Influencer marketing is commonly used to drive business growth but many brands execute it poorly, failing to see results. When partnering with influencers, brands frequently make the mistake of paying flat fees for vaguely defined goals, creating no connection between spend and performance.
Besides poorly structured compensation, another common mistake is the lack of analytics. Without the right metrics, tracking, and processes in place, it’s tricky to set up, plan, and launch an influencer campaign that guarantees measurable results.
Performance-based influencer marketing removes all guesswork and sets you up for success in 2 crucial ways:
- Your spending is based on influencer-generated results, using your marketing budget efficiently.
- Your strategy is backed by data, allowing you to accurately measure your campaigns to identify what’s working, improve on what’s not, and maximize your ROI.
In this blog, we’ll help you understand what performance-based influencer marketing is, why it’s important, and the strategies you can use to turn influencer marketing into a revenue-generating channel.
What is Performance-Based Influencer Marketing?
Performance-based influencer marketing is a data-driven approach that integrates data at every touchpoint of your campaign— from finding influencers and content creators to compensation to post-campaign strategy.
Here’s what it would look like if you set up a data-driven influencer campaign:
- Find the right influencers based on their audience demographic, follower engagement rates, content performance, and past collaborations.
- Compensate them based on the results they drive, like paying for 3 videos generating 30K+ views about your products or giving them a 10% commission on every sale they generate.
- Use relevant metrics to identify top performers, marketing platforms, and content styles.
- Refine your strategy. Share content recommendations with your influencers, invest more in high-converting influencers, and close partnerships with poor performers.
Why It Matters for Your Business
Data-driven influencer campaigns make your spending and strategy more precise, removing speculation. Here are three reasons why prioritizing performance matters:
Measurable ROI & Predictable Returns
With traditional influencer marketing, brands invest large budgets without any clear expectations of the results it will generate.
With performance as the foundation, you can set up an influencer marketing strategy that guarantees a high return on investment (ROI):
- Predictable: Your marketing costs are tied to results that your content creators drive.
- Measurable: A data-backed approach allows you to accurately track the performance of your campaign.
- Optimizable: You can then use this data to refine your strategy— reinvest in top-performing creators and marketing platforms, or recommend better content styles.
Transparency and Fair Compensation for Influencers
Instead of flat fees, a performance-based influencer strategy compensates influencers based on the clicks and conversions they drive. This benefits both your brand and your influencer partnerships in multiple ways:
- Transparent Expectations: Your influencers would know exactly what is required from them to earn a commission.
- Relevant Partnerships: Only content creators who are confident in delivering results will agree to be a part of the campaign, making sure that every partnership is relevant.
- Fair Payouts: Since compensation is based on performance, top influencers are rewarded for their high results.
- Better Incentivization: Influencers will be more motivated to create high-converting content and pitch your brand to their audience more actively, guaranteeing better results.
Lower Risk and Better Budget Control
Data-driven influencer marketing minimizes upfront influencer costs. Instead, you only pay for what works, minimizing risk and making sure that your budget is spent more efficiently. This makes it easy for you to scale your influencer marketing efforts while keeping it cost-effective.
For instance, Nutrachamps set up a performance-driven UGC campaign using a data-driven Creator Marketplace. From a pool of 322 health and wellness creators, they handpicked relevant influencers to successfully create Instagram Reels. Their targeted efforts drove 99K+ views in just 2 weeks.
The Data Behind Performance-Based Campaigns
When setting up performance influencer campaigns, you need access to three types of data:
1. Influencer Account Data: Audience, Reach & Engagement
Influencer account data helps you identify the right influencers for your brand. It includes audience demographics (age, gender, location), reach, impressions, and engagement metrics.
With data about the influencers you are evaluating, you can understand if their audience demographics are relevant to your brand and check engagement rates to understand their potential to drive influence.
Platforms with a Creator Marketplace like Insense have accurate influencer account data to easier view all the relevant metrics needed to help you shortlist the right ones.
2. Content Data: Post Performance and Creative Impact
Metrics like views, comments, and shares help you evaluate the content created by the influencer.
Influencer content data supports you at two touchpoints:
1. During your search for the right influencer
When searching for an influencer, their past content performance lets you evaluate how the influencer can effectively help with your brand’s goals like reach and conversions.
Use both the influencer account data and metrics about their content to find relevant influencer partnerships for your brand that are sure to drive results.
The right influencer management tool gives you a breakdown of every influencer’s content performance. Here’s an example of what post-wise metrics look like on Insense:
2. During your campaign to evaluate content
Once you start working with your influencers, the content that they create for your brand needs close monitoring.
Content data can help you measure how your campaign is performing and get specific insights like:
- Performance of different types of content types based on influencer types.
- Which content format and style works best.
- How engagement rates vary across platforms for similar content.
This lets you recommend content styles and formats based on platform and audience size to improve results.
When using Insense to manage your influencer marketing campaigns, you can view post-view performance to easily compare different content styles and social media platforms.
3. Conversion Data: Tracking Clicks, Sales, ROAS
Conversion metrics like clicks, sales, and ROAS help you understand how your influencer campaign is impacting your brand. Here are some kinds of insights you can gather:
- Engagement-to-conversion rate for each influencer
- Platform-specific conversions, like whether Instagram or TikTok perform better.
- Types of influencers that drive more clicks and sales to your business.
With conversion data, you can re-invest in top-performing influencers and platforms, cut spending on low-performing campaigns, and increase returns.
Tools like Insense give you a complete picture of your campaign’s performance in one analytics dashboard. Within the dashboard, you can filter your influencer marketing efforts, seeing the engagement and sales driven by different influencers and across platforms.
Setting Up Your Performance-Based Influencer Campaign
Choosing the Right Influencers with Data-Backed Insights
A successful campaign starts with choosing the right influencers. Many businesses make the mistake of picking influencers based on their follower count alone. However, this doesn’t account for the influencer’s content engagement rates or their ability to drive conversions.
When picking influencers, focus on:
- Audience demographics like age, gender, interest alignment, etc.
- Engagement rates to understand if their audience shows genuine interest and considers the influencer’s content.
- Quality of content produced by the influencer to match your expectations.
- Past brand collaborations to check for credibility.
- Influencer rates to make sure that the partnership fits your budget.
Insense’s Creator Marketplace lets you easily filter and find the right partners for your campaigns.
Setting Clear Campaign Goals & KPIs
Your influencers need to be aligned with the goals you have for your campaign. Stating your goals clearly can avoid any misunderstandings, aligning your influencers with the guidelines and expectations you have from them.
Your campaign goal depends on what you’re hoping to achieve:
- Multi-Channel UGC: Collect user-generated content to repurpose for different needs (e.g., ad assets, on the website, email, or social media).
- Awareness and Reach: Increase the brand’s awareness and reach among new and relevant audiences.
- Conversion and Sales: Acquire new customers and increase sales for the brand.
Based on your goal, set key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your campaign effectively. Here are examples of influencer marketing KPIs to consider based on your goal:
- Multi-Channel UGC:
- Number of Content Assets Generated: Total content created about the brand.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Revenue generated for every dollar spent on ads using UGC assets.
- Awareness and Reach:
- Engagement Rate: Interactions on brand-sponsored posts (likes, comments, shares).
- Brand Mentions: Number of mentions on social platforms.
- New Follows: Number of followers generated by influencer posts.
- Conversion and Sales:
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): Clicks driven to your website through the influencer’s content.
- Conversion Rate: Sales generated by influencers.
For example, UCA Lingerie is a sustainable lingerie brand that was able to successfully run its campaign with the right goals and KPIs. They wanted to generate UGC for their ads and decided to partner with Instagram nano and micro-influencers.
Using Insense, the eCommerce brand identified and partnered with 50+ influencers with an engagement rate of 1-17%, successfully generating 60+ video and photo assets, and achieving an average reach of 40K+.
Clearly Define Compensation & Tie It to Performance
When setting up performance-driven marketing, clearly define your compensation structure to avoid any uncertainty and miscommunication. By defining your pricing, you also incentivize your influencers to meet set expectations.
Your performance-based compensation is dependent on your goals for the influencer campaign:
- Brand Awareness: Brands often choose a pay-per-post model where influencers get paid for every post they make about the brand.
- Content Creation: If you just want influencers to create content, compensate them based on the number of high-quality content they make about your products.
- Engagement: Brands typically opt for pay-per-click (PPC) where creators earn based on the number of clicks they generate to the website.
- Sales: If your goal is to generate revenue, there are a few ways you can compensate:
- A revenue share or affiliate marketing model is common, where influencers receive a percentage of the sales they generate.
- Compensation could also be pay-per-sale where influencers earn a fixed fee for every sale they drive.
Tools & Techniques for Accurate Tracking
Without the right tracking in place, you won’t be able to get an accurate view of your influencer campaigns. You’ll end up relying on wrong performance data when making decisions.
Here are a few ways you can set up accurate attribution and tracking:
1. Custom Identifiers for Each Influencer
Assigning a unique tracking link or promo code to each influencer allows you to track how many clicks and sales each influencer brings to your business.
You can then use this data to improve budget allocation, doubling down on high performers and giving data-backed feedback to low-performing influencers.
2. Use a Single Tool to Manage Multiple Influencers
Managing multiple influencers manually is time-consuming, inefficient, and hard to scale. A centralized tool helps with:
- Finding the right influencers, reaching out to them, and setting up a partnership without needing to switch between multiple platforms.
- Communicating with all your influencers in one place instead of relying on DMs and emails.
- Tracking status, deliverables, and deadlines for each influencer.
- Setting up payments to payout influencers on time.
- Analytics tools for accurate tracking and reporting. Access all your metrics in one place, measure your campaign’s results easily in real time, and compare performance based on influencer, platform, and content type.
Tools like Insense are designed to simplify influencer marketing efforts for brands with a powerful dashboard that lets you run your entire campaign from finding and managing influencers to measuring your campaign to optimize it.
3. Track Mentions and Influencer-Created Content
Monitoring mentions and influencer-created content helps your brand in a few ways:
- Lets you maintain consistent brand messaging to avoid miscommunication
- Identify high-performing content for repurposing and to get insights into what resonates with audiences.
- Find trending topics and gather consumer opinion.
- Optimize future campaigns based on content quality and performance.
Here’s how you can keep tabs on content and mentions related to your brand:
- Social media platforms have an in-built “Tagged” tab within your profile where you can see all the posts that you’re tagged in.
- Influencer management tools like Insense track content assets, even giving you the option to repurpose them by getting usage rights by default.
- Track content created about your brand by searching for branded hashtags and keywords.
- Unique tracking links provided to influencers also make this easy.
4. Segment Data to Get Better Insights
When analyzing the performance of your influencer campaigns, segment your data based on content, platform, and influencer type to improve your approach. Here’s how you can do this:
- Identify winning content formats.
- Determine which platforms deliver better results.
- Refine influencer selection based on specific influencer groups (like micro vs nano influencers).
For instance, a skincare brand may find that TikTok influencers creating tutorials generate more sales than Instagram influencers. This could prompt the brand to invest more in these influencers and recommend that influencers create more informational content about their products.
Prioritize Performance Marketing to Improve Your Influencer Strategy
By setting up influencer campaigns that are planned and optimized for performance, you can provide fair compensation to influencers, manage your marketing budget more efficiently, and drive higher ROI at lower costs.
Setting up performance campaigns is easy with the right tool in place. Insense is a complete influencer marketing platform that lets you leverage data to:
- Find influencers based on their account and content performance.
- Manage communications and campaign operations in one place.
- View the performance of your campaigns in one place.
Turn influencer marketing into a performance-driven, revenue-generating channel for your brand. Book a demo of Insense today!
