencers content. Now, honestly, the engagement levels of a profile can be the most telling factor of if an influencer's price is really worth it. So look at the amount of likes that they're getting, the comments, the views, the shares, compared to the numbers that they want and determine if it's worth it for you. So just to give you guys a little recap, there really is no set price guideline for influencers. They do tend to charge whatever they feel like they're worth based on past accomplishments or their current followers and current engagements. But there are metrics that you can use to determine if their price is worth it for your budget, for your campaign, or just worth it overall. One thing that you'll want to look at is the platform that they'll be promoting you on. Different influencers do tend to charge different prices for different channels of promotion. The second thing that you'll want to look at is the total amount of followers that they have. Like I said in marketing, we tend to refer to this as the total amount of reach. So look at the reach of a profile of an influencer to determine if their price is worth it. And you'll also want to look at the engagement of an influencer, look at the things like their likes, their views, their comments, and how many repeat fans that they continuously bring back to their posts and to their content. And as always guys, if you feel like you're learning anything today, like and share this video. Hit those post notifications as well as I wouldn't want you all to miss anything. Once again, my name is Kory and I'll see y'all next time.