Our team works with fintech companies and many of our members have demat accounts. We couldn’t resist marrying the two and still being able to find useful things.

A typical equity portfolio that is long-only would have several stocks at a given price. After doing due diligence on many parameters, such as the intrinsic cost, market value, expected growth rate, perceived safety, and estimated growth rate, you would buy the stock. You will then gradually build your positions and increase your confidence, adding more money to the portfolio.

You will see that nearly all the books on trading speak highly about your position sizing. This means that you can’t allocate more than a certain percentage of your budget for one stock, and that you must ensure sufficient diversification within the portfolio.

Now that we have gotten past the jargon about portfolio management, let’s get to the point. What does this have to do with managing influencer campaigns? Similar to portfolio management, you choose your Influencers and set a budget. This is based on brand objectives and what other brands are paying for similar services. After you have selected the influencer, you need to work on the operational tasks like how the communication should be done and how brand integration should look. It’s very similar to tracking the stocks in your portfolio. Once you have executed a campaign with the influencer, you can look at ROAS. This is similar to monitoring the quarterly and annual stock returns. You can double down if the results are positive. In the case of influencer marketing campaigns, if you are pleased with your results, you can extend your contract.

Similar to your equity portfolio you will need multiple influencers. They should come from different categories or genres and be chosen at a reasonable % of your budget. Changing this allocation can skew your results and lead to incorrect signals.

What happens if there is only one influencer to help you with a campaign? You may be able to get amazing results, which is what happens all the time. However, there are limited followers that an influencer can gain in a short time span. This means you could end up repeating the same message to the same audience. Your incremental ROI won’t increase. If your campaign was successful, you’ll get additional analytics that will give you additional data and possibly experimental budgets. You can add more influencers to your campaign to expand your reach and repeat the process.

What happens if your campaign doesn’t work out the way you planned? This happens quite often, and it is not uncommon for campaigns worldwide. Similar to portfolio allocation, you need to understand Stop loss. A threshold must be set for expected performance. If this fails, you can reduce the influencer’s weight and assign it to someone who is performing well.

Here’s a summary of the lessons that you can learn from your portfolio management campaigns regarding influencer marketing.

1. You can set a selection criteria. This could be category, cost per viewer, average video views, and so forth.
2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Have a double-digit influencer count that you can use to manage your campaign.
3. Do not spend too much on one influencer. We recommend spending no more than 15% of your campaign budget for one influencer.
4. Take a look at the campaign’s overall outcome and not just on winners. If there are a few winners but a lot of losers, you can learn a lot about your content integration, selections and other aspects. These lessons can be used to build the next campaign.
5. You should have a hypothesis and an expectation. What are you expecting from these campaigns? And over what timeframe. This is even more important. This is more important than ever.
6. You should wait for a reasonable price – Don’t be tempted to hire a celebrity influencer if it doesn’t fit your needs. Instead, find multiple micro influencers at an affordable price.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? We are happy to discuss this further with and discuss portfolio construction for Influencers campaign.

Influencer marketing is one of the most successful ways to contact your target audience. However, influencer expenses might vary greatly depending on your industry, business goals, platforms you are  targeting, posting frequency, and other factors. How do you identify the appropriate influencer for your brand without spending a fortune?

Creating branded content includes time, effort, talent, and production costs. And not always have an option to pay via merchandise or gifts. Paying the proper price is worthwhile and also encourages creators to do more brands. But what is the appropriate price?

Continue reading to discover the best method for determining rates, the ballpark cost of various types of posts, and other elements that may effect influencer pricing for your next influencer marketing campaign.

How do you calculate reasonable Instagram influencer payout?

There are techniques to ensure that brands gain value from sponsored posts and that influencers are fairly compensated for their efforts. Rates should be based on an influencer’s genuine follower count and engagement rate, but other criteria such as talent, star power,  or access to a specific audience such as notable followers can also have an impact. Covering any expenses related with a shoot (such renting a studio, employing a hairstylist, et cetera) will also be a concern. Most pricing begins with one of these basic formulas and progresses upward from there.

• Engagement rate per post + extras for type of post (x #of posts) + extra factors = total rate.
• The unspoken industry standard is Cost per view (CPV) as per industry + extras for type of post (x # of posts) + additional factors = total rate.
• Cost per view changes a lot from Beauty & personal care to Ed-Tech to finance. E..g, in one specific cases we wanted to target freelancer communities via youtube long form cost and since there was scarcity of such creators, we had to pay per post. We had a similar case with the remittance category too. Depending on the TAM and use cases, the CPV may vary from 10 Paisa to say 2-3 Rs.

Factors Influencing Influencer Rates

There are a variety of elements that can determine how much an influencer costs for their services and it is very common that an influencer may charge different commercials for different brands. Influencer marketing is a reputable business, and influencers base their pricing on what brands are willing to pay. These are the elements you can bet on to have an impact:

1. Social Media Platform: Some influencers may charge the same amount for the same type of post regardless of the channel, but the rates usually vary across channels. After all, each social media site has a different audience type, and creative resources vary as well.
2. Influencer Reach: Reach is the number of people the influencer has access to through their platform. This is mostly determined by the number of followers or subscribers the influencer has and the number of people they have the potential to reach.Influencers are classified according to their reach. This is not sacrosanct and should be treated in ballpark only:

• Nano-influencers: 1,000–10,000 followers
• Micro-influencers: 10,000–50,000 followers
• Mid-tier influencers: 50,000–500,000 followers
• Macro-influencers: 500,000–1,000,000 followers
• Mega-influencers: 1,000,000+ followers

• Content Types: The type of content you request from an influencer will also have an effect on the fee. This is due to the fact that influencers will need to invest energy,time,  and resources into creating the content, and different forms of content necessitate different things. Consider how much content the influencer will need to develop and whether they or you will provide the necessary resources. The more effort it takes to develop the stuff you are requesting, the more it will cost.
• Engagement of Followers: Look closely at how much an influencer’s audience genuinely participates and interacts with their content. The more involved their followers are, the more effective your message will be. You might also want to explore comment quality while doing this. 
• Specialization or Industry: Popular categories will have more accessible influencers and lower pricing than niches with considerably fewer influencers. You can also look at the industries that an influencer’s audience prefers to ensure that hiring them for your company makes sense.
• Rights of Use:  If you intend to reuse an influencer’s content, ensure that you discuss it in advance and specify the terms in the influencer contract. 
• Exclusivity: Influencers earn money by endorsing different brands. It is possible that you will pick an influencer that your competition also wants to use. In this case, you may wish to request that the influencer sign a non-compete agreement or exclusivity clause as part of their influencer contract, which prohibits them from supporting a competitor for a set amount of time.

What Should You Consider When Pricing an Influencer?

Influencer rates can differ significantly. To ensure that an influencer is demanding a fair rate, brands should look at:

• Influencer marketing ROI
• Standard influencer rates and rate cards
• Previous campaign performance

How Much Money Do Influencers Make Per Post?

The amount influencers make is depending on quite a few criteria and not straight forward. The following are the top five social media sites for influencer marketing as per brand’s choice:

• Instagram (93%)
• TikTok (68%)
• Facebook (68%)
• YouTube (48%)
• Twitter (32%)

How to Find a Low-Cost Influencer?

Finding the ideal influencer for your brand is a delicate balance between what you can spend and their influencer prices. Here are a few points you can keep in mind: 

• Influencer Marketing Objectives:  The money you should spend for influencer marketing is heavily influenced by the objectives you would like to accomplish with your campaigns and the strategies you’ll use to get there. Some frequent goals are increasing social engagement, raising brand exposure,  and making more purchases.
• Influencer Marketing Platforms: There are numerous influencer marketing platforms available to help you locate influencers for your company.
• Influencer Marketing Firms:  There are also various influencer marketing organizations that exist to connect influencers with brands who wish to hire them, but their services do not end there. These agencies will help brands build an influencer marketing strategy, implement that plan, and maintain their influencer marketing campaigns.

Although influencer marketing might be costly, the returns can be incredibly useful, with 41 percent of businesses reporting greater success with an influencer marketing campaign than a standard ad effort in one poll.

Fun Fact: The number of YouTube channels that made at least $10,000 in revenue was up more than 40% year over year in 2022.

We worked with several brands having different objectives for their influencer marketing. Some brands wanted to start influencer marketing to test out certain geos within India, some had first sales or CPA as goal while some wanted to boost their ongoing celebrity campaigns. Some even wanted to just get the content rights of the promising creators to use them as ad copies for their performance marketing campaigns. Since objectives are very different, the end goals are measured on different KPIs. Not only that, there are few outcomes that are not so easy to measure or assign weight to. E.g, we came across one such campaign for a gaming brand where we saw their Instagram followers increasing by double digits % in a month’s time post-campaign completion. Usually, these bumps up in social media following take time if done organically, and getting such bumps up helps gain network effort much faster. In the case of another brand, we saw referral rates going up more than usual. In our past experience, we have also noticed if a brand is running a promo code outside of influencer campaigns, the redemption of those picks up as you increase influencer activities. This is very much likely in case a customer is discovering the product for the first time being endorsed by an influencer they follow. Some of the customers would want to search for the product elsewhere and depending on your distribution, they may find a promo code elsewhere and use that during purchase.

The above hypothesis is applicable for all sorts of influencers i.e. Nano, Micro, Mega, however, you typically see notice bump up in these secondary metrics if you have a large number of micro/nano influencers promoting your brands. There are multiple reasons for the same:

• Micro-influencers have a higher engagement rate and users are more likely to perform some of the actions suggested by influencers.
• Micro-influencers usually have to work hard to gain incremental followers and engagement and hence proportionately have to work more on content ensuring better quality.
• The number of endorsements for micro-influencers is limited and hence would value any endorsement more.
• Their audience is growing at a better pace and hence would be keen on doing something for brands that resonate with their audience.
• From content iterations and messaging perspectives, brands can do more A/B tests as the cost is relatively small compared to the mega influencer.

While sales or ROAS is the ultimate objective, some of the above help in brand recall or establishing trust. Small companies which end up spending a lot of money to get video creatives done for ad-gen campaigns, find a pocket-friendly solution when they work with micro-influencers. In our past experiences, we have come across a few micro-influencers where collective performance even takes care of non-performing ones. Once you are able to find out high-performing ones with desired ROAS, this serves well for the next set of campaigns too. Brands can continue to work with performing ones until the performance goes below the expected ROAS level. By repeating this process, brands will have access to a lot of influencers who would help build recall, give their content rights, be brand evangelists and at the same time bring desired ROAS. As some of these micro-influencers grow, new audiences also end up making purchases after watching older videos/reels. Many of these are hard to attribute if you are not following the MMP/ Brand link and hence do not show up while checking for attributed sales from influencers.

In a nutshell, if you plan your micro-influencers campaign well and have the right mechanism in place to monitor and remarket your audience base, this can do wonders. We are happy to chat about it and help you build this channel in an effective manner.

Influencer marketing has evolved into an effective tool for businesses seeking to reach new audiences. Marketers employ a variety of techniques to identify influential people and gain access to their followers.

Social media has a massive and ever-growing user base and a projected 4.41 billion by 2025. As the term “influencer marketing” spreads across industries, one industry, in particular, is embracing it and changing what influencer marketing looks like in the financial industry.

The increasing interest in digital marketing in the finance sector stems from an understanding of its benefits and applications. Finance brands are taking advantage of finance influencer marketing to connect with their customers and build credibility for their brands. Marketing financial services are not as simple as marketing a cosmetics or clothing line. These traditional products have an allure and attraction that most financial products do not. The items that financial brands hope to promote are innately dull, which makes convincing people to buy them difficult. Unlike other lifestyle products and services, the audience size for financial products is also lower which makes it difficult to use traditional marketing.

Another reason financial services marketing is more difficult than in other industries is the finance industry’s jargon. Finance professionals employ highly technical terminology, and their processes are replete with industry jargon. It can be difficult for marketers and advertisers to translate marketing jargon into language that a normal social media user can understand.  Furthermore, the financial services marketing industry is hampered by numerous regulatory and compliance formalities.

Looking for ways to plan an influencer campaign for a Finance brand? No worries, this article will help you make fabulous influencer marketing strategies for fintech brands.

Tips For Making An Effective Influencer Marketing Strategy For Finance Brands

A different approach is required for financial brands.

• Understand your influencer marketing campaign’s goals and objectives: Your finance brand’s influencer marketing strategy must have goals and objectives. You must ensure that you understand precisely what you want to achieve from a campaign and what it has in store for your target audience. Users typically seek information from finance brands rather than entertainment. As a result, you must be clear about the campaign’s goals and objectives and try onboard influencers who try to break down problems into smaller pieces and explain those well in simple words.
• Understand your target audience: When seeking desired results, finance influencer marketing campaigns must be targeted toward the appropriate audience. Financial brands must be cautious about who they target; otherwise, their campaign may fail to produce results. Let’s say you want to promote a personal finance app. In that case, your target audience should preferably be millennials and Generation Z, as they are tech-savvy and frequently use such apps. We did not have great success with Instagram for one of the investing products, however, it worked well with other generic saving and DIY mutual fund brands. At the same time, our investing product promotions with influencers on Youtube did really well and continue to get us additional customers even after several months of campaign execution.
• Choose the best social media apps for your brand: Influencer marketing for finance brands can be difficult because it necessitates prudent platform choice on social media. Once you’ve finalized your target audience, you must determine which social media platforms they use the most. To achieve the best results, make sure that your influencer marketing strategy is implemented across multiple platforms. Not only this, the video format i.e. short form vs long format work very differently. In the case of investing products, users typically like to understand various aspects of investing as well as associated risks and hence try and watch multiple long format videos to build understanding. While for something like saving or checking accounts, users would typically like to understand USPs and these can at times be communicated via short format as well.
• Create relevant content for a finance brand: When making a marketing campaign for a fintech brand, the content must be clear and to the point. Social media platforms allow you to use many kinds of content, from micro blogging to videos. Furthermore, the type of content you choose has a significant impact on the influencers you select. You must also ensure that the content you choose is appropriate for the particular social media platforms you’ve chosen in order to get the most out of your finance influencer marketing strategy. E.g. The kind of content one promotes on LinkedIn varies a lot from the one shared on Twitter. Also, brands tend to use different influencers even for the same communication depending on which platform they are using.
• Select the apt influencers for your finance brand: Finance brands that use influencers must be cautious about who they choose. Not every influencer has the ability to communicate financial messages. Make certain that the influencers you want to promote your brand have good credibility and are truthful. They must be careful about what they post because any mistakes can have serious legal ramifications.
• Before implementing your strategy, conduct a competitor analysis: Many banks have begun to market their financial products through influencers. Evaluating your competitors on social media can help you formulate the best strategy. You will be aware of the influencers with whom your potential customers are collaborating and the kind of content they are posting. Monitoring these factors will assist you in determining which aspects of your strategy require improvement.
• Make a campaign brief for financial influencers: Your campaign brief must include all of the pertinent information about your campaign. It should contain a detailed brief so that the finance influencers you’ve chosen are on the same page as you. This can include details about the campaign’s content structure, timeframe, salient points, disclaimers, and so on.
• Examine the outcomes of your influencer marketing campaign: The final and most important step in designing a successful finance influencer marketing campaign is to examine previous and ongoing campaigns. Only by investigating and evaluating the outcomes of your campaigns will you be able to determine whether your strategy was effective. This will also assist you in determining areas for the betterment of whether your chosen influencers can achieve the desired responses for your brand.

Many fintech brands have mellowed their influencer programs and treat influencers as part of their overall customer experience. Finance brands spend time and money on each stage of the cycle.   Influencers are positioned as long-term endorsers who can tell stories and support the brand’s message. The beauty of such a connection is that it tends to influence a variety of outcomes, such as awareness,  sign-ups, app downloads, purchases, engagements, and so on.

At Unravel Media, we have been able to estimate performance from influencer campaigns for the finance brands that we work with and also been able to clearly derive ROI from these campaigns with a media mix of LinkedIn, Youtube, Instagram and Telegram contents. Do get in touch if you wish to know more about our approach.

Influencer marketing has grown in popularity in recent years, and more people are interested in learning more about it now than ever before. Globally, Influencer marketing was estimated to be a $15 billion industry in 2022. It has become popular because of its unconventional and quirky approach. It has come forward as completely different from traditional marketing techniques that provided superficial sales content. Conversely, influencer marketing focuses on more meaningful conversations and experiences. As a result, influencer marketing is more personal than data-driven commercials.

Micro-influencers or creators with a small following are people who work in their respective niche, are truly knowledgeable, passionate, and authentic, and are regarded as reliable sources for product recommendations. It’s ideal for companies that do not have the budget to work with macro influencers but want to reach a more targeted audience. When it comes to Micro-influencers, the connection is everything. They receive a steady stream of comments, likes, and clicks as a result of their authenticity. As a result, unlike their Macro and Mega counterparts, Micro-influencers are frequently perceived as more approachable and relatable.

The competition among social media influencers is increasing, and we see a wide range of influencers and content generation. This may surprise you, but if you want higher brand engagement, go for micro-influencers rather than macro-influencers, that is, any influencer with 1,000 to 100,000 followers. According to research, the bigger and more popular the influencer, the lower the engagement (likes, comments, shares). Influencers with fewer than 1000 followers receive likes on their posts 8% of times, compared to average of 1.6% for those with tens of millions of followers or more.  As a result, for maximum engagement and lead generation, look for an influencer with 10K to 100K followers. However, the number of followers is not the only metric to consider; you should also consider how engaging the audiences are. Idle followers don’t help brands seeking exposure.

• High Return on Investment: Micro-influencers provide low-cost marketing solutions with a high return on investment. They also exponentially expand a company’s reach and are highly trusted by their followers. Engaging with multiple micro-influencers broadens but also deepens the reach. The average engagement rate for micro-influencers across feed and sponsored posts is 2%. Macro and Mega Macro influencers, on the other hand, have engagement rates ranging from 0.8% to 1.3%.
• Cult-Like Loyalty: Micro-influencers already have a following of people who are interested in businesses, products, and/or services like yours. Their followers are also cult-like in their devotion to every word and recommendation made. This increases the ROI of micro-influencers in your industry or niche. To get them on board, start a social media conversation and tell them how much you enjoy their content.
• Genuine Audience Connection: Because of their smaller, more engaged audiences, working with micro-influencers often produces more impactful results than working with macro-influencers or celebrities. People nowadays want personalized one-on-one recommendations, and micro-influencers can help them establish that authentic connection with their audience.
• Deep Audience Understanding: Make every effort to align your goals with those of the micro-influencers. Inquire about what their audience responds to the most and collaborate with them to make the posts more authentic. In addition to paid placement and promo codes, aligning incentives with an affiliate program can help. While maintaining brand consistency is important, give the influencer a seat at the strategic table to maximize results.
• Increased Credibility: Micro-influencers can increase the trustworthiness of your brand and assist you in reaching your desired target audience. Encourage your micro-influencers to become the new faces of your brand in terms of micro-influencer engagement. Request that they provide honest feedback on your products/business and that you use that feedback constructively, or that they create product tutorials and relevant live-stream videos.
• Sales and top-of-funnel traffic have increased: While celebrity influencers with vanity metrics have recently fallen out of favor, micro-influencers have proven to be effective partners for businesses of all sizes. Their value is derived from authentic and original content, which primarily drives top-of-funnel traffic and sales, which can be measured using performance-based models such as CPA. Treat them as true partners, and you’ll see your revenue grow.
• Involvement in More Intense Social Conversations: Working with micro-influencers allows brands to engage in a much more intimate social conversation with communities that typically demonstrate higher levels of trust and engagement. Sponsorships for micro-influencers are inherently more personal, so brands must seek out influencers and audiences who personally align with their brand values. –
• Sharing of Comprehensive Content: Micro-influencers have highly targeted audiences and are ideal for sharing in-depth content, ABM campaign material, or vertical-specific material. Begin cultivating relationships with micro-influencers as early as possible in the process.
• Product Evaluations: Micro-influencers are a great marketing asset when used to get product reviews on their social media and at retailers. They should disclose that they were involved in a seeding campaign, but their opinions are genuine and their own. To get your audience engaged and excited, you should re-gram their content or have them take over your Instagram Stories for a day.
• Brand Promotion: Today, online influencers and reviews generate the same level of trust as a recommendation from a friend. According to studies, micro-influencers have the highest engagement rates. Spend less money by using their niche market to reach your target audience and testing what works and what doesn’t. Product/service reviews and social media sharing are excellent places to start before moving on to personal content promotion ideas.

How to Collaborate with Micro-Influencers?

• Be clear with your Expectations and Goals: Before you begin working on your Micro influencer marketing campaign, you should define your goals and the metrics that will be used to measure success. Spending time outlining your goals will help you decide who to work with and what deliverables to request.
• Verify Micro-Influencers to Collaborate With: When selecting a Micro influencer to work with, ensure that they are a good fit for your target audience and brand. Working with influencers who have high engagement rates, post consistently, and have a distinct personality or voice is ideal.
• Negotiate Fees and Make an Influencer Agreement Contract: What happens now that you’ve identified a few Micro-influencers with whom you’d like to collaborate? The money speaks for itself! When the fee has been agreed upon, you must draft a contract that includes the payment amount, mode of payment, content deliverables, deadlines, contract length, and so on.
• Track and Monitor Outcomes: It is critical to track, monitor, and measure the outcomes of your campaign. You’ll be able to see how the content performed and use it to inform future campaigns, whether you’re working with the same Micro-influencers, finding new ones, or establishing different goals.
• Clear plan to run a follow up campaign – In our experience, we have seen 50% of campaigns with micro influencers fail despite having best of efforts on influencer selections, communication and follow up. The rest 50% work better than expected and over a long time meet the campaign goals too. However, for this to happen, as a brand you need to have a clear follow up campaign plan as many of these micro creators grow exponentially in terms of their subscriber base or views or other metric that you track. Since growth for Micro influencers is really fast, at times repeating a campaign with them costs a lot more than when they are small, Not only this, since typically the growth of subscribers is led by amazing content quality, chances of these getting viral is much higher. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you have a follow up campaign plan and inform them well in advance.
• Identify the right compensation strategy – You might want to explore a hybrid payment model with a few nano influencers who are willing to work on a fixed fee plus an incentive linked to a milestone. This brings Cost of goal much lower and influencers are motivated to work on content. By doing this, brands also get a chance to explain their objective in a much better manner which helps influencers to execute or evangelize to not only followers but in their own community too.

We really hope that you find this useful and would try and implement those on your micro creators strategy for additional sales. If you want to discuss this further or any other thing with respect to your influencer strategy, Do write to us and get started for free!

Influencer marketing is currently one of the trending marketing techniques. Working with influencers is a wonderful way for brands to reach a large audience. Therefore, we can see numerous companies factoring influencer relationships into their budgets to meet their own specific requirements. This works better than a mass advertising campaign globally, earning $5.78 for every dollar spent. According to recent statistics, global influencer marketing spending will reach $16.4 billion by the end of 2022. The achievement of influencer marketing is based on the fact that influencer-generated content has provided brands with better results than promotional/branded posts.

Initially, influencer marketing was limited to promoting new products and services. Influencers are now called to launch new brands, revitalize stagnant brands, and enhance brand perception on social media. According to Prasanth Kumar, CEO, of GroupM South Asia, “the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of influencer marketing by brands and has made it an integral part of their brand marketing strategy”. There are several steps involved in planning and executing an influencer marketing campaign. Each step in the right direction will get you closer to your brand’s goals and objectives. However, is it true that all influencer marketing campaigns are successful? Not at all.

So, how do you assess the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign? Is it only about the number of likes and comments? Are there any other important metrics for determining the success of influencer campaigns? Regular monitoring of your influencer marketing campaigns is a time-consuming task. Everything boils down to measuring the success rate of the influencer marketing campaign, whether it’s implementing the campaign on the right social media platforms, uncovering relevant social media influencers, or collecting data for the campaign.

Assessing the effectiveness of influencer marketing is a time-consuming and data-intensive process. Influencer marketing platforms can also assist in this regard. Without further ado, let’s get started measuring influencer marketing campaigns.

• Align influencer marketing campaigns with long-term business objectives: What do you hope to achieve with your Influencer marketing campaign? Do you want to increase brand awareness with an Influencer campaign? Or do you want to boost the level of engagement with your content? In some cases, or rather for established brands, they would want to get extra sales or focus on getting higher reach in case their reach is getting stagnant across traditional channels. Whatever your goals and objectives are, it is essential that you have a clear understanding of them. It is important to be clear about your objectives in order to stay focused. When monitoring the performance of your campaigns, your goals will help you determine whether or not your performance is satisfactory. Set goals for your social media activity that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. This will assist you in achieving maximum precision toward achieving your goals.
• Set a campaign goal: It becomes easier to reverse engineer a campaign objective and KPIs(key performance indicators). With the help of the social media analytics tool, you can begin tracking KPIs on your social media performance. You can choose which KPIs to prioritize based on your social media objectives. Among the most common KPIs in influencer marketing campaigns are:
  • Influencer-generated sales
  • Utilization of influencer-specific discount codes
  • Visits to your website or time spent on it
  • Sign-ups for your website or newsletter
  • Impressions, or the number of times the campaign content is shown

• Measure Influencer Followers: It is important to note that influencers have both human and bot followers. As a result, you cannot fully rely on the influencer’s follower count to determine the success of the campaign. However, the metric can still assist you in determining the approximate number of people who have received your brand message. To assist you further there are some paid tools as well that can assist you in measuring influencer followers.
• The number of influencer followers indicates the approximate number of times your brand message is shown to your target audiences. If your sponsored post received 2,000 impressions, it was viewed 2,000 times. Of course, you won’t know whether 2,000 people checked it out or not. You would, however, have some idea of the reach of your brand message.
• Measure Audience Engagement and CPE (Cost Per Engagement): Measuring the reach of an influencer marketing campaign is insufficient. You must monitor the level of engagement of your target audiences with your sponsored post. So, start with tracking every statistic for all of your sponsored posts and stories. Remember to track the following metrics:
  • Clicks: Are you interested in knowing how many people are interested in your product/services? Clicks will make it easier for you to find it! Once you know how many clicks your sponsored post received, you can easily determine how many of the target audiences saw your post.
  • Likes: It is also important to track the number of likes on your sponsored post. As a result, you can learn how many people have expressed interest in your post. If your post receives more likes, you can expect it to rise in the social media rankings.
  • Shares: The number of shares indicates how many people found your post interesting or useful. People who have shared your post are therefore interested in your products or services. You’d have to nurture those leads in order to convert them into paying customers.
  • Furthermore, the shares indicate that people are interacting with the influencer’s content and recommending the post to their networks. That means your brand awareness will have increased as a result of the campaign.
  • Comments: The most powerful tool for measuring the engagement of your sponsored post is comments. The more comments your post receives, the more people are interested in your company. To track the success of your campaign, you should also consider the reactions and brand mentions for your post. When it comes to Instagram, you should look at the number of saved posts.
• Measuring Your Campaign’s ROI: There is no simple way to assess the success of your influencer marketing campaign. How you measure the ROI of your campaign and how another company does it may be the same or different. It all depends on the campaign objectives you’ve established.
• To learn the metrics that businesses should regularly monitor, measure, and analyze, here are some questions that most businesses should ask:
• If an influencer shares a post on our social media, how many followers and how many views will we have?
• How many people interact with each influencer post?
• Which marketing messages and content types are being received favorably by our target audience?
• How many website visitors have we gotten as a result of influencer posts?
• Are influencers improving our company’s SEO through organic conversations and website links?
• Is the value of influencer posts greater than the cost of working with them?

Monitoring and measuring your influencers and their efforts effectively come down to being able to squeeze in trustworthy and consistent reports in these areas (social, SEO and sales). Once you have this information, you can calculate the value of each content type and social channel. Once you have those figures, you can compare them to the influencer investment you made to see which influencers perform best on which social channels, content types, and product types.

In conclusion, the metrics you use to measure your influencer marketing campaign will be determined by your specific business objectives. Influencer marketing is an excellent marketing strategy for capturing the attention of your target audience. Unravel Media can help you track influencer campaign metrics beyond impressions and clicks and up to the level of measuring sales and repeat sales. We have built a model to map the entire journey on an influencer campaign and to further optimize this similar to a performance campaign.

In this world of unprecedentedly growing technology, the market sphere has tightened its grip on the ongoing trends. Where business owners have excelled in their capacity to reach a wider audience, the internet and social media have made it even more dynamic. One such aspect that has catapulted growth is influencer marketing. The influential faces of today’s generation that rule the world of social media are endorsing brands from local to international and from startups to already established trademarks. However, There is a constant push that needs to go on every screen to gain the actionable attention of the audience. This is where the ROI comes into question.

Driving the best ROI is a part of every marketing venture and influencer marketing being one of the prominent marketing strategies in today’s world, it often dissolves the balance between actual investment and profit.   However, the reach indeed goes high, but the conversion is rather slow and, in certain cases, is an absolute deadlock. Since influencers have a large reach, this medium of promotion can do wonders when done right. Business owners need to keep in mind the need to address the correct techniques combined with consistent efforts, including the dimensions of the venture.

There are numerous parameters that must be considered before hopping in this campaign. Reaching people is one thing, but reaching the right set of people to create your exclusive audience is the main element. You need to identify the aspects that will help boost your engagement. This involves the influencer based on their followers and fans, age, gender, location and compatibility with the product, and more. Apart from this, you must also take into account the genre of the influencer or the channel. For instance, if your product belongs to the technical category like software, an app, or perhaps a gadget, then you must choose a channel that talks about tech and has a tech-savvy audience. This way, the conversion rate will likely increase, bringing in more sales and revenue.

Another major factor that contributes to growth is repeatability. Nudging the users with regular updates and frequent appearances helps cultivate a space in the potential buyer’s mind. Displaying only once will not help generate desired results on its own. People will rather scroll up in the first 10 seconds than watch the full video. Thus, it is crucial to repeat the process with catchy content that attracts the user. Apart from the influencing figure, your product or service’s integrity is a crucial aspect. You must highlight your product features that match the current fads of the market. The audience that seeks the exact element will click into buying the commodity earlier than you might anticipate.

Being a brand it is important to utilize strategic decision making in order to sell a product or all together running a business; Opting for data-driven influencer marketing is one such progressive step in the same domain. But what exactly is data-driven Influencer Marketing? Analyzing your reach through an influencer campaign is crucial when scouring in this domain. An increase in reach, follow-ups, sales and revenue plays an important role in the initiated campaign. However, the question arises who and how one can track these conversions to conclude if the campaign worked or not? Utilizing a data-driven influencer marketing strategy, you can figure out the efficiency of each of your influencers along with the tactics to further optimism future endorsements.

The team at Unravel Digital Media identified the potholes and decided to target them to help businesses achieve results. This is where we provide insights to our customers about their campaigns. From views, clicks, registration, purchase, and repeat purchases, we monitor and track each of them and analyze your progress. Through this, you can easily recuperate your ideas and plan things accordingly.

Unravel Digital Media is all about purpose and performance. We aim to augment your brand and deliver objectives to help you gain deeper insights into your marketing campaign. With our interface, you can increase brand awareness among a wider audience and can enhance the results easily. With us, you get the opportunity to reach a creator who aligns with your brand and effectively conveys it to the audience. Our target is to help you finalize a deal that benefits everyone in the circle.

The multiple data point strategy followed by Unravel Digital Media is particular to you and your brand’s needs. The demographic factors that play a vital role, from gender to location, are considered. Brands with us can track potential and recent engagements while estimating unaided brand recalls. The conversion funnel is dense; nevertheless, only a few reach the final step quickly, and the rest need recurring appearances and reminders to take action. These metrics are manageable through our multifaceted approach. The right intent and planning help brands effectively calculate the ROI and aid influencers in earning through the approach. Unravel digital media puts in task its versatile, flexible, and unique approach where brands get to track every step, including click, installation, registration, sale, and ROAS.

Investing in the influencer campaign is worthwhile; however, the risk is high when there is no plan in place. A step-by-step technique that aims at managing every crucial minor aspect in mind is a must. Unravel Media allows you to stay away from high-risk campaigns, in turn, building your capacity to generate a good ROI. Scale your performance with the best social media marketing experts and avoid getting stuck with just views. Join hands with us and enjoy the ease of service and reliable influencer marketing.

When I joined Unravel Media about 9 months back and started reaching out to potential customers, most of them were experimenting with the idea of influencer marketing. This naturally pushed me to start thinking about key opinion leader (KOL) marketing which was already happening for many years globally and more in the geos where there are adoption problem of some of the conventional media.

I started to wonder how can I also do this for the brands and differentiate our offering and club this with my prior experience of managing performance marketing for some of the large brands that I helped in the past.

I was in a territory which was very unfamiliar and I saw few posts from brands on LinkedIn where they were asking all sorts of questions to media managers such as do you have more micro influencers or mega influencers? What is the collective reach you have on your empaneled influencers? Can you get reach in certain cities & states in India? There were few questions around commercial model and all of them seem interesting.

Having worked in the area of consulting, performance marketing and analytics, I was questioning does this bring performance to brands or incremental tangible benefits that brand can benefit from or is the old wine in new bottle to say that I can get you reach from best of publishing house and it is brand’s responsibility to optimize those. I remember some of the large media houses selling impressions (without targeting) and lot of corporate buying those for a premium price.

What made sense in all this that marketing is shifting to more peer to peer and that was already visible on Tiktok and IG Reels. Second observation was people trust people and speak dialect. No questions on that.

Okay, what I concluded is that if some way I can present the metrics from influencer marketing in same manner as any other performance campaign metric, I can get rid of all those smart questions and I just have to talk about something that I am good at i.e., performance marketing and CAC and repeat and audience persona. On digging deeper, you can see that outcome of influencer marketing can be presented same way as any performance marketing campaign.

All someone needs to do is to have the right tracking mechanism in place to track these events. Which brought me back to the question of our existence, how do we identify influencers who will bring performance? This has to be celebrity otherwise why would the campaign work?

Not exactly, that’s what I figured in next few months.

As an experiment, we got RO from a brand with a focus of getting users from a particular state in India. A small pilot. The outcome was to be measured in terms of direct performance. No bullshit and our existence was in question!!

If I had gone ahead with selection of an influencer who speaks Hindi and English, their users would have come from everywhere across India and few from outside India and while this is a “good reach”, the end objective of trying from that particular State/Geo would have gone for a toss and we could not have used that for validation or performance would have been scattered across his/her audience base.

So we decided to get influencers who speaks vernacular language, we actually “Geofenced” the campaign to a large extent without drawing any radius targeting. We invented “Unravel Ring of fire”.

Well, fair enough. But I missed out on people who speak Hindi/English in that region/state. That’s a small % which is okay when you are doing a pilot for a brand who is looking to measure your performance and your next RO depends on this. We did okay for the month and missed performance benchmark by about 30%. But what was interesting is that we took a big leap and started thinking how can we go at par rather than thinking this will never work. The brand was generous and liked our thoughts as to how we were able to triangulate pin code level performance using some of the SaaS platforms that we deployed.

Thankfully the campaign continued and we became profitable albeit at a small scale. After couple of months, when we started looking at performance which gets tracked on 3^rd party SaaS platform that we use for event tracking, I was amazed to see that there were still significant numbers of incremental new sales were coming from few of those campaigns. As usual I led with skepticism thinking some issue with the tool. That wasn’t the case. The performance was real. But why was this happening? Simple reason that video discovery happened at different time for different people and if they liked what they saw, they just clicked on the link in the description box on YouTube and carried on with their journey. This I had not come across on any other paid media platform that I had worked with in the past. Rather, the moment we switched off the marketing, we would see impact within 7 Days. The discovery came very delayed and hence we termed this as “Unravel’s delayed attribution phenomenon”. This was exciting so I went little far. I drew a cohort to see the incremental sales from the historic campaign and the amazing thing to find was that performance was coming from even 3-4-6 months old campaign. I am showing below the illustration just for reference. The actual data had incremental sales coming from even 9-month-old campaigns.

Since I had data now and enough of it, I could clearly draw few parallels with different channels and could see that the end result measured in terms of CAC for the particular brand, was in sync with any other media campaign that we ran at scale.

Here is what I learned additionally from the exercise:

1. Get your tracking right. Otherwise, the brand and performance team will always be debating what’s the outcome of the performance.
2. Regional creators in most cases worked better than Hindi speaking or English-speaking influencers. Of course, that could be function of product too. Mine was low ARPU consumption product so more generic in nature.
3. There are ways to do geofencing to some extent on influencer campaign and creators physical territory has much higher performance.
4. One should always look at affinity categories along with focused category. E.g., if you are running a campaign for fintech brand, you can have some creators from comedy or say Vlog categories to experiment, ofcourse, after looking at age and gender split and more demographic data point if you have those, although, those are difficult to find, we have been able to triangulate some of those.
5. Engagement rate is a good metric to look at but if you are not selecting right influencer, it will not work.
6. Subscriber count is good to have but unless you know how fast is the channel reaching milestones on subscriber count, you will have difficulty planning follow up campaign.
7. A follow up campaign does well if you have selected right influencer or capping a frequency to include mix of new viewers and existing viewer.
8. If you are retargeting to users who dropped off somewhere in the user journey, you should use similar inventories as the creators. E.g., if you have been using Instagram influencers for your campaign and you want to do remarketing, you should try IG reels with similar CTA so that users can have a recall and connect back to the brand.
9. For any influencer campaign and genres to perform, if you are only looking at Views or sub count, it is unlikely to work in long run. One should always look at CTR and first product interaction metric which could be sign up for example. If your sign up rates are way below compared to other digital media, it is unlikely to perform. Beyond that, product interaction will take care of the rest of the funnel.
10. For me, 70% of creators yield very little but the rest 30% of them work wonderfully well to compensate for the lost value.
11. If I am not using non-performance logic on my other media channels, I lose more. It is essentially same audience persona on a different platform and is likely to react to the messages in a similar manner.
12. How do you price the media is the most important? There are brands who are paying much higher for audience and there are brands who are paying much smarter. One should price it as per their objective.
13. Chasing influencer is like chasing price on traded stocks. It is better to stay away for volatility.

If you have any opinion or want to discuss this further, you can write to us – Virtualcoffee@unravel.media

Cost of acquisition (CPA) is one of the most important metric if not the most important metric that you track as a performance marketer. Chances are high that none of your core team meetings is concluded without mention of it and debate on how can we bring it down?

The holy grail to reduce CPA takes a significant toll on the entire marketing team and while teams try to come up with innovative ideas, many a time they end up losing on the scale or high-value customer acquisitions.

If you are part of a growing start-up/ mid-size corporate, there are chances that you often change your marketing channel mix, budget allocation, targeting and essentially most of the ingredients that go to your secret recipe.

We at Unravel Media, have seen that discussion from close quarters sometimes as team members, sometimes as consultants and sometimes as vendor and have developed our own methodology on this and we would like to give a glimpse of the same in this write-up.

We believe that for early-stage startups/ mid-size corporates, scaling fast has got clear advantages and that should not be compromised due to any other reasons. Of course, there are budget constraints that need to be taken into consideration, however, you should be looking at data deeper or slightly differently if you have to overcome the challenge of lowering the CPA.

We ate Unravel Media, take utmost care to not only look at CPAs but rather action post acquisition to derive the true CPA or relative CPAs.

We have worked extensively with gaming clients in India as a digital marketer or as a consultant and all the major gaming portals on Rummy, Poker and Fantasy where CPAs are on the higher side due to lower applicable market size, however, we have ensured that our client’s profitability is still intact by looking at post-acquisition funnel across channels.

While we allocate budget on each of the channels by taking an analytical approach, we tweak the same regularly by looking at post-acquisition activities. This gives us insight into what end customers are liking/ disliking and buying again.

This goes to the CRM team as an insight so that they can plan the activities accordingly. Many times, we suggest a different path to the customer journey post-acquisition to test our analytical hypothesis and to ensure customer longevity on the platform.

What we have observed that many times, the highest CPA channels are also the highest ROI/ ROAS channel which goes in your favour. Particularly for gaming, we have observed that search performs much better than any interest-based audience platform although CPAs are less on an interest-based platform, the incremental ROI on search campaigns are far more profitable.

Add better retention on top of it and that will ensure that your higher CPAs sometimes do not even hurt and in fact add to your overall business profitability.

There are customers who are sometimes not comfortable sharing their CRM journey, however, we ensure to share a customized journey with them so that their retention teams can ponder on such thoughts if they see the merit.

We can conclude by saying that higher CPAs are not always bad if you know what you are paying for? After all, there is always a premium and high maintenance for fast cars! Goodspeed to all your campaign!

If you would like to discuss this or any other things please reach out to us: Virtualcoffee@unravel.media

“You need to know pronunciation to search the right word in the dictionary”. I heard this once from someone and since then I can totally relate to it whenever someone discusses the marketing dashboard.

After having used the best of the tools such as Tableau, QlikView, Klipfolio and many more custom-developed BI tools, the holy grail to find the right dashboard is still on. What I realized that dashboard becomes better and better only if we input what we want to look at clearly otherwise it becomes a fancy exercise with expensive affairs to manage.

To simplify, one should look at fewer and independent metrics and not too many dependent metrics which might make the numbers look very confusing and clumsy. One should be very clear about what do they want to achieve from these dashboards. Many a times, what I have seen is that it starts with few snapshots and later on more and more team members across different functions keep on adding multiple metrics to the extent that it becomes too complex to even make any sense out of dashboard.

Having gone through the cycle many times, I see a classic mistake is that generally, dashboard creations are on the go exercise and usually starts with analysts trying their hands without much inputs on what is the end outcome? This results in input based dashboard which ends up showing information which most of the time you are already aware of.

Since you are already aware of the content, the end-user loses interests over time and start exploring new tools with better UI usually. The cycle continues and analysts keep on learning new tools at the expense of productive time that they can put into insight generation.

I struggled with this in early days of my career my couple of major E-commerce companies in India. The organizations were using more than three-four visualization tools, however, KPI reviews were still happening over excel and there was another classic discussion that one team’s data would not match with another team’s data leading to different goal tracking and discussion usually shift as to how do we correct this data rather than discussing the output.

The solution to this lies in changing the dashboard to Output driven dashboard and the rest all can be derived from these outputs. E.g., one of the metrics that the market development team would track is that how many active sellers do they have on the eCommerce marketplace? This I believe is just a vanity metric as this would change every day depending on how do you define active sellers? some would define active as 7 days, 15 days or 30 days.

I would approach this little differently as to what is that % of sellers getting orders in a certain period among all the sellers registered? This will tell me what is the health of marketplace and if enough % of sellers are getting orders or not or contributing to overall order count.

Similarly, on customer side metrics, one should definitely look at customer cohort to get an insight on overall business health. Just by looking at new customer acquisition or retention in isolation will not give a true picture of seasonality driven business. If sales team is looking at GMV data, one should definitely look at percentile distribution to understand what categories or set of customers are contributing to sales.

There are several such examples that we can go through and most of them will point towards how to look at data differently or in a simple yet effective manner. There are multiple ways to look at same data set and generating real insight depends on right set of metrics and not just by picking generic metrics without understanding them how and which one to use?

We have helped many startups and mid-size companies in the past to simplify complex looking dashboard into simple clipboard which multiple teams can refer to and have a symmetry on their understanding.

If you have any opinion or want to discuss this further, you can write to us – Virtualcoffee@unravel.media