Let's talk about Influencer Marketing Measurement
the 15 minute long-read version of this can be found here: https://traktion.ai/blog/influencer-marketing-kpis
Recently I was interviewed by Traktion which resulted in a detailed long-read on how to measure Influencer Marketing success. Here’s the broken-down, quick-step version.
Overall Strategy Considerations
Before you commit to building an influencer marketing strategy, determine what your goals are. You want to collaborate with influencers? Fine - but why?
Set realistic goals & always add context. Don’t compare yourself to Glossier, Nike, Fenty, etc. They all post big awareness/engagement numbers and have the advantage of being a renowned brand with a worldwide presence. Their results are not a benchmark for the industry, nor for your brand. Context is key.
Think long-term. Most content creators are fairly brand promiscuous - and locking down long-term partnerships will allow you to maintain frequent brand mentions, and allows you to expose audiences to a content-relevant brand message for a prolonged period of time.
Mutual value. I hate to break it to you, but “I’ll pay X if you do Y” is not a sustainable (if at all) influencer strategy.
Multi-platform. Wider audience? More impact
Multi-tier. I get it, everyone loves micro-influencers. But they’re resource-heavy and it takes an army of them to generate the same impact that one top-tier influencer can generate. Make sure to activate throughout the influencer pyramid.
Combine earned, paid, and owned influence. This means generating organic mentions, as well as boosting well performing paid-posts to reach specific audiences, and utilising your owned media channels to drive credibility.
Collaboration Tips
Due diligence. Utilise third party data and tech that allows to review audience demographics as well as content.
Build relationships. Please, try to have at least a few conversations with an influencer before you barge into their DMs saying you’ll pay them to create a set of deliverables guided by even stricter brand guidelines. Have a conversation, ask questions.
Request first party data. Validate your findings before engaging in partnerships.
Influencer Vetting
Here are a set of data points that I tend to use when it comes to choosing which influencer you’d like to engage in a long-term partnership with.
Influencer Audience demographics: if you’re in Europe and you’re collaborating with an influencer that generates the majority of its engagements from people in the U.S., reconsider.
Engagement rates + average likes: the obvious ones, but always look at these metrics in the relevant context.
Keywords: How often does the influencer post using keywords that are relevant to your industry? A high match here indicates that their audience may well be more receptive to similar messaging.
Sponsored / organic post ratio: this will tell you how experienced an influencer is with brand deals, how “brand promiscuous” they are, and allows you to check the average duration of each partnership.
Output Metrics
Mentions/brand hashtags: tracking these will allow your brand to measure the effect of your paid influencer marketing efforts in relation to earned advocacy.
Engagement Rates: the obvious one, this allows you to compare influencers across various tiers with each other to benchmark how they’re doing, and optimise accordingly. This also allows you to identify which content could benefit from paid media spend.
Net Promoter Score: in addition to mapping mentions / hashtag performance, running these studies at various points throughout your influencer marketing strategy will allow you to benchmark the impact of influencer marketing on advocacy.
Conversions & Attribution: influencer tech has come a long way, and we are now in a position where we can track sales, clicks, etc accurately through this tech - even allowing the entire product-to-content cycle.
In closing
“There are a lot of people, even within the industry, that only utilise influencer marketing as part of a transactional, short-lived, campaign-based, pay-for-content model. From a measurement perspective, though, a longer-term
approach just makes much more sense. It allows you to clearly map how an influencer is impacting your business goals.”