Measuring the performance of influencer marketing
Influencer marketing is having a transformative impact on driving consumer purchase decisions. Retail brands are heavily investing in this area, not just to boost visibility, but also to develop brand trust and fuel organic sales. Studies suggest that 22% of 18-34 year-olds make a large purchase after viewing an influencer’s endorsement on social media. However, when it comes to proving the ROI garnered from such promotions, most marketers have little or no insight at their perusal.
The first step to knowing whether your influencer marketing initiatives deliver results is to ask yourself these pressing questions:
- How efficiently is the influencer promoting our brand?
- How often does the influencer publish content associated with our brand?
- Is the influencer’s follower base growing or depleting?
- How do we measure the engagement garnered by their posts?
- Does their compensation match the value they deliver?
Answering these questions calls for tracking and evaluation at a micro-level. However, determining the right metrics, and sifting through massive amounts of data on each influencer activity across various social media platforms can be daunting. What brands need is an effective influencer tracking mechanism that provides detailed performance insights.
Monitor engagement metrics
To know how actively an influencer is promoting your brand, having an accurate track record of their posting frequency, impressions, and engagement is critical. Engagement type can be grouped by likes, comments, shares, retweets, etc. However, this data may not always be available or accessible in a uniform manner.
For instance, Facebook has reactions while Twitter and Instagram have “likes”. Standardizing engagement data is key to drawing accurate conclusions. A simple way to arrive at an influencer’s engagement rate is to divide the total engagement by their number of followers. Additionally, observing the growth curve of an influencer’s follower base helps understand their potential reach.
Engagement rate = Total engagement / Total number of followers
Structuring such information in a consumable format can help marketers gain precise answers to their influencer marketing questions. For instance, a marketer concerned with a Twitter campaign would want to know an influencer’s performance after assigning a specific weight for say, retweets (engagement) on Twitter (platform). A dashboard that provides a granular view of this level will help them strategize better for the future.
Analyze content impact
Tracking the impact of an influencer’s activity goes beyond just collating information across various metrics. It requires a combination of automation and human expertise. While a throng of social listening tools can dole out metric-based statistics, aspects like a post’s relevance to a brand’s marketing goal require manual effort.
For instance, let’s take the engagement garnered by an influencer’s post. If it has gained mere likes or got people to tag – the post has low relevance; if it encouraged people to comment – medium relevance; and finally if it has inspired them to share – the post is highly relevant. Mapping such post-based effectiveness can gear marketers to elevate their relationship with the most productive influencers.
Low-relevance engagement: likes, user tags
Medium-relevance engagement: comments
High-relevance engagement: shares
Determine ROI
One of the most challenging areas for marketers is to quantify the revenue generated from its influencer marketing. To unlock this insight, a ranking methodology would be effective.
An influencer may be boosting your brand’s visibility, but what you need is engagement. That’s why setting up Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on your influencer marketing goals will make it easy to determine an influencer’s rank and contribution based on their compensation.
An influencer’s ranking also accounts for their activeness across social media platforms. A quick snapshot of the top-ranked influencers will help marketers create competitive compensation plans to encourage better performance and optimize their budgets for future campaigns.
As the number of social media influencers continue to grow across product segments, a more data-driven approach towards influencer identification and measurement will be crucial to leveraging them to your brand’s advantage. Global consumer brands partner with Netscribes to gain accurate and highly-customized reports on influencer marketing campaigns to measure success and foster sound influencer collaborations.
Here’s how we helped an energy drink brand get the most out of their influencer marketing spend. Read the case study.
Want to see how your influencers are performing? Reach us at info@netscribes.com to get started.
