How Much Do Fashion And Beauty Brands Use Influencer Marketing

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When bloggers, vloggers, vloggers, and the like start trending, or a big fashion blogger posts a daring style, it’s easy to think that all fashion and beauty brands are interested.

But how much are they actually buying off these influencers? A new report by Skimm found that fashion and beauty brands spent $151,960,560 buying ads from the more than 482,000 influencers featured in the report.

That’s a lot of free marketing to be handing out. To find out exactly how much money brands were shelling out to influencers for each of their tweets, Instagram posts, and videos, we spoke with CB Insights data specialist Ashley Chou to find out.

Chou’s research consists of more than 750 billion statements of purchase intent and cost-per-engagement from more than 25 brands over 12 months. “While the research covers all types of branded social media content : from video to selfie sticks : we’re not talking about the most popular or highest viewed clips on social platforms,” Chou tells Business Insider.

Though we can’t confirm the value of each of the brands’ mentions across social media, it does show how frequently fashion and beauty brands are paying their endorsers to make their posts go viral.

“I find it fascinating to see that spending on influencer marketing is roughly in line with the amount of campaigns their influencers put out,” Chou said.

The results show that the average spend on influencer marketing is $8.13 for each tweet, $4.79 for each Instagram post, and $7.35 for each video.

These results give a snapshot of how much brands are shelling out to use influencers to flog their products : and the results aren’t the most flattering to brands.

For example, the results show that fashion brands spend a whopping 11.95 times more on Instagram per post) than fashion and beauty brands. Meanwhile, beauty brands are spending an average of eight times more than beauty and skincare brands.

In general, fashion companies spend an average of $14.52 per influencer, beauty companies spend $7.34 per influencer, and beauty companies spend $6.28 per influencer.

The results may seem surprising : after all, one wouldn’t expect an avid fitness enthusiast to spend half a million dollars on influencer ads in a single year. But many who regularly express themselves online tend to focus more on their opinion or personality than a product, which is why they feel comfortable getting paid to say positive things about a brand.

“Most influencers consider that influencer marketing is an additional means of reaching the audience they already have,” Chou said. “Not only do they think influencer marketing builds their personal brands, they also believe that working with brands is a great way to build a long-term relationship that can be mutually beneficial.”

If anything, these numbers may be understated. Brands that wouldn’t dare to advertise their products on YouTube : where the average spend is more than $17 per post : can afford a similar amount on Instagram.

A year ago, Chou’s data reported that the average spend on influencer marketing was $14.67 for each ad posted on Twitter. Today, that number has risen to $15.24.