How do I validate if my influencer marketing campaigns are working or not?
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.