Paid vs Organic Influencer Marketing Strategy: Which is Best for Your Brand?

Influencer marketing is a powerful tool for brands looking to build trust, expand their reach, and make a mark in their industry. While once seen as an optional bolt-on, influencer marketing is now a sophisticated commercial strategy. It’s a discipline that will place your brand in front of your target audience at the right time in their journey.

We’ve discovered that influential voices often deliver a significantly greater impact than your usual brand owned content, as these numbers show:

While developing meaningful influencer partnerships will level up your brand reach in a saturated space, deciding whether to go the paid or organic route isn’t easy. Here, we’ll look at the key differences between paid and organic strategies to help you make the best choice for your brand.

Paid vs organic influencer marketing: what are the differences?

So, what is the difference between paid and organic influencer marketing strategies? Let’s explore.

What is paid influencer marketing?

Paid influencer marketing strategies revolve around compensating influencers to endorse your brand or its products. In these situations, payment can be monetary or incentive-based, where influencers receive free products or perks for promoting you.

Typically, paid influencer marketing content comes in the form of:

• Paid product reveals or reviews
• Paid influencer ad content
• Sponsored social media posts

Paid influencer marketing: key considerations

According to The Influencer Marketing Academy, 47.4% of brands spend $10,000 or less on their influencer marketing campaigns, with 14.5% spending more than $500,000. Unless your activities earn a consistent return on investment (ROI), leaning solely on paid influencer campaigns will seriously eat into your advertising budget.

Paid influencer content is often based on buying into a one-off transaction for a ‘quick win.’ On the flipside, organic influencer marketing strategies are usually founded on building long term partnerships.

What is organic influencer marketing?

Organic influencer marketing strategies revolve around nurturing relationships without paying for the pleasure. Typically, brands reach out to relevant influencers in their industry or niche and nurture partnerships based on shared values, relevant interests or common goals.

Organic influencer marketing content often comes in the form of:

• Branded content published through the influencer’s promotional channels (social, vlog, blog or podcast)
• Organic product endorsements or event promotions via social media
• Natural influencer-led brand mentions, comments, and community conversations

Organic influencer marketing: key considerations

Organic influencer discovery and outreach takes time and perseverance, but it’s usually far more authentic than ‘pay to play’ content. When an influencer genuinely respects your values and what you do (or offer), they’ll become brand advocates.

Well-positioned organic partnerships will ensure your influencers’ messaging speaks directly to your audience, and you’ll likely earn more engagement from your campaign activities. You’ll become creative partners. Why? It’s because organic influencer relationships are founded on shared goals and aligned values, often resulting in the most impactful outcomes.

Should you try the hybrid approach? 

Lots of forward-thinking brands across industries adopt a hybrid approach to their influencer marketing strategies. If you choose to balance paid endorsements with organic influencer partnerships, you should set a clear budget and performance benchmarks. Doing so will ensure you don’t overinvest in paid influencer marketing and drive a healthy ROI from your activities.

If you do the ‘hybrid’ route, we recommend focusing on building organic influencer partnerships and leveraging paid opportunities sparingly. That way, you can use paid promotions to complement your organic influencer campaigns rather than relying on sponsored opportunities to hit your marketing goals.

The impact of well-placed organic influencer marketing strategies

We live in an attention-poor age. Consumers can gorge on content across every channel or touchpoint imaginable – so why is yours worth their time? That’s a question that every brand manager or marketing decision-maker often asks themselves. We’re sure you’re no exception.

Brand-aligned organic influencer content is one of the most impactful branches of marketing right now. Today’s consumers crave authenticity, and real organic moments are the best way to stand out in their feeds.

Carefully curated and nurtured influencer partnerships can elevate brand reputations and earn genuine engagement, which often converts into long-term advocacy.

Our State of Influence report shows that influencer marketing is making significant waves across industries. In the personal care sector, for instance:

• Earned media value (EMV) has increased by +87%
• Impressions have risen by +82%
• Engagements have improved by +73.4% YoY, driving a 12% rise in Virality

Based on our insights, what’s clear is that an industry-wide rise in influencer marketing largely drives this growth. Interestingly, we’ve seen similar patterns and trends across other key industries, including sport & athleisure, beauty, luxury, and fashion.

For authenticity, attention, and growth, here are three essential elements of any impactful organic influencer marketing strategy. 

Work with nano influencers and micro influencers

We’ve found that identifying the right influencers for your brand and campaign is essential. Working with nano influencers or micro influencers in your niche will likely make the biggest impact as you can tap into slightly smaller yet highly-engaged audiences. Reaching focused audiences with interests or motivations that align with what you have to offer will drive the healthiest ROI – so choose your partnerships wisely.

Lean on more than virality alone

Rather than aiming for virality alone, your influencer marketing content should speak directly to your audience and their motivations. Leveraging the right influencers to share or amplify messages that offer actual value to your target consumers is the best way to build trust and convert. Often, ‘going viral’ is the side effect of well-placed, thoughtfully curated messaging.

Reach beyond vanity metrics

While the likes EMV, impressions, and brand mentions all have their place in influencer campaign analysis, without real context, these are often little more than vanity metrics. Without the right tools, it’s hard to accurately track the impact of organic influencer campaigns, as so much related content gets lost in the mix.

WeArisma’s AI-powered organic coverage monitoring tool can help you reach beyond vanity metrics to measure your earned media impact and identify the influential sources discussing your brand with razor-sharp efficiency.

Measure the Total Impact of your influencer marketing strategy

Investing in meaningful organic influencer marketing strategies and using paid partnerships to complement your efforts is the best way to ensure consistent success.

Shifting consumer preferences are changing conceptions of what good looks like. These ever-evolving attitudes call for new ways of thinking about earned media success – organic influencer marketing is the way forward. The time to act is now.

Put theory into action with our insider guide on creating an influencer strategy that drives results.