5 Reasons to Pay Micro Influencers

You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. Conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their missions through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of Attended Media. Jenny today’s topic, five reasons to pay micro influencers. We’ve had a few episodes now on why should pay influencers. But I think today we’re going to support the case for why should pay all influencers or at least your micro influencers. I think sometimes there’s some hesitation. If they’re a smaller influencer, then they don’t have that many followers. So I really just want to do ticket trade. But we think there’s a few reasons why should they consider paying them as well too. Yeah, let’s start there. We’ve been doing this for a while now and we’ve seen that there’s basically four different approaches to influencer marketing. When we’re working with cultural attractions, let’s run through these level set before we dive into the nitty gritty about the micro influencers. So this first category is a media night. What are you talking about there? I think a lot of cultural attractions have an organized media night where they send invites out to influencers and other media, right, TV and radio personalities as well too to try to get that sneak peak on an event. So that’s something we see a lot of people doing. If you can make it on this night, essentially, we’ll give you tickets in exchange for content, which is a great strategy to have. Yeah, so just to be clear, it’s no financial compensation. It’s coming out this particular night and we hope you post a video. Maybe talk about some of the pros cons of using that approach? Yeah, I mean, pros is you can get a lot of people to come out and I think it works really well for like a big event. So influencers of course want something kind of busy to share on their social channels. So the strategy can work well for that. If it’s kind of a more, it will come to the attraction on any particular given day without a big event going on or maybe a membership push, it’s probably going to be a little harder to get a bunch of people out on a particular day. So you’ve got to do something special for them. You can still supply like a kind of influencer, one cheater, kind of a mini brief for these events so that you give them some talking points that they can easily incorporate into their content, but you’re going to have a little bit less control over what they’re saying because you’re not paying them. But still a great way to just capture a lot of content again for kind of a big, busy event. Yeah. And then okay, so number two in this approach is on working with influencers marketing. We have a CVB. Yeah. So working with their CVB or another kind of big local media partner can be a great way to do it. You start moving into of course paid partnerships for this, but the payment is actually going to that to the CVB or to that media partner. And then they’re going out and they’re finding the influencers for you. So this can be, I think one way a lot of attractions will do this is kind of an more tourist approach, right? So maybe the CVB is working with an influencer that’s outside of your market and bringing them in for kind of, you know, here’s what a day in St. Louis looks like, right? So that is one way it’s done. And then the CVB or again, another like big radio, I heard media or something might be another kind of example of this where they’ll work with local influencers as well too to say like here’s your checklist of things to do while you’re, you know, spending a day in this market. Yeah. And some of the, you know, the pluses on this, this approach and we’re not saying like don’t do any of these things. We think all influencer marketing as a whole is one of the key tactics we can use to our visitation, right? And we’re not saying CVBs or working with just the media and I think is necessarily a bad idea, but just highlighting some of the pros and cons here. I think when you’re approached by these tourism development boards or these CVBs, it’s, hey, you know, we’re going to put you the five top things to do. Let’s just do St. Louis for this episode. Five thought top things to do in St. Louis. And that might be going to the garden, going to the zoo, going to the museum, going to this, you know, for profit attraction. And you’re kind of cattle called in this roundup video. So maybe, you know, you’re, you’re paying, but you’re, it’s not creating content exclusively for you and not that it couldn’t be just we kind of see that a little bit more in that tourism play. Yeah. It’s like the new co-op play, right? So you get, you get a portion of this message. And sometimes that can be great because maybe your costs are actually lowered a little bit to do it, but that’s a normally when we see kind of packages coming over from the CVBs, they can usually be a few thousand dollars. If for, you know, one package or partnership. I think the other thing is typically there’s not like a paid amplification behind that. So it really is just the content that you’re partnering with that that tourism group or influencer on. Yeah. And you mentioned the price there. You know, all things being equal. The CVB is getting compensated. The influence is all kind of, yeah. But you’re paying them a little bit of a premium compared to maybe if you were to handle some of the stuff internally. All right. Moving on. Number three, what we’re calling the big local publisher. What do you mean here? Yeah. So this is kind of like, you’re like, mommy kind of a social media channel that’s not like an individual person. So it’s your Metro market mom, right? And they’ve got 30, 40, 50,000 followers. And they have multiple contributors to that account. They post great content. But I say usually, like, they’ll have other media outlets as well too. So they’ve got like a big newsletter list, like a good website. So they’re, their content is in multiple places and think of it almost like the replacement for all of the like individual publications, maybe up the past. It’s starting to seem more, more move away from like an actual print magazine to the social media channel really being their hub for their content. So this can be a great play. There’s usually kind of a, you know, when you’re doing something like that is usually kind of a multi multi-level partnership. There’s a lot of different pieces versus maybe just a one and done quick post for one event that’s usually less of what they do. And it’s more of a annual kind of package, which can be a great way to partner with these types of groups. But I always say it’s like it’s not, you know, Jane from, you know, Milwaukee who’s doing the post that you, you know, feel like you really relate to and you love all the places she goes to. It’s more of just like, here’s everything going on in and around the market from multiple moms in the market. Yeah, I think one of the knocks that we’ve seen on this approach, once again, not saying it’s bad, but just comparing and contrasting is a lot of the video content, at least the video content design for social, it seems to be faceless. And I think we’re both big believers in, you know, in any type of advertisement for cultural attraction is we really want to be showing people experiencing the plants, people experiencing the exhibit, people experiencing interacting with the animals or enjoying, you know, watching the animal. So yes, the, you know, for zoos, the animals are important for aquariums, you know, the aquatic life is important, but in terms of just pure marketing advertising, we want to show people enjoying that. And so you kind of get that knock with these big publishers. Sometimes they, as you mentioned, are faceless. So maybe the content isn’t as engaging or as storytelling as we might like it to be. Yeah, I love them for like, again, that big splash event because usually they have really high reach and you’re partnering them more with them more so for the followers. But yeah, I mean, you know, it’s a part of an overarching strategy for an influencer campaign, but. And I know we’re going to be talking about dollars throughout this, this episode, but the price point for some of these packages, you know, for just going off the rate card could be five, six, seven, eight, ten thousand dollars, depending on the size of the market and the number of deliverables, I think what we’re going to be preaching is maybe some more efficient ways to spend a budget of five, six, seven to ten thousand dollars on influencers. And that is the perfect segue into number four, the fourth kind of approach of working with influencer influencer marketing for cultural attractions is going to be what we’re calling amplified micro influencer campaigns. Yes, this is what we talk about a lot on this podcast, right? So how are we working with individual influencers and creators? They don’t have to be your largest. We work with some with a few thousand followers to 10, 20, 30 thousand followers, right? Somewhere in that range, oftentimes we find as a sweet spot and it’s a sweet spot for a couple of reasons. One, it usually is a person who has built a relationship with their followers. So you get these really kind of nice personalized, really authentic stories. They’re touching on things like did you know there was a splash bad here or you’ve probably never seen this might, my kids are obsessed with climbing on this tree that you’re allowed to in this, you know, zoo or garden. And it’s like those little things that you’re just not going to get from one of the like bigger publishers in the market because they’re trying to create the larger ones are trying to create that quick 15 second really splashy draw as many viewers as possible. And the smaller ones are typically trying to tell you a story about their experience. And we know we find that oftentimes especially for cultural attractions who have a true have a story right beyond just the excitement. It’s the mission, the membership, the you know everything that that you’re supporting is well too can more easily pulled into these stories and all these little moments can be in that video versus just look look at this splashy event. So it’s great to have a little bit of both because obviously the big splashy event that’s going to get you views is is going to help drive awareness of your attraction. But when we talk about amplifying the smaller kind of micro influencers, we start getting this more authentic content market. We start getting it from people who who look like your community versus just maybe one set of you know one type of person. And then I think when we say amplified we mean boosting it in our paid advertising and treating it as part of our advertising strategy. So it doesn’t matter if they have 2000 followers, we can boost that content to make sure that it’s getting views. And I want to share like one quick example just to get some in the middle of like or the thick of. Influence of marketing right now for all my clients going into holiday season. But I’ve seen creators that we pay $100 and creators that we paid $3,000 put almost the identical video together, right? Like in terms of just the quality of it like how it’s stitched together. And so don’t just don’t discount your smaller influencers because you think that they’re not going to be as polished or you think that they’re not going to be able to like tell that story as well as a larger influencer. Well yeah, I’m glad you kind of mentioned price points or investment levels or just money. kind of recapping our four strategies or four approaches here. You know number one being that media night. Well that’s just typically ticket trade. You know come and join cocktail. That kind of thing. So zero dollars there. Number two, the CVB or some tourist organization, piling, you know getting a group together to make a best hits of your local city. That can range from a few thousand dollars to 10 to 15,000 dollars depending on the the amount of content that’s going to be produced for your particular institution. Number three, this larger what we’re calling that that local publisher. You mentioned that these are typically annual agreements. So that could be five to 10,000. Once again depending on market size and the amount of content, but for this amplified micro influencer campaign, you just mentioned that you’re spending a hundred dollars. You know the compensation levels a hundred dollars or two hundred dollars or five hundred dollars. I think the argument that we’re going to make here is if you only had five thousand dollars to invest in influencers, this micro influencer approach can get you two three four five different creators, different personalities, different audience alignments versus putting all your eggs in that one basket. Yeah, if I’ve got five grand, I’m able to bring in five influencers and pay them a hundred two hundred bucks a piece and then put that other nine eight or nine hundred dollars into amplifying the content. We can have a really, you know, successful campaign that’s giving us five versions of ad creative for the campaign that we’re amplifying and our paid social. You know have a variety of audiences potentially maybe summer Spanish speaking, summer English speaking, right? I’ve got variety now because I have five to row ones and then tell the story from five different types of views, right? Maybe it’s the mom view. Maybe it’s the singles, you know, friends night out view. Maybe it’s the date night. So I have a lot of, I have much more content for telling a story in a different way for the same amount of money. And at the end of the day, most likely a similar amount of views because I’m going to have that ability to boost that content. You’re listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast conversations on how nonprofit attractions are increasing attendance and sharing their mission through marketing. Your hosts are Ryan Dick and Jenny Williams of attend media. Attend media is a media planning and buying agency specializing in zoos, aquariums, gardens and museums. For more information, please visit attend.media now back to Ryan and Jenny. All right, Jenny. So we kind of touched on a bunch of this already, but let’s go through these five reasons to pay micro influencers. Number one on the list, you can collaborate with who’s not coming. All right. Yeah. I’m back now for us. Just like we were talking about diversifying the audience when it comes to influencers and who you’re trying to speak to in your market. I can’t diversify my audience if I’m only working with one big influencer in a market. So working with smaller influencers gives you that ability to work with multiple influencers, multiple backgrounds, multiple stages of life. Right? So anything kind of comparing this back to like a media night or something when you’re sending invites out, you might find a lot of the people who are accepting the offer who are saying yes, all kind of are the same type of influencer, the same type of person, right? So again, the zoos are probably going to be really good with those moms, raising their hand and saying, yep, I’ll come. But are you getting the cool local young influencer who’s able to introduce the zoo to an audience that isn’t coming yet? So that’s probably one of the best things about doing some of this outreach and paying influencers. You get a little bit more flexibility in who you’re inviting and making sure the people who aren’t coming on a daily basis can be invited. Well, you said it right there. The key to this amplified micro influencer strategy or approach is outreach. Right? So when you’re working with a marketing team, you’re identifying the growth audiences, which, you know, for zoos is usually not the moms with strollers or for gardens. It’s usually not the 55 plus retired crew, right? You’re saying, okay, you know, let’s take the garden, for example, you know, I want more ethnicity in my garden. I want a younger crowd in my garden. I want people to come from 20, whatever that audience is, we’re starting with the audience first and then we’re filling in the influencers who align with that audience versus being reactive and waiting for the CVB or the mom block or the media night people to come to us. And, you know, why do we need to pay them these micro influencers that, you know, are Spanish speaking and we want more of the Hispanic community in our group? It’s if we were to reach out to this Spanish speaking influencer and say, hey, I’ll give you two tickets and $100 to come out or $200 or whatever that price point is, it just seems like it’s so much more of a fantastic opportunity. The chances of them saying, yes, I don’t have stats on this, but I mean, think about it, you know, if you got $100, $200, $300, $300, whatever it is, like the excitement level is there. We got to understand that we want these people, we’re prioritizing these people to come in. Yeah. And I think as we talk about kind of some price points and things, $100, $200, I think can be a fair price for certain influencers, some are just never going to come out and partner with you at that rate. So there’s no like, like golden rule anymore for what’s the right price to pay an influencer other than what’s the price you’re willing to pay an influencer, right? So just no wait, if you’re offering $200 and they’re telling you $2,500, you know you’re probably pretty far off and there’s not, you’re not going to negotiate in the middle. So they’re either coming down to you or you’re walking away, right? But I say this because I think that it’s this idea of being able to pay a small envelope, let’s say $8,000 in follow-up, right? And they’ll accept that offer for $100 or $200, right? Based off of the deliverables, you’re asking them. But now you have a contractual agreement with a payment and now it can be done when on your terms and when you want it done. And I think that’s something that’s really important as well is just, you know, can you come out this weekend? I’ll pay you $100. Well, they might not want that if there’s no payment, right? So it just sweetens the deal a little bit for them. And again, we’re kind of using these budget rages. And when we talk about micro influencers, not make it influencers. I just want to make sure we’re not bearing in the lead on this particular point though. I think this is more about prioritizing who you want to work with and those the priority should be on people who are not coming already. They’re not the ones already knocking on your door. They’re not the ones who when you look, look out on your campus, it’s like everybody kind of fits this mold. We want to prioritize the people who will be new, new visitation. Okay. Number two. And you kind of touched on this already. We have here on our sheet, we control the brief. You know, you kind of talked about it becomes more of a financial contract. Their expectations are a little bit more clear. Why don’t you expand on that? So this is how we want them to talk about the event or the attraction as a whole. But then also like some of the little things that we were talking about like the hidden gems of your attraction. So again, you might have a great event going on, but you also have an awesome children’s garden. And so being able to guide the creators to say yes, come out to this event, but make sure that you are pulling in content from the children’s garden and talking about how great it is. So we have campaigns right now for some clients where you know, they’ve got their fall festival going on. And it’s like don’t forget to go to the children’s garden show the children’s garden decorator for fall as well too, not just like the mega shot with thousands and thousands of pumpkins, but make sure you get into the children’s garden and show that too. So that’s like one example of how we can help guide that a little bit. Some other things are, you know, we maybe we have a you know, a snack package or dinner buffet or something that people just aren’t really that familiar with because it’s not really pushed in your normal advertising or messaging for events. And so again, a creator can go and highlight that so that viewers know that that’s also an option to do. So a lot of different things that you can do with these briefs beyond just the full focus on the event itself. Obviously, that’s going to take that’s going to be the main message when you’re using influencers for promoting events. But what else is there that we want to tell them about? Yeah, when we’ve been talking a lot about dynamic pricing recently, you know, that can be a challenge for some institution, especially if you’ve just rolled this out. So, you know, when we talk about creating this brief, we, hey, we want to have two or three different influencers that shoot, it might just represent our core audience, but we want them to talk about the dynamic pricing experience and how much money they saved by coming on in Tuesday versus the Saturday and how easy it was to you, etc. Or, you know, we talked about, I mean, gosh, parking garages and parking lots, you know, how much that can be a challenge for certain institutions. We can create videos or have influencers create videos to talk about, hey, here’s the tips on how to navigate the parking lot or, hey, I took the shuttle. It really wasn’t that big of a deal. The people who are coming up for the media nights or just purely on a ticket trade, they’re not really talking about that. Right. You know, you get the flashy CVB people, it’s like, they’re not going to want to be talking about these particular challenges. When we financially compensate, we can drive the narrative. We can tell the story that we want them to tell. Yeah, and I think going back to, if we’re working with my own influencers, you’re working with more influencers, right, and we’re paying in them, we can direct them, but I can have five different challenges covered if I’m working on five different videos. So maybe one is, hey, parking is not that great. Make sure you get there early or try the parking ride or did you know you get $5 off your ticket if you take red share, right? So that could be one person’s message. Another one could be maybe we’re working with a, a bilingual creative or creator, and it is, there is signage in Spanish, right? Like that could be something that’s being told through one lens. I like that. Yeah. And then, you know, to your point, the price points, whether that is you know, come on Tuesdays because it’s the least expensive night of the week or however we want to communicate that message, like each influencer can have a slightly different challenge. Again, the more, if you’re trying to get one influencer to cram all of that into a video, it’s just, it’s going to get lost, right? So, and we’re in the thick of this too. Gosh, we’re really dating this episode. We usually don’t do that, but yeah, we’re in the thick of preparing our presentation for the an APGA conference, that’s the public garden conference up in Atlanta talking about tourism strategies, right? And the main gist of that presentation is the keywords used in these creator videos, right? That live forever on TikTok and Instagram. The keywords that are used are important for driving more discoverability in particular locations. So, the point I’m trying to make here is with financial compensation versus just ticket trade, we can dictate to the creator, these are the key words that we want to be included in this video. For example, top things to do in Atlanta, family friendly Atlanta, etc. So, if somebody’s not looking for Zoo Atlanta specifically or any other cultural attraction, we have a chance of, you know, once again, I’m typing in fun things to do in Atlanta this weekend, where they’re motorists or local, that my video actually has a chance of populating those search results. But that’s a whole another topic. In fact, we already did an episode on that. Check out the influence as your tourist marketing plan. All right, moving on. Number three, they are creating video content, they being the actual creators, they’re creating video content. What are we talking about here? They’re a production team for you, right? So, I think a lot of times, this idea of like, what, you know, that’s a small influencer, why would I pay them? I’m just going to give them tickets. Okay, besides all the reasons we just talked about, why you should pay them, they’re producing content for you, for your attraction to drive visitation for you, to drive revenue for you. And you wouldn’t go higher somebody to shoot some video for you and edit it and make it good for a, you know, tiktok or Instagram and not pay them. So, you either have somebody on staff who’s doing that for you or freelancers that’s doing it for you or production company that’s doing it for you. And I think you’ve got to start thinking of influencers this way as well too. They’re just doing it and building it through the lens of themselves for their followers, which is different than how you’re creating your own content. And that’s a good thing. And then they’re also, you know, doing it or creating this content to where it actually does fit these platforms that they’re in, whether that’s TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. So, you know, it’s, you’re getting something that’s already ready for the social platforms versus just getting video that’s probably maybe more geared or could be more geared towards a general video channel that really isn’t going to be the best performer within a social channel. So, don’t, don’t, even though it’s not the most polished creative there is, it is creative. That’s built for these social platforms where more and more attractions are investing more of their dollars. Yeah, and it’s video, right? It’s not a blog post. It’s not, it’s video. And I get it. It’s 2025 videos. Not that everyone’s got a video production device in their back pocket, but I think the idea of having more and more video about your visually appealing attraction is a huge plus. And then, to your point, Jenny, you know, I think a lot of institutions wouldn’t bat an eye on spending 25, $30,000, $50,000, especially the larger ones, uncreating this beautiful brand spot, right? That’s going to run on TV a little bit. And then here we go. But it’s like, oh man, I’m not going to pay that guy $250 to come out and shoot a 60-second commercial. It’s like, you know, I get it. They’re not the same. But if we talk about value, 25,000 versus $250,000, I think the $250 is extremely well spent. But I will get off on our horse about brand spots. All right. Number four. Okay, this ambiguous term, storytelling. Reasons to pay micro influencers. Number four, storytelling. What do we, what do we say in here? So, yeah, I mean, back to kind of the last piece that we were talking about, they’re creating video for you, right? But they’re creating video that tells the story. It tells the story about your event. It tells the story about your head and gyms. It tells the story about your mission, your, you know, why you should be a member. There’s all kinds of things that they can talk about in here that you’re just not going to get in a billboard or you’re not going to get in a banner ad. And quite frankly, you’re not really going to get in a lot of the content that’s being produced in house or by a creative team for social channels because oftentimes it’s a video meant, like the videos that you’re creating for advertising look like they were created for advertising, right versus these reels and TikTok videos that influencers are creating that don’t look like advertisements. You know, it’s, it is the experience of what am I going to get when I walk through this, you know, inner into this attraction for this exhibit. When am I going to see? And I think, you know, as it, speaking as like a consumer, when I get ads for events for cultural attractions and social, I’m always like, but what is this? Like what am I supposed to expect? Like, especially if that’s like a separate ticketed event, like show me what I’m supposed to be getting to make me want to you know, pay the $10 up charge or the $20 up charge or okay, if it’s an event for lights at the zoo and I’m not going to see animals like let me, like help me understand what this is that I’m going to see. So that’s something that these creators are able to do that I don’t always see in the actual ads that are being produced by the cultural attractions themselves. Sometimes, you know, you do, but it’s just, it’s a great way to get that part, that storytelling aspect into your advertising to, to feel more content and to make people more aware of what’s going on at that particular time. Yeah, I got to take on this as well. Maybe just thinking through the lens of membership, right? A lot of messaging we see is, hey, it pays for itself after it’s second or third visit, you know, upgrade to a membership today. Okay, that’s great. Like that is a pure advertising message, right? And the value is, once again, it can come every day if I wanted to for the price of just this membership. But when we look about an influencer video in this concept around storytelling is the value really that I’m going to save a hundred, two hundred and three in a box. Sure. What does that mean? Well, you know, for a mom with a toddler who can come on a Tuesday, you know, at every Tuesday for the rest of the year, the value is that shot of their two year old, three year old, four year old in the back seat of the car honked out at 2 p.m. because they just spent two hours on your wonderful, you know, play area. That’s the value. That’s the storytelling. And I think as marketers, maybe in our, you know, that’s a very hard story for us as marketers or us as a brand to tell. But that is the reality and the value that the mom who bought the membership is seeing every time she comes, right? So it’s content that we in terms of our own four walls in terms of our own voice of our own brand, we can’t we can’t say that in an ad. But they can. Right. Right. Instead of why you should have a membership, it’s why I have a membership, which is so great. And once again, that video, that, you know, quote unquote, air quotes TV commercial, instead of spending $25,000 for, you spent $250 for. All right. Number five, and this is a big one. We talk about it quite a bit, but, you know, five reasons to pay micro influencers. Number five, add codes. Write it down. Yeah. Well, this is the amplification part, right? So oftentimes, yes, you’re all right. A micro influencer, my comfort free. But if we want to use their, you know, name image and likeness in an advertisement to make us money, we should be compensating them for that. And whether that’s $100, a couple hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, depending on who you’re working with and what their price prices are. This is again, you’re, you’re not going to go hire someone to shoot video and run in your ads and not pay them. And I think that’s the way you have to start looking at creators as well to you. So worry less about the follower size, worry about the actual deliverables that they’re giving you. And, and then boost it in your, your actual ad platforms. I think one thing that I see consistently across the board is I just, I typically we don’t get enough video content for the length of an entire campaign. So we’re a lot of events are, you know, say, two to three month run and you get that one set of creative at the beginning and then it’s done. Or if I have creators coming through, I might have five, six, seven different creators I’m working with that can help fill that creative funnel, take burden off of your own internal team or again, what are you paying an ad agency to create this content for you, right? Can that creator create content cheaper? And it’s not that one’s better than the other. It’s just that all of this should work together. And if you’re kind of finding yourself in a, well, we don’t do take talk because we don’t have, we know our audience is there, but we don’t have creator for it. You should be working with creators. If it’s, you know, we tend to run more heavily on Facebook because we don’t have a lot of video creative to run in Reels and that’s where the performance happens. You should be working with creators, right? So the creators can help fill your ad content strategy. And this frees you up if you’re boosting this content and you’re getting those ad codes because you’re paying for the rights to use this content from your influencers, you’re going to be able to boost, promote, and amplify this content to drive the views, to drive the engagement, to track the ticket sales. So, you know, this is, this is what’s going to allow you that ability to actually measure the campaign, campaign, measure the performance. So you did Influence or A work better than Influence or B, find the insights to say, wow, when we work with Spanish speaking influencers, like our TikTok goes through the roof in terms of the views and the engagement that we get and we’re seeing an uptick in our Hispanic visitation because this is the only, this is our strategy for bringing in this audience, right? So you can start pulling those insights out because you have real reporting going on versus just, well, we worked with a bunch from ticket exchange, but we really don’t have a good aggregate of what actually happened, or we, maybe we do from a view standpoint, but not from a, you know, a ticket sales standpoint, like we might see with our, our amplified content and paid social. So bringing it into the ad campaign, bringing it into this content allows us to measure it like advertising. Yeah, I mean, I know a lot of times you’re using Influence or Content to supplement content that’s created in house or created by a creative firm. You know, you kind of talked about content wearout, right? Maybe you’re getting one or two assets for a two to three month campaign. If anybody’s run a paid social media campaign in the last six weeks is the last year or so, you know that that one piece of creative is going to hit its frequency cap pretty quickly, right? And the platforms don’t want to show, stale content over and over and over again to the same audience. So with a limitation on the different varieties or variations of the creative, that’s where influencers, micro influencers can step in and provide that, you know, more robust assets. And also, I just want to make sure we’re hammering this point here is we can run the creator content with the brand content simultaneously, right? And you mentioned like a two to three month flight, well, what if we start seeing some optimization opportunities to say, hey, this creator content or the Spanish speaking Spanish language content on TikTok is really driving performance. We have to have those ad codes in order to run a campaign in that setup where we can track that back to ticket sales, whether it’s a direct click or a view through attribution window and saying, this is the type of creative, whether it’s brand, Spanish, creator content, a creator created that is actually driving the best results for this particular campaign this event. All right, so I’m gonna put you on the spot. Yeah, I’m gonna put you on the spot a little bit. Give me your ideal breakdown. You’ve got a campaign coming up. Let’s say you had $10,000 ear marks under this quote unquote influencer bucket. You know, we talked about maybe working with the CVB or maybe working with that big mom blog, publisher in town. Tell me like kind of how you would break down that $10,000. Where would you be bucketing? How would you spend that money? Yeah, it’s a good question. Maybe not just like, here’s the golden rule for this, but I was saying generally, I kind of like to look at it as I’m gonna spend about half of that budget on actual creators and half of that budget on amplifying it. And it could be, I spent a little less than half, right? So maybe I get six or seven influencers, you know, for $5,000 or so out of that bucket and then I’m promoting it with the other $5,000. Or maybe I actually get them for like two or three thousand dollars because I just worked with all smaller influencers. So I don’t have a single premium influencer or macro influencer in there. So generally for a campaign, I’m looking for at least three influencers to run. And we usually say three influencers per audience are trying to reach. So for 10 grand and promoting it, you could get anywhere from that three to five range for influencers, three to six range for influencers. And again, this is just like actual net costs to these influencers, not any fees or anything that you might have to pay on top of that. But yeah, I would start there and then boost half of it with ads. So if I’m thinking of like, oh, hey, I’m going to your mark about a thousand dollars per creator, maybe, you know, there’s $200 is going to their fee and $800 is going to boost them, right? So that’s like one way you might be able to look at it to try to figure out like, how do you set that budget? But I don’t want to do is pay an influencer $2,000 and then spend $200 boosting here, right? So that’s where it’s like kind of flip flop there. But yeah, that’s kind of generally 50, 50 is what I kind of look for. Yeah, and maybe one other thing to look at is, hey, I’ve got the super duper influencer. They want $6,500, you know, and I’ve only got 10 in there. So now I’m putting all my eggs in that one particular basket that, you know, I think we’re preaching a diversification of your portfolio, if you will. It does take more work. You do have to do the outreach to make this happen. But this strategy of working with these micro influencers could help you fit your new audience, your audience growth goals, right? By finding smaller influencers that align with those audiences that you really want versus everything is that one big influencer who’s going to reach a little bit of, you know, just their particular audience. And nothing wrong with the big influencer, we love big influencers too. But yeah, for a lot, they’re just out of range for an attraction to work with. Right. And once again, it could just be a one and done scenario. So all right, I think the the recap on this one is like if we just start thinking about influencers as part of our advertising strategy, I think that’s something that we’ve preached for the last two years. On this podcast, it’s not just a public relations play, it’s not something that there’s an opportunity to be proactive and reach, you know, influencers that align with our audience. I like this idea of thinking about like actors, right? We’re creating a, we’re writing the movie script. And I need an actor to play, you know, a female moody teenager, right? Well, I’m not going to go higher of a 36 year old guy to play that role, right? I need somebody to be the meat moody female teenager. I’m going to go proactively look for influencers that maybe not the best example here, but it’s my point gets across is, is this idea of this is our growth audience. Let’s go find influencers that work with this growth audience. And many of times those are, you know, especially within a local market, those are going to be influencers with 2,000, 3,000 followers. That’s not a deal breaker. We can amplify that content. But let’s throw a couple hundred bucks against that to make sure we get the content exactly the way we want it. I like that, I like that actor thing. And shoot, I’ll go, I’ll take that a step further. You know, these clinical actors, we got to keep in mind is they’re creating on some level a mini TV commercial for you. And I think that’s something that warns some financial compensation. Well, again, the person that you’re hiring internally is a person walking around with their cell, their cell phone in a video, you know, and producing content for you. So you’re paying them, why not pay the influencer? Right, right. And then the title together, you know, the strategy that we like to implement here is, you know, the ticket trade will happen first, right? So we’re going to get the influencer tickets. They’re going to come out, you know, film their day, go back, edit it. But then the financial compensation part doesn’t happen until that video content is actually produced. And it’s met to the standards that we’ve, we’ve detailed in the brief. Then we get that video content, we get that ad code, and now we can actually run an advertising campaign where we’re measuring ticket sales, not just views and likes and engagement, but what really matters ticket sales against that particular piece of content. Contract complete and your payment will be sent. All right, Jenny. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to the Marketing Attractions podcast. If you have a suggestion for a topic or would like to be a guest on the show, please visit our website at MarketingAttractionsPodcast.com.