When influencer marketing, you have several different options. You can center your campaigns around micro-influencers, nano-influencers, mega-influencers, or some combination of the three. They each have unique advantages tied to their reach and follower counts on the social media platforms they operate on. Mega-influencers are the social media influencers with the highest number of followers. Their follower counts are typically in the hundreds of thousands to millions, and they have significant reach and large audience size.

If you are centering your influencer marketing campaign around these types of influencers, your success will depend on your ability to get the most out of your marketing budget. Unlike nano and micro-influencers, mega-influencers will typically demand a significant amount of money for a social media post.

When utilized correctly, marketing with mega-influencers is an effective strategy that can yield significant ROI. While a branded post has a higher average cost, these celebrity influencers have a major audience, leading to a bigger platform for brands. Let’s look at how you can maximize your budget to get the best value from marketing with mega-influencers.

Expand Your Outreach

When you reach out on your channel of choice to try and cultivate a relationship with influencers, don’t limit yourself. Finding the right potential influencer fit will take time and a large outreach. You can have an easier time finding the right content creator fit by having a larger outreach.

The first step in an influencer marketing campaign is connecting with the creators you hope to work with. This requires messaging them on different social platforms. It can be a time-consuming first step, but it is worthwhile to reach out to a larger number of influencers. This is because it will provide you with a variety of different creators with different influencer rates to choose from.

Having more influencers interested gives you more leverage. The more leverage you have, the more you can negotiate. Don’t be afraid to negotiate with mega-influencers. Just because they have celebrity status doesn’t make them different. Many of them are everyday people who run their online presence like a business, so negotiation can be expected.

A more substantial outreach provides you with options. You can find mega-influencers that are better suited to your business, get a more affordable rate for a post, and even have more of a say in the type of content created. If you play it right, you can get posts from a larger influencer at a rate that works with your budget.

Calculate the Engagement of the Influencers

With influencers, engagement rate is an extremely important metric to pay attention to. It is a way for you to see the actual impact the creator has with their followers, which makes someone a valuable influencer for a brand to partner with. There are influencers with millions of followers with an extremely low engagement rate. Fake followers may inflate their follower count, or the people who follow them might not be that invested in their content.

Engagement rate is a metric that tracks the likes and comments and general impact of an influencer’s post, and it is scaled based on the number of followers they have. It shows the level of engagement they have on their posts and the level of interest their followers take on a typical post. Most of the time, micro-influencers will have higher levels of engagement because having fewer followers makes it more likely that the followers you have will interact with your content.

A mega-influencer with an engaged following has massive value. You can find out the engagement levels the influencers have on your own. HootSuite provides you with an easy breakdown of how to handle this job yourself to find out which influencers have the most active users.

Calculating the engagement rate of the influencers you are hoping to work with is an important step. Many brands overspend on influencers that have high follower counts but low engagement rates. If you build your campaign around targeting mega-influencers with high follower counts and engagement rates, you’ve found an effective influencer marketing strategy.

Prioritize Video-Based Creators

One of the most effective marketing channels to use on social media is video content. Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have built their success on this medium, and it is one that consumers are extremely fond of. From Instagram Stories to TikTok clips, video content is the best way to get the most out of a single post.

It is also the form of influencer content that makes the most sense for brands. Video allows brands to get more of their message out and better spotlight their product, and it is also the form of content that consumers prefer. According to a comprehensive report by WyzOwl, when asked how they’d most want to learn about a new product or service, 69% of consumers in a survey said their preferred medium was a short video.

Video also helps boost conversions. The same report showed that 78% of video marketers said video helped them generate sales. This is why prioritizing content creators that will develop video is the best use of your budget on influencer marketing.

Video content is the type of post many in the influencer marketing industry are now pivoting towards. Even if it is an impermanent post like Instagram stories, there is still a ton of value to be found there. It is consumers’ preferred way of receiving branded content on their social media feeds, and it allows companies to share higher-quality, more detailed information with their customers. By building your campaign around high-follower count mega-influencers, your influencer post will have a massive number of average views.

Find the Right Partner

Influencer marketing is a tricky thing. Building relationships with influencers takes time, money, and effort, and even with all that, industry experience is a major differentiator in campaign success. Finding the right partner is essential. This is where Influence Hunter comes in. Get in touch with us and find out how we can help you create successful and scalable influencer marketing campaigns, whether you’re looking to utilize nano-influencers, micro-influencers, mega-influencers, or a combination of the three.