Influencer marketing agency in Saudi Arabia

Mawthooq licence: what to know before hiring influencers

Since October 2022, a Mawthooq licence has been mandatory for any individual who publishes ads on their social media accounts in Saudi Arabia. It is issued by the General Authority for Media Regulation (formerly the General Commission for Audiovisual Media), and licensed advertisers can be verified on the official Mawthooq platform. Applicants must be at least 18, and non Saudis can apply under set conditions but may not advertise until the licence is issued.

For a brand, the practical meaning is simple: don’t hire an influencer to advertise for you until you have confirmed they hold a valid licence. Working with unlicensed influencers exposes the campaign to violations and damages your brand’s reputation. The authority does exempt certain cases, such as an individual promoting their own product or service on their personal account.

As for the fee, media reports at launch put it at about SAR 15,000 for three years, and the authority has since announced changes to the fee and duration. So we always check current terms on the official platform and ask every influencer for their licence number before signing.

How much do influencer ads cost in Saudi Arabia?

There is no official rate card for influencer ads in Saudi Arabia; each influencer sets prices based on audience size, engagement, niche and demand. Costs vary enormously between a small niche creator with a few thousand engaged followers and a celebrity reaching millions.

Other factors push the price up or down: content type (a Snapchat story is not the same as a dedicated TikTok video or a permanent Instagram post), the number of deliverables, exclusivity against competitors, rights to reuse the content in your ads, and season, since demand rises in Ramadan and major occasions.

Our advice is not to judge an influencer by price per follower, but by cost per result. A group of mid sized niche influencers can outperform one celebrity on the same budget, because their audiences trust them more and engage more. That is why we spread budgets across several influencers, measure sales for each with unique links and codes, and rebook those who deliver the best return.

How to choose the right influencer for your brand

Start with the audience, not the fame. The first question: are this influencer’s followers actually your customers? An influencer whose audience is in Riyadh won’t help a store that only delivers in Jeddah, and one whose audience is mostly outside the Kingdom won’t suit a local campaign. So we ask influencers for real audience stats: cities, ages and gender.

Second, genuine engagement. Follower counts can be inflated, but comment quality and the ratio of views to followers reveal a lot, and repetitive generic comments or numbers that don’t add up are warning signs. Third, fit: does the influencer usually talk about your field, and do their values and style suit your brand? An ad that breaks from their usual content looks forced and loses its effect.

Fourth, compliance: a valid Mawthooq licence, clear disclosure of ads to the audience, and a history free of violations and controversy. Review their past content too, because your brand will be linked to them in front of their audience. At Zeal we run these checks on every influencer we recommend and share the data before any decision.

How to measure influencer marketing results

The biggest complaint about influencer campaigns is that they can’t be measured: the brand pays, the influencer posts, and nobody knows what happened next. The fix is to build measurement before publishing, not after. Each influencer gets a unique tracking link and a named discount code, plus a clear landing page where needed, so you know exactly the visits, orders and sales from each collaboration.

Not all of the effect shows in the code. Some followers search for your brand on Google or visit your account later. So we also watch for increases in branded searches, direct visits and account followers during the campaign, and compare them with the previous period.

Finally, we get extra value from the content itself. A video that earned strong engagement on the influencer’s account often works as a paid ad on Snapchat, TikTok or Instagram, provided usage rights were agreed upfront. That way the campaign doesn’t end when a story disappears after 24 hours; it becomes proven ad creative that lowers cost per purchase for weeks.