The Cost Landscape of Influencer Marketing: An Interview with Jenny Song Schmidt

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Jenny Song Schmidt is a German influencer marketing expert with over seven years of experience in managing data-driven and results-driven influencer marketing campaigns. Before launching her own company in 2021, Jenny Song Schmidt was Senior Director of Influencer Marketing and Social Media for German online fitness platform Gymondo. Today, her job is to help brands launch and manage ROI-driven influencer marketing campaigns, as well as teach masterclasses to teach marketers how to get the most out of data-driven campaigns. In this interview, Jenny explains how market fluctuations influence influencer pricing and why the growing awareness of the impact of social media on mental health is forcing influencers to bring more value to their content and channels.


What trends are influencing influencer prices and fees?
There are two things going on right now: on the one hand CPM and pricing fluctuates quality directors email database , and on the other hand platform diversification . It’s correlated. Instagram has been the number one platform for influencer marketers for a long time, but since 2022 it has been struggling in terms of ROI, especially for D2C companies. They have had to turn to other marketing channels. Marketers have been proactively trying other channels, going back to YouTube’s origins. They are also trying platforms that work better than TikTok – TikTok has been a trend that influencer marketers have tried over the past couple of years, but I have seen time and time again that TikTok still doesn’t measure up to Instagram in terms of performance. It’s not a performance platform. TikTok wants you to stay on TikTok, so it’s something you can’t track. Marketers use it to promote their brand, but because it’s so unpredictable, they turn to other platforms like YouTube or try new formats like podcasts.

This suggests that marketers are spreading the same budget across more channels and platforms, which impacts influencer pricing .
That’s exactly what I’ve observed in the market. The diversification of platforms means that the budget goes elsewhere. It’s split between different channels for different types of platforms. It’s still used for influencer marketing, but it’s no longer fully dedicated to Instagram. It also means that the budget often doesn’t increase, stays the same, or even decreases. I’ve noticed budget cuts or allocations to different platforms and channels because ROI is no longer as important as it was over the past three years.