With their large following on social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, influencers have become an important marketing tool for brands looking to tap into their audience and increase their brand awareness. The concept of influencer marketing is simple: businesses partner with social media influencers to promote their products or services to their followers.
Key advantages of influencer marketing include its ability to reach a highly targeted audience, increase brand awareness, and boost sales. Influencers have a large following of fans, and when they promote a brand, they expose it to a new audience and motivate it to spend money on the promoted goods and services. However, not all influencers are equally efficient for a brand or for a particular purpose.
Influencer marketing can be utilized by various businesses. One company can’t blindly copy the strategy of another company and achieve success through that. Also, each business may have its own KPIs to target depending on its strategy and current needs. For some the main reason to start a campaign is to boost awareness, for others, it’s important to increase sales.
A tailored strategy is important. To figure it out, a business should be able to measure the effectiveness of its influencer marketing campaigns. Measuring results will help businesses identify areas for improvement, make data-driven decisions, and ensure a higher ROI.
Here are the metrics to evaluate influencer marketing campaigns objectively:
Engagement rate
The engagement rate is a combination of metrics that identify how many people are paying attention to the branded posts. These metrics include likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates. By using tracking tools, businesses can gain insights into how an influencer’s audience is engaging with the content and how much the followers are interacting with the brand.
Engagement may provide not only numbers but also valuable insights and ideas which may be found in the comments posted by the influencer’s followers. This metric is especially relevant for brands that are just entering the market because people may not rush to buy something from a brand that they have never ever heard of. In this case, raising awareness should be the primary goal because most consumers need a few touch points with a new brand prior to purchasing something from it.
Sales and Conversions
Another way to measure the effectiveness of influencer marketing is to analyze the sales and conversions generated from the campaign. To execute it accurately, use trackable affiliate or UTM links or a unique discount code to identify customers who have come from the influencer’s posts.
If it’s not a brand’s first influencer marketing campaign, it makes sense to track these indicators during the current campaign and compare them to the previous one. Also, a company can compare campaigns created in collaboration with one and the same influencer. This helps to determine if the influencer’s promotion had an impact on the sales or conversions.
Website Traffic and New Followers
If an influencer is big enough, it’s very likely that some of their followers will follow the social media account of the promoted brand and it will be noticeable. The same goes for the brand’s website because it’s usually easy to see if there are any peaks in traffic or new subscribers in the case of social media, and they correlate with the start of the campaign.
However, it’s important to remember that this data may be unreliable or hard to interpret if the brand launches a few marketing campaigns simultaneously. Also, sometimes it happens that somebody with a large number of followers posts about your brand in all sincerity at the same time as the beginning of the planned influencer marketing campaign.
Monitor Social Media Mentions
Businesses can also measure the success of their influencer marketing campaigns by monitoring social media mentions. This includes tracking the number of positive mentions, negative mentions, and neutral mentions about the brand. It will help evaluate the brand’s reputation and how the influencer’s promotion has affected it. And, again, it may bring some useful insights and ideas.
Today there are a lot of digital services that help marketing teams monitor and analyze social media mentions. However, on platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook it’s rather easy to monitor them yourself because their users love tagging and mentioning brands in their posts.
Conduct Surveys
Surveys are an effective way to measure the success of influencer marketing campaigns. By conducting surveys, businesses can gather feedback from their target audience and determine how they perceive the brand after the influencer’s promotion. Surveys can also help identify areas where the campaign was successful and areas for improvement.
Surveys, though, are usually efficient when conducted by professional researchers, and this is mostly available for big brands. Nonetheless, any company can try this method and figure out if it works for them.
Influencer marketing has become one of the most effective marketing strategies in the digital age. However, it requires a considerate approach and delivers the best results when combined with thoughtful goal-setting and analyzing each campaign in order to improve outcomes.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Yauhen Razhko, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Hypetrain
Yauhen Razhko is the Founder and CEO of Hypetrain, a full-cycle platform designed to help any-size agencies, brands, media companies, and freelancers execute and manage their influencer marketing campaigns.
Yauhen is a thought leader in the industry with 10+ years of experience in IT and marketing. He is passionate about innovation and is committed to making influencer marketing more transparent, predictable, and fun using big data analytics and AI algorithms.