With social media apps like Tiktok and Instagram proving to be critical resources for businesses to advertise and generate sales, it’s no wonder more and more entrepreneurs and companies are looking for content creators for hire.
A content creator is someone who creates engaging, interesting, or educational material and publishes it through any medium or channel. In modern lingo, this primarily pertains to the digital sphere, such as social media apps and other web platforms, like YouTube and WordPress. While many brands reach out to social media influencers and figures with brand sponsorships, this doesn’t generate unique content on the brand’s platforms or provide analytics and insights.
If you’ve never hired a content creator before, it can quickly blow through your budget if you don’t know what you’re doing. Whether you want to hire a content creator for Instagram, Tiktok, or your brand’s blog, you can expect to pay anywhere between $3,000 to $10,000 per month (or even post)! In this article, we’ll discuss what exactly justifies those costs and budget-friendly strategies to boost your digital engagement.
Why Does a Social Media Presence Matter?
In our modern age of technology, a social media presence is more than a way to post updates about your business. In fact, several businesses start on social media! Investing in your brand’s digital presence can help with:
- Attracting customers and receiving feedback
- Increasing your market reach
- Conducting market research with lowered marketing costs
- Developing your brand
- Increasing traffic to your brand’s website
- Increasing revenue through advertising and building networks with customer bases
Costs of Hiring a Content Creator
Increasing revenue and turning leads into sales sounds great, but hiring a content creator is not as easy as hiring an intern to post once a day. You must factor in your exact budget, determine what types of creators would help you reach your goals, and understand the price breakdown of different projects.
Consider Your Budget
Start by determining which types of influencers or creators you’d like to collaborate with and the kinds of posts you’d like to sponsor or publish. We recommend considering:
- Maintaining exclusive rights to any content the creator produces for your brand, so you can use them in all of your promotional materials moving forward
- Whether you want one sponsored post or several
- Types of content the creator will produce and the time and skill required to produce it (for example, videos typically require more time and skill to produce than a simple image post with text)
Content creators charge a little differently than other freelancers. Some may charge per hour (you can generally expect to pay anywhere between $15 to $150 per hour), per post or content piece (which can range anywhere between $25-$300 per piece of content), or a flat rate per project (this pay range depends on the scope of your project and can run you anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand dollars).
Types of Content Creators
Content creators can be utilized in a variety of ways. Brands hire micro-influencers, macro-influencers, and in-house or freelance creators to manage their brand accounts.
A micro-influencer is a content creator with between 1,000 and 100,000 followers on a platform, with an average engagement rate of at least 7%, who consistently creates strong visual content. A macro-influencer has between 100,000 and one million followers, an engagement rate of at least 3%, and also creates consistently engaging content. These influencers will post about your brand from their own accounts with the goal of driving traffic to your brand’s accounts.
These contracts typically require negotiation between the influencer’s management team and your brand, negotiating a number of posts, their exact content, and pricing per post. For micro-influencers, a single post can cost between $50 to $300, and for macro-influencers, expect between $300 to $3,000, depending on their follower count.
A full-time, in-house content creator will post directly from your brand’s account, allowing your accounts to produce unique content and drive direct traffic where you want it. However, it can be costly to bring on a full-time employee, as salaries for this role can range between $36,000 to $99,000 per year. This figure alone doesn’t account for taxes, marketing budget, and more.
We recommend smaller businesses hire a freelancer. Why hire a freelance content creator? These creators don’t require an annual salary and can work remotely from anywhere in the world to help you achieve your goals, which means you can pay a lower rate without sacrificing quality. Like an in-house content creator, they can produce content that goes directly on your social media accounts, review analytics, and tailor their posts to meet your business’s unique needs.
Connect With Creators in Your Budget
Guru is the leading platform that connects top-notch freelancers with businesses and professionals like you. Browse through hundreds of profiles and portfolios, or save yourself time with our easy-to-use search! Ready to boost your brand’s digital presence and turn those followers into customers? Post a free job listing today to get started.
