You hear how good influencer marketing is from your fellow marketers. Whenever you are online, you see your favorite Instagrammer talking about some product and getting sponsored. You wonder if this is going to work for your brand as well. While influencer marketing has been a safe bet for brands over the past couple of years, every marketer needs to sit down and figure out what goals the brand needs to achieve. This will help shape the campaign itself.
Not only before campaign planning, even during and post the end of the campaign, tracking the results is a very important process for the brand. Designing your brand’s marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Not only are they good for your brand in the long run, even short term decisions of what kind of campaign works for the brand and what doesn’t can be determined with these metrics.
Referral Traffic
Referral traffic is a very vital tracking metric for a brand’s influencer marketing campaign. This metric gives the brand an overall view of the success rate of the campaign. While the key goal could be sales or conversions, sometimes traffic shows a level of a campaign’s success. Typically, traffic is equated to the reach of the campaign’s content.
For eg, if the traffic is quite high with the conversion rate turning out to be exceedingly low, maybe the brand has to take an internal look at the product or service.
Promo codes are given by some brands to the influencers for easy tracking in traffic or sales. Google Analytics is probably one of the best tools to calculate referral traffic. Some subset metrics to be tracked here are:
number of new visitors during the campaign timeline
Checking the referral sources (see if they are from the campaign. You can also review this to see which influencer has given the best result)
Total number of views
Bounce rate/Time spent on your link
Conversions
The other face of referral traffic is conversion tracking. A conversion is the ultimate goal your brand should be aiming for. While it doesn’t have to be the case with every campaign, when your brand is focused on driving growth and sales, this KPI would be the ideal metric to deal with. For eg, what counts as a conversion for a brand could also be – likes on your social media, a database for your marketing research, brand awareness, etc.
The first simple method of tracking conversions
Comparing the sales before and during/after the campaign
While this seems like a straightforward method, this metric doesn’t give the brand intricate results. Some other methods of tracking conversion through influencers would be
Promo coded
Landing pages
Link trackers
Affiliate links
UTM parameters
Although estimating profitability is a bit of a trial, there are pointers that can help you weigh the numbers approximately.
Brand reach and awareness
This is the most favorite goal in the bag of every marketer who is considering an influencer marketing campaign. Why? Every influencer’s audience whom you have considered your primary audience would be seeing the post and whether they decide to act upon it or not, awareness has been achieved. Tracking awareness about the brand would be a long-term tracking – impressions on the campaign, brand name over a period of time, comparisons made before and after the campaign.
Tools are available aplenty for tracking this KPI. All social media platforms now provide analytics tools like Facebook Analytics, Instagram Insights, WordPress stats and marketers can even resort to Google Analytics.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
Calculating your cost per acquisition is quite straightforward in marketing campaigns. When it has to be calculated specifically for an influencer marketing campaign, the marketer needs to write down some primary metrics
The ultimate goal with a number (For eg: My brand needs social media following to increase from 2000 to 5000)
Once this is done, calculate the amount spent with the number of new customers acquired. While this might not be relevant in all cases, it is an important metric when relevance is high.
Via Freepik
Growth in the audience
Here’s the primary difference between audience growth and traffic – while your campaign might have reached a big audience, you want them to sign up for your brand’s updates. Let’s say your influencer lead a follower to the landing page, but the follower leaves the site after seeing the products either disliking it or not remembering about it after.
This is not successful audience growth, but rather a temporary spike in traffic. What would make this successful is when the follower directly lands a sale or signs up to your brand’s newsletter or even is a repeat visitor of your brand’s page which could mean you landed a potential customer.
Calculating this KPI is straightforward – compare the numbers before and after the campaign. This can be done with email lists, social media following or any other goal that you have set for the campaign.
Engagement
A campaign’s engagement is probably one of the favorite metrics of a marketer who is thinking of running an influencer marketing campaign. Marketers even check the engagement of the influencers’ previous campaigns as a selection method. Engagement as a KPI provides a detailed view of how successful your campaign was with the audience in terms of relatability. Why engagement is such a critical KPI is because you realize how your target audience directly responds to your brand, relevance to the audience and gauging customer loyalty.
Via Immediate Future
So what counts as engagement?
Likes
Reactions
Shares
Comments
Clicks
Votes
Pins
Video views
Brand mentions
Moreover, your brand can also calculate the cost per engagement (CPE) by
Total ad spends
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by the number of engagements
This helps your brand to calculate the campaign’s ROI and also allocating budget for future influencer marketing campaigns. budget requirements for future campaigns. You should also keep track of the interaction sentiments of the audience. Interactions sentiment is defined as a ratio of positive interactions (positive and neutral comments, likes, shares, etc.) to the total number of interactions. Interactions with negative sentiment are usually negative comments or dislikes.)
Conclusion
As the industry of influencer marketing grows, KPIs and goals have varied over the past couple of years. What KPIs does your brand usually measure? Reach out to Greenroom if you require help with your influencer marketing campaigns.
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