The last, but most important step in any marketing campaign would be to analyze the results. Results helps you to decide which resources and channels to keep using and to determine what the budget for your next campaign should be.
In the same way, you should measure influencer marketing results. But how does one measure influencer marketing and which metrics do you use? Obviously, this depends on your goal!
We often recommend influencers marketing for Sales campaigns, for branding (image) and mainly for creating brand awareness.
Raising brand awareness
Influencers are often used to reach new audiences using (social) media. If your main goal is visibility or brand awareness, your main metric, while using influencers is probably the reach – the number of unique users who see the post with your product or brand.
The metrics you should measure in influencer marketing:
Impressions
Reach
Number of visits on the website
Number of branded searches on Google
Interactions
It’s important to note that the number of influencers’ followers doesn’t show how many people the post will reach.
The good news is that if the influencer has a Business or Creator Account on Instagram or TikTok, they can see the impressions and reach for each image separately. Meaning, they can tell the brand the expected reach before the campaign starts. If you don’t use a marketingplatform, you should ask for screenshots of the actual results after the campaign has ended.
If you are using a marketing platform (such as Add Valore), you’ll receive reports with the campaign statistics for every post and story separately as well as for the campaign in total.
Improving brand image
Influencer marketing is a very good way to improve your brand’s image: products used by influencers are often perceived as much more attractive and trendy.
If your goal is to connect with your (potential) customers, you should focus on the engagement-related metrics:
The number of post likes
The number of post comments
The amount of new Instagram followers on your account
The number of visits on the website
The number of Google searches your brand
Interaction
In addition to the number of likes and comments, you can also check the quality: is it just emoji’s and buzzwords, or did the influencer spark meaningful conversations around your brand.
Since people usually follow brands they really like and care about, the number of new followers of the brand is also a good indicator. Obviously, only if becoming a follower was not mandatory for participating in the giveaway! Giveaways can be tricky because you never know if the new followers joined your socials to get free stuff or if they really appreciate the value of your content.
But if they are interested, they might check out your brand’s website or search about your brand on Google. Which is always a good metric to monitor.
To compare different campaigns and collaborations, the two metrics that are mostly used:
Engagement rate – the sum of unique likes, comments, and saves divided by the reach. This enables you to compare the engagement rate of the sponsored post with the average engagement rate of the influencer. If it’s higher, the audience match is probably there!
CPE (cost per engagement) – total budget divided by the sum of likes, comments and saves
Both brand awareness and brand image are quite difficult to measure, especially if the brand doesn’t invest in brand surveys. In this case, the brands don’t have any other way than to rely on the social media data and customers’ feedback.
Boosting sales
For most brands, increasing the number of sales is the main metric. However, it’s crucial to remember that the potential customer almost never does the purchase decision the first time they hear about the product – as a new brand, you need to build awareness first.
Or you could try to become the loudest by being visible in a lot of places, Add Valore can help you in showing up on your targets screen frequently. Research has shown that consumers are more likely to purchase a product after seeing it frequently, thus recognizing the brand.
This is also what the AIDA model explains: first, you need to get consumers’ attention, then build awareness, then spark interest, and finally, they’ll make the purchase.
In general, studies have shown that, on average, consumers need 7-8 touch points before they make a purchase decision!
If you’d like to measure influencer marketing results on your sales numbers, you should focus on the following metrics:
The number of new customers
Revenue brought by the influencer
The return of investment (ROI)
Measuring influencer marketing in e-commerce
For web-based products, the measurement of those metrics is fairly straightforward: special links or promotional codes can easily measure the impact of each influencer on website visits, number of transactions, and sales.
Here’s how we do it:
You can create a tagged URL that helps you see the results per every channel, campaign and medium in Google Analytics. Tip: you can use the name of the influencer as the keyword – so you can see exactly how many visits or sales revenue each creator brought. This depends on how you create your URL’s. In blog, you can easily hide it inside a text link. On Instagram or TikTok, the influencer can add it in their bio and refer to it in their story or in the post caption (“Link in bio!”).
To avoid long and dragging URLs, you can create a personal web address for the influencer(s) that redirects to the UTM-tagged URL. That will also give you accurate information about how many visitors, transactions and sales each post generated.
or
Create a personal discount code for the influencer. If your web store platform allows it, one of the easiest ways is to create a unique promotional code for the influencer. The greater the discount you can offer, the more the influencers are motivated to share it! It’s a value for their followers, after all.
The best way seems to be using an influencer marketing platform where all the social media data is gathered in one place. If you’d like to learn more about the possibilities Add Valore offers, let us know. We’d love to hear from you!