Growing investments in influencer marketing are followed by increasingly noticeable questions about the profitability of the investment.
In a time when influencer marketing is one of the most effective ways to connect brands with their target audience, the question is how to measure its success. One of the keys to the success of any influencer campaign is understanding and optimizing the return on investment.
Analyzing the return on investment is a topic around which there are many discussions. Many are not sure which metrics and how to monitor, and how to interpret the obtained data. In the text below, we provide some advice from everyday practice that will help you in this.
In order to have something to measure, it is necessary to set clear goals and determine metrics before starting the influencer campaign. Goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. The metrics that we closely associate with them, and depending on how measurable the goals are, we divide into financial and non-financial.
The best example of a financial metric is the sales revenue that results from specific campaign activities, and is measured using a shopping code that allows precise tracking of conversions.
In everyday practice, we more often encounter non-financial metrics like reach or engagement, which are directly linked to the content created by influencers. Given that monitoring non-financial metrics does not result in exact financial return on investment data, the questions of what, how and why to monitor are often raised. The answer lies in the answer to the question: what do I want to achieve?
If the goal of an influencer campaign is to introduce a new product or service to as many people as possible and thus raise public awareness of the brand, the metrics you should track are reach or impressions. Reach tells us how many unique users saw the influencer’s content, while impressions show us the total number of views of that content.
After the launch of your brand, product or service has been successfully completed, in the second phase, you may want to encourage social media users to engage. In this case, the relevant metric is the engagement rate, which measures how many times users took action on the influencer’s post (like, comment, share).
One of the goals of the campaign could be to increase traffic on the website. In this case, we can measure the CTR (Click-Through rate), by which we monitor the percentage of people who saw the influencer’s post and clicked on the link leading to the desired website, in relation to the total number of people who saw the influencer’s content.
These are just some of the metrics we most often monitor in our clients’ influencer campaigns. Measuring the success of influencer marketing is not a one-time task, but a long-term process that requires continuous monitoring and optimization. Based on the obtained results, we can improve strategies for upcoming campaigns, optimize the choice of influencers and manage the budget more efficiently. But metrics are not the only determinants of success. The core of influencer marketing lies in the connection and trust between the influencer and his audience, so metrics should be used as guidelines, not as the only factor in decision-making.
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When a brand and an influencer know from the outset what they want to achieve, the collaboration becomes more straightforward, and the content is more likely to achieve the campaign’s objective.
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