Here’s What Marketers Are Spending On Their Influencer Marketing Programs

New research conducted by Linqia, titled The State of Influencer Marketing 2018, sheds light on the ever-growing marketing tactic from the perspective of brand marketers. To inform the research, a total of 181 marketers were surveyed spanning a variety of industries including CPG, Food and Beverage, Media, and Retail.

Key findings from the research include:

• Eighty-six percent of marketers claimed to have used influencer marketing in 2017. Of this group, 92 percent said they found it to be effective.
• Thirty percent of marketers report that they will spend between $25K and $50K per program in 2018 and 25 percent report that they will spend between $50K and $100K.
• Forty-six percent of marketers run between two and five influencer programs per year per brand and 31 percent run more than five programs per year per brand, with enterprises typically holding portfolios of dozens of brands.
• Overall, marketers are taking FTC guidelines more seriously, with 71 percent of respondents reporting that they were up-to-date with current FTC Endorsement Guides, compared to 55 percent who said the same one year ago.
• With respect to the challenges inherent to influencer marketing, 76 percent of respondents reported that, in 2017, determining influencer marketing ROI was their top challenge. In the year ahead, 42 percent project changing social network algorithms will be their second largest challenge.
• Less than 20 percent of respondents claimed that they self-manage their influencer campaigns in-house, proving out the growing market for influencer agencies and technology partners.

The main takeaway: As the influencer space matures, it grows more complex—yet more powerful. Fifty-two percent of marketers in the Linqia survey say they’ll use multiple types of influencers for their upcoming strategies.

Further, 44 percent will employ influencer content to bolster the performance of other digital channels and 36 percent reported they will pair their influencer content with e-commerce to help drive product sales.

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