The Power of Influencer Marketing Data: A Guide

With the major platforms expanding the tools they offer brands and influencer marketers, including live streaming, AI-powered content generation, campaign management, and content analytics, it seems influencer marketing strategies are required. If your brand is ready to invest its time and budget into influencer marketing campaigns, start by learning more about the role that influencer marketing data plays in making them successful.

What is the role of data in influencer marketing?

The role of data in influencer marketing can’t be emphasized enough. Sure, you’ll be analyzing campaigns to calculate your influencer marketing ROI based on views, shares, likes, comments, downloads, and signups, but the data influencer marketing requires will be useful long before you’re counting clickthroughs to your e-commerce store.

Use data to define your marketing goals or update your audience research because even if your brand hasn’t changed, your target audience is always evolving. Or analyze the data on various influencer marketing platforms to determine which types of content perform best on each.

You can also look at real-time data for potential partnering influencers to determine if their follower counts, engagement rates, and most popular content aligns with your brand’s wants and needs.

Other data to analyze for creators:

Audience demographics. An influencer might have incredible engagement rates and a high reach, but if they’re reaching an audience that isn’t your target audience, you might not get the results you’d expect from working with them. Understanding the audience type or audience age of an influencer helps you better see whether they’re a good fit for your company.
Active platforms. Active platforms are the social media sites where an influencer posts or where they have the greatest reach or engagement levels. While some influencers only use one or two social platforms, others are active on four or five.

What is the size of the influencer marketing market?

There are several ways to measure the size of the market, including the percentage of brand participants, the number of social media users who consider themselves influencers, how much brands are spending on influencer marketing, and how readily new platforms are adopted for influencer marketing.

Here are a few stats to give you an idea of the current and future size of influencer marketing:

In 2024, U.S. influencer marketing spending is expected to hit a record high of $7.14 billion.
Within 10 days of Meta launching its Threads platform, 54% of influencers were already posting sponsored content, according to IZEA research.
Globally, there are approximately 200 million creators who use their influence, creativity, or skills to aggregate and monetize their audience, per Linktree.
By 2025, it’s predicted that 86.0% of U.S. marketers will use influencer marketing, based on an Insider Intelligence report.

How much do you pay for influencer marketing?

Various factors affect how much marketers will pay for an influencer campaign, including the type of content produced, the platform, the number of pieces in the campaign, usage rights, and the influencer’s niche, experience, engagement, and number of followers.

But if you’re looking for a general idea of average payments, our State of the Influencer Economy report, which analyzed over $70 million in influencer payments in IZEA’s platform, found the average cost paid per post, per platform is:

Twitch: $4,373
Instagram Story: $2,784
TikTok: $2,741
YouTube: $2,102
X (Formerly Twitter): $1,643
Pinterest: $1,450
Instagram photo: $1,311
Facebook: $642

Influencer marketing ROI

Done well, influencer marketing has one of the highest returns on investment of all advertising mediums. Influencer marketing statistics show brands earn an average of $6.50 for every dollar spent on a campaign.

Beyond just the response your campaign can earn, it’s important to note that creators can save your brand money on everything from platform research to photography and video production, the latter of which can add up quickly, especially with multiple campaigns.

Benefits of influencer marketing data

Using data before, during, and after your campaigns can help you turn numbers into insights and insights into action. Whether you’re studying influencer marketing trends or learning from the results of influencer marketing case studies, here are three ways your brand will benefit from studying marketing data.

Data-driven decision making

No experienced marketer will argue that instincts, bias, or even power grabs don’t play a role in a brand’s decision-making. But when it comes time to explain your choices or ask for a bigger marketing budget, nothing trumps data.

With planning, strategy and implementation developed around facts, even calculated risks that don’t pay off become easier to defend.

Identifying audience segments

Analyze not only consumer trends through the lens of your existing target audiences. How are the demographics of your audience changing? Are Boomers buying more fitness equipment? What social movements matter most to Gen Z right now? Have your millennial customers ignored your last few campaigns because they can’t identify with the messaging?

Turn to your data to learn why your past marketing efforts are no longer working, and turn your data into well-researched audience segments to focus your messaging for each group.

Measuring ROI

Just how effective are your campaigns? Only data analysis can truly help you unearth answers to your questions. Need some examples of what data can tell you?

Who was the most engaged with your campaign?
What day of the week and time earns the best engagement?
What percentage of viewers found our campaign through the hashtags we chose?
Why did most viewers stop watching the video at the 42-second mark?

When you learn from data and transform your takeaways into actions that will improve future marketing, every campaign is a step toward greater success.

Put these data-driven insights and practices to work for your team long before you seek influencers to roll out your next campaign. With the right numbers guiding your decision-making, you can make informed choices that enrich your influencer marketing efforts today and down the road.