A better way to think about this is a framework I call The Cost-Per-Asset Funnel, an idea I picked up from Cody Wittig of The Bottom Line. Instead of focusing on an individual post's engagement rate, it measures your success by the total cost to acquire a library of User Generated Content you can use everywhere.
Here’s how you can apply it. The first step is to model your outreach. When you're doing broad, unpaid product gifting, you have to work with percentages. Wittig lays out a solid benchmark: for every 100 influencers you reach out to, expect about 20% to opt-in and agree to receive a free product. So right away, you have a baseline of 20 potential creators from your initial list of 100.
Next, you have to benchmark the post rate. Of those 20 people who receive your product, not all will post. A reasonable expectation, per Wittig's experience, is that around 30% will follow through. In our example, that means you’d get about 6 influencers posting from your initial outreach of 100. This is a critical number to track.
Then, you calculate your asset volume. Each of those 6 influencers won't just post once. They’ll typically create an average of two to three pieces of content. So from your initial batch of 100 contacts, you should end up with a haul of around 15 unique content assets (videos, static photos, stories) for your brand. Now you can calculate your cost per asset, which is a much more useful number than engagement rate. As Taylor Lagasse points out, for these seeding campaigns, you're not buying reach, you're looking for charismatic people who can create content that you can repurpose that content in your paid ads.
This is why focusing on a single engagement rate is so misleading. As Kunle Campbell explains on his show, engagement is inversely correlated with follower size. Data from a major influencer platform shows that micro-influencers with under 1,000 followers average an 8% like rate, while those with 10,000 to 100,000 followers get around 2.4%. And as Myran Mahroo notes on Honest Ecommerce, a celebrity like Kylie Jenner might only get a 1% or 2% engagement rate. The number itself is almost meaningless without the context of follower count and your campaign's goals.
The Cost-Per-Asset framework breaks down when you're paying significant cash for a collaboration. If you are paying an influencer a large fee, you are paying for access to their audience, and you should absolutely have stricter requirements for reach and engagement. But for building a library of authentic content through scaled, unpaid influencer marketing, your focus should be on the final cost for each piece of creative, not the vanity metrics it gets on the influencer's feed.
