.avif)
Influencers can bring much-needed trust and authenticity to your social media marketing efforts.
Still, as with any other marketing campaign, keeping track of metrics and key performance indicators is necessary.
Compared to traditional marketing, influencer marketing can be a bit harder to quantify than conventional marketing.
Nevertheless, it’s doable… if you know what you’re doing! 😉
We’ve made this guide to help you:
- Determine your influencer marketing strategy goals
- Understand ways to track the goals
- Calculate your campaign’s return on investment (ROI)
And we’ll also break all of this down into small, manageable (and actionable!) steps.
Now let’s get right into it with an overview of what to do before the campaign starts.
Before the Campaign Starts
As Benjamin Franklin famously said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
To win the social media game through influencer marketing programs, you must have a solid plan and know what you want to achieve.
One of the best ways to define the objectives of any project is to use the SMART goals framework. That stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound.
This process makes defining influencer campaign goals easier and creates a roadmap with actionable steps. Knowing which goals you’re pursuing will give you a better idea of which metrics must be tracked.
Before we go any further, we need to define the two most important terms we’ll use throughout this guide:
- Goal: a specific, concrete, and measurable objective you want to achieve.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs): metrics used to measure the effectiveness and success of a marketing campaign’s goals.
For instance, an increase in brand awareness could be the goal of an influencer campaign, while its KPI metric would be tracking the number of followers.
You'll need analytical tools to measure an influencer campaign's progress and success.
Most social media platforms have some level of built-in analytics when you open a business account — this applies to influencers and brands both.
Some of the metrics you can use to track performance on social media and benchmark against are:
- Reach: the number of people who've seen a post
- Engagement: how many likes, comments, and shares
- Follower growth: how many new followers you attracted as a result of the influencer posts
Comparing historical and real-time data that these platforms and analytics tools offer lets you track how metrics change over time. It lets you know how the campaign performs.
Now that we've clarified goals, KPIs, and metrics, we'll give you examples of concrete influencer campaign goals and the metrics you can use to measure them.
Goal #1: Increase Brand Awareness
If you want to spread your message to more people, the campaign's goal is brand awareness.
Brand awareness is about increasing your brand's visibility and recognition among your target audience.
Influencers have precisely the know-how and skills to reach your intended target audiences, so collaborations with them can benefit you greatly.
You might think brand awareness is an abstract goal that’s hard to track and measure — but you’d be wrong.
There are relevant KPIs to track brand awareness efficiently.
Follow us, and we’ll show you! 😉
Number of new followers
This is a straightforward yet handy metric.
If you gain more followers during an influencer campaign, this indicates an increase in brand awareness because it means your audience is growing.
The best thing about built-in analytic tools on social media platforms is that they analyze the source of new followers and show you the followers that come through a specific post.
Note how many followers you have before you launch a campaign so that you can compare.
Post impressions
Views are crucial when it comes to brand awareness. If your audience is going to become aware of you, they first have to see your content. Logical, right?
Impressions is a metric that shows the number of times a post, in our case an influencer’s post, was shown in users’ feeds.
This metric is also helpful when choosing the right influencers for your campaign since it lets you analyze their reach.
Branded or campaign hashtags
More mentions and shares of your brand’s content mean more brand awareness.
Branded hashtags are often used to get people to create user-generated content (UGC) since users trust their instrumental pieces of content more.
However, you can also use them as an indicator of brand awareness.
You can find all hashtag mentions by searching for the branded hashtag in the search bar on social media platforms or the “Hashtags” tab.
Branded or campaign search volume:
Search volume measures how often users enter a search term, keyword, or phrase into a search engine in a given period.
So brands can understand if users search for their campaigns' names, products, slogans, or taglines.
Regarding influencer marketing, you can use search volume to gauge if influencer content has affected brand awareness. The more volume, the more awareness.
To measure search volume, brands can use tools like Google Analytics or Search Console, as well as Ahrefs.
If keywords or branded hashtags related to a specific influencer campaign are increasing in search volume, that indicates more brand awareness.
It means that people have seen the content and are researching your brand.
Let’s move on to the next goal.
Goal #2: Increase Conversions
According to surveys, 82% of consumers have purchased or considered buying a product after seeing a friend or an influencer post about it.
This means that collaborating with influencers on social media can be a powerful way to increase your conversion rate.
Tracking purchases is easy but evaluating how many sales came from specific influencers and campaigns can be tricky.
But don’t despair! There are ways to do it — here’s how.
Trackable links
No worries — they don't track you 😉
Trackable links help define if a link in a sponsored post drives website traffic and, as an extension, increases conversions.
You can create trackable links by inserting unique codes called urchin tracking modules (UTMs).
UTM parameters are a tracking device to help you determine the exact source of web traffic.
Several tools allow you to create trackable links. There’s Bitly and Google’s own UTM solution called Campaign URL Builder.
Links with UTM tags can be used in blog posts, newsletters, or sponsored posts to track where each conversion originated.
Affiliate links
One popular way to generate leads is to use affiliate links combined with limited-time promo codes.
To help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign at the same time, you can make affiliate links into trackable links (the process is the same as described above).
Additionally, brands that allocate their budget to several influencers in the same campaign can give unique coupon codes to each participant to evaluate their performance.
Campaign landing page traffic
A social media campaign can benefit from leading to a landing page created specifically for that campaign because landing pages are created and optimized to drive conversions.
A landing page can also help track sales and measure the campaign's effectiveness.
Marketers can get insight into the campaign's success by analyzing landing page traffic.
This insight allows them to better understand their audience and what works and what doesn't.
Up next is how to build a community and evaluate engagement rates.
Goal #3: Increase Community Engagement
Unsurprisingly, brands want to collaborate with influencers to promote their products and services when 49% of consumers say they rely on influencer recommendations before making a purchase.
Consumers see influencer content as more trustworthy, authentic, and honest than traditional advertising.
However, it’s precisely because of this that influencer campaign success often relies on the ability to measure and track its impact on community engagement.
So, if your primary influencer campaign goal is to increase community engagement, here are the KPIs you should track.
Total engagement
Total engagement refers to the number of people interacting with a brand on social media during the influencer campaign.
To track total engagement, consider these metrics:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Clicks (click-through rate)
By monitoring these metrics, you can see if the influencers' efforts to engage with the community are working and adjust their approach as necessary.
Any social media platform lets you analyze these metrics through its built-in tools.
Engagement rates
The engagement rate measures the level of interaction between your influencer's audience and your brand.
This includes likes, comments, shares, and saves.
A high engagement rate indicates that your influencer's audience is interested in your brand and likely to convert from potential customers to paying customers.
One common way to track engagement rates is through Instagram Insights.
You can also calculate your engagement rate by reach, dividing your total number of engagements per post by your reach (total number of followers or impressions) per post, then multiplying the result by 100.
By monitoring total engagement and engagement rates, brands can make data-driven decisions to increase community engagement and build stronger relationships with their audiences.
How to Calculate the ROI of Influencer Marketing Campaigns
The million-dollar question is upon us — was my influencer campaign worth my money?
This can seem a bit daunting, but as we’ve seen, you can evaluate goals through trackable KPIs to determine a campaign’s outcome.
Return on investment (ROI) is how businesses assess any investment, and since paying influencers to create content for you is an investment…. You get where this is going 😎
You need these two formulas to calculate ROI:
To measure your influencer program sales, you should determine these KPIs:
- Number of orders
- Number of conversions
- Total sales
Then, examine the costs connected with your influencer campaign and look at these factors:
- Creator payment
- Production costs
- Paid tools (e.g., for analytics)
- Discount codes
Then, using the formulas from the graph, you can measure the campaign's success.
Bottom Line: Use the Right Metrics
One of the main criticisms of influencers in digital marketing is that it’s hard to measure their effectiveness.
However, as we saw in this post, using the right metrics to evaluate your influencer marketing campaign will help you prove its value to stakeholders and secure buy-in for future campaigns.
It’s also essential if you want to understand what went well and what you’ll need to change for the next marketing campaign.
Tracking all KPIs on your own can get pretty time-consuming, though.
So, why not save time and headaches and keep track of your influencer campaigns with Insense’s campaign management platform?
You can launch an unlimited number of campaigns at the same time and have a centralized dashboard to keep track of progress easily.
