Influencer marketing is lucrative, but are you getting your money’s worth? There’s a lot more to working with influencers than just hiring someone with X followers on Instagram to post photos about your product. In fact, the platform, the audience, the influencer, all have to be in sync for you to maximize the benefit — for everyone. When determining your return on investment, you also want to know you’re paying a fair price for their work and that work is giving you results. As with any effort, the process involves setting specific goals, measuring progress towards those goals, and then adjusting where necessary. At the end of the day, you want to make sure your audience is aware but also ready to act. Now, let’s dive into quantifying success.
The plan should start by setting objectives and goals for the campaign, with Key Performance Indicators that will be used to measure success.
What is success? It depends on the campaign, but it will determine what you’ll measure during the campaign as well. If the goal is increasing sales but the activity detail is around spreading awareness, then you’ll wind up measuring the wrong things. If the goal is awareness, you’ll measure reach, plus retention and completion rates.
You have to choose the “right” influencer. This should be the right performance, the right persona, and the right story. This “fit” for your brand is part qualitative and part quantitative. What we’re interested in today is quantification. How do you know this person is the right fit? Qualitative judgement includes the biases and opinions of those on the team, and the stylistic fit. It’s useful, to a point. But when we’re measuring things, we need specifics. We want to make sure our KPIs will really give us a sense of whether this is a successful collaboration or not. If your goals are aligned with your methods, KPI’s will provide a wealth of data.
The ideal technology platform during planning would give you some metric that could predict a level of success. That is, how big is an influencer’s audience and how engaged are they? An influencer may have a large but diffused audience. That’s great for a brand awareness campaign, but what about a specific product? Here, you might have a KPI that says you need a certain number of activations, or signups, or direct actions. So how do you know the influencer can deliver? There are tools available, like iScore, that wl tell you if an influencer’s audience is engaged or not. Our unique process compares influencers with similar size reach, and analyzes engagement factors. Our formula allows us to know before we hire whether that influencer can truly get the job done, by measuring their performance on a scale of 1 to 10.
So you’ve chosen an influencer who has a great iScore, their persona matches the ideal customer, and you’ve developed a content plan. Now what? It’s time to activate the campaign and start measuring KPI’s. There’s not a magic button to push that will choose an influencer, fit them in the perfect platform, and create content. Content remains a manual process of creation, but we can absolutely measure the results of that content with automation and precision. Even better, with our Predictive Performance Analysis you can pre-estimate campaign results, and with our “fair audience price calculator” you can see how much you should be paying the influencer.
What we’re able to do now is take an individual who interacted with influencer content and remarket to them across platforms.
Now ROI becomes a bit simpler, doesn’t it? Once the “value exchange” is quantified, you can set the desired KPIs and consequently track success. A dashboard should allow you to spot suspicious activity, further amplify content that’s working, and measure KPI’s in real-time.
For example, sign-up or promo codes are a common way to track influencers. This attribution model is effective until it isn’t. What if your site gets around 10,000 visits a month, but after you activate an influence campaign it doubles, but not through attribution. These new views are still a result of the influencer campaign, they’re just using a different vector. The ideal platform allows you to properly attribute those viewers to the campaign by combining paid marketing amplification of influencer content.
The world moves too fast to wait for a post-mortem analysis of “what went wrong.” Learn how to extract good insights from the performance of your influencers, which will inform later campaigns and more collaborations with the right people.
The real secret sauce is taking the insights from a campaign and building on top of that with actionable information going forward. This doesn’t have to happen after a campaign, but is integral to remarketing efforts that can multiply the success of a campaign over time. Plus, we’re not just talking about actionable information for the marketing team, but for the audience.
What we’re able to do now is take an individual who interacted with influencer content and remarket to them across platforms. Now, we can send individuals a call to action after they’ve been exposed to the brand. This maximizes ROI by not wasting time fishing in the wrong waters. Because any successful campaign builds from awareness to action, not the other way around. Ideally, using influencers is a way to genuinely connect — because influencers are humans, not salespeople. Getting in front of the right audience at the right time, one that has already tuned into your frequency, is an achievable goal with our platform.
