After all this work, the final step remains influencer reporting and performance analysis.
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We’re now at the point where you’ve successfully launched your influencer campaign. You’ve gone down the social media rabbit hole, found a list of prospects, sent outreach emails, negotiated, and successfully onboarded influencers to your campaign—phew, that’s a lot. At long last, the fruits of your labor are beginning to pay off. Influencer content is trickling in, your branded hashtag is steadily growing, and your brand’s follower count is rising! It’s working! Give yourself a well-deserved pat on the back because when onboarding influencers and managing a campaign, most of the heavy lifting is behind you (well, for this campaign).
After all this work, the final step remains campaign reporting and performance analysis. When it comes to performance analysis, measuring the success of an influencer campaign can be complex and often requires a multidimensional approach. Every brand will have specific objectives that call for measuring a unique set of KPIs and success indicators. This section will unpack how to determine the effectiveness of your influencer campaign based on your earlier chosen KPIs and marketing objectives.
Next, we’ll turn to the numbers. The evaluation strategies and understandings you’ll learn here will help you iterate and direct the future trajectory of your brand’s influencer marketing program. Now, let’s put all the pieces together.
As a general refresher, here’s the list of common influencer marketing objectives and their respective KPIs that you can use to analyze campaign performance.
Metrics that determine Awareness
Where you can find them
Social networks display most of this data on their platforms. You can get specific insights, such as the number of swipe-ups or Story views, by asking influencers for their post analytics. Google Analytics will show you reliable click data, provided you’ve set up the proper tracking URLs.
How we analyze it
Awareness metrics can be analyzed and interpreted in a variety of ways:
How effectively did you reach your target audience?
Awareness metrics can be analyzed and interpreted in various ways, but it all boils down to how effectively you reached your target audience. Follower counts are important when searching for influencers and show how many people you could reach in your campaign. It’s important to keep track of actual reach and the total number of engagements compared to what you expected.
If the results are unexpected, it’s time to look at the data and apply critical thinking. Was the influencer’s audience your target demographic? Is their audience real followers or purchased? Is the content poorly written, or was it posted at a bad time (e.g., holiday, middle of the night)? How strong was the engagement of your influencer’s posts?
Was your influencer’s brand content engagement above, below, or the same as their non-sponsored content? Review your influencer’s content and comments regularly to get an idea of the interest level of your influencer’s audience.
Did the content have a high engagement rate but not drive the expected traffic to the site? Maybe their call-to-action needs to be stronger, or the tracking link you provided was incorrect, didn’t contain tracing parameters, wasn’t used at all, or led to a 404 on your site. Digging into your influencer data will help you resolve these types of issues.
Metrics to track
You can find conversion numbers through online-store data (e.g., promo codes, affiliate links, post-purchase surveys) depending on your conversions and how you track them. The same holds for your conversion rate and cost per order. However, your return on investment might involve some manual calculation, including how much you paid the influencer and how much profit came from the influencer’s promo code purchases.
How we analyze it
Conversion data analysis hinges on several factors and variables that pertain to your overall sales funnel. Sometimes the answer might not even lie in the data specific to your influencer marketing efforts. Thus, we’ll do our best to offer some scenarios to get your efforts focused in the right direction.
Metrics
Where you can find them
You can find many of these metrics if you track your influencers using an automated CRM like GRIN. Without software, you need your manual CRM to determine most of these metrics, including notes you should keep for yourself on the content as influencers post it.
How we analyze it
A post’s aesthetic is discretionary and unique to each brand. UGC repurposed for elsewhere (social ads, website, email, etc.) saves you time. If an influencer provides you with content that is reusable at a later date because it is high quality, you need to note this as a success and a cost-saver. Weigh the frequency of posts with the quality. Does one influencer have a slower production pace but higher quality and better-performing posts? Or does another influencer have a faster pace and sloppy captions?
Make sure to conduct some hybrid analysis, such as the type of content (static image vs. lifestyle) and how they perform (engagements, traffic, conversions) when compared.
Metrics
Where you can find them
You can find all of these metrics in Google Analytics.
How we analyze it
Using UTM codes, you can determine how much traffic comes to your site from an influencer’s affiliate link, which is why unique links and strong organization are essential. You can also tell how these visitors interacted with your site. A high engagement rate and time on site are good signs that your influencer has an audience relevant to your website. Even with high traffic, a low engagement rate could indicate that wherever people are landing, the content isn’t resonating with them.
Metrics
Where you can find them
You can find info on your brand in the comments section on influencer posts, social listening tools, and communicating with the influencer about what they’ve seen and heard on their end.
Brand sentiment can be nebulous and hard to track, so tools are vital if you can afford them. If you can find free tools, use them. Otherwise, you’ll need to calculate and track things like your net promotor score manually.
How we analyze it
Brand perception is hard to measure, but you can detect trends in influencer posts. If one influencer has largely negative comments, you should investigate what about the post makes people angry. Alternatively, if you have a post with primarily positive responses, consider running that type of content more often.
We know what you’re thinking; that’s a lot to take in. There’s an overwhelming amount of data points we can use to measure the performance of an influencer campaign (or even just a single influencer!) However, knowing them alone doesn’t give us all the necessary insights. As if that weren’t enough, we can bring even more data points into the picture that allow us to dig even deeper.
There are many more details you can review that will help you build a solid roster of brand influencers, such as the following:
Other factors you can monitor are repurchase and churn rates. Remember to always layer in your data no matter what other data points you track.
At the end of the day, all the data in your Activated Influencers CRM are just numbers. You can use these numbers to build and manage a core of star performers who will fit your overall marketing goals and objectives and help take your brand to the next level.
Learn more about influencer reporting best practices on our blog.
Introduction to Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy involving a brand and content creator collaborating to promote a product, service, or the brand itself on social media.
This guide will turn a novice in influencer marketing into an efficient influencer marketing pro who understands the ins and outs of strategy, terminology, and campaign growth and refinement.
We will describe all significant aspects of influencer marketing, from setting up your budget to finding the right content creators for your campaigns.
The world of influencer marketing is new and constantly evolving, but understanding the basics can make a huge difference in setting up campaigns for your brands.
If you’re already familiar with these topics, use the table of contents to the right to jump to the section you need. Otherwise, let’s begin!
Why do influencer marketing? Influencer marketing is several years old in practice. There are already brands demonstrating influencer marketing’s fantastic power to yield incredible ROI and create stronger bonds with your target audiences.
Influencer marketing is pretty established in the zeitgeist of modern digital marketing, so if you’re new to it, you’re in a good spot. Many marketers before you have already done the hard work of testing, retesting, and failing at several types of influencer marketing campaigns, and you get to see the fruit of that labor.
Take Branch Basics, for example. Branch Basics figured out how to launch and improve its influencer marketing campaign with a two-tier system using affiliates and paid content creators.
City Beauty found social media creators who shared their values and sent them products to promote on social media. Now they have over 6.9 million impressions from influencer-sourced content.
And a baby product brand focused on content creators from the start, wanting to expand on their word-of-mouth through influencer marketing. After growing their campaign, the baby product brand reached a 7-figure code conversion revenue.
If you’re still not convinced, check out our blog on the total value of influencer marketing.
