Measuring the Success of Your Influencer-Driven Campaign
It’s important to know how to measure the success of your influencer campaign
Influencer marketing has become a crucial part of digital marketing strategy. In fact, 67% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is one of the best ways to reach a targeted audience. Moreover, 81% of brands that have used influencer marketing said it was successful.
That being said, before you hop on the influencer marketing bandwagon and plan your campaign, it’s also important to know how to measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign, and for that, you need key performance indicators.
Key Performance Indicators
Simply put, a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively your company is achieving your business objectives.
One of the most important aspects of KPIs is that they are a form of communication. As such, they abide by the same rules as any other form of communication.
Succinct, clear and relevant information is much more likely to be absorbed and acted upon.
KPI for Influencer Marketing
When talking about KPI in influencer-driven campaign, you need to know which metrics to consult both when choosing an influencer and in assessing the success of your campaign. These KPIs will help you track your progress, measures success in meeting your goals, and help you stay on track with your influencer marketing campaign.
Here are some of the essential ones to focus on
- Relevance
It seems like a no-brainer that the first metrics that you should check is their relevance. You need to ensure that the influencers’ personas are fully relevant to your brand.
To find a relevant influencer, brands need to build a solid list of keywords and search terms associated with your products or services. Then you can scour social media platforms and pull together references and hashtags to locate which users using these terms the most.
As your campaign progresses, it’s equally important to keep re-assessing your influencers’ relevance. Tools such as Google Analytics allows marketers to track target audience growth based on demographics, interests, and location of connections.
2. Reach and awareness
One of the biggest advantages of influencers is their accessibility to a wider target audience, that could potentially increase the visibility of your brand. Reach is essentially the number of connections influencers have across their networks, but their actual reach shows how many impressions they achieve and the volume of referral traffic they drive.
If your goal is to boost brand awareness and build new relationships, you’ll want to track how many people you reach with your influencer-driven campaigns, how many prospects become aware of your brand and how well the campaign reinforce your brand with your existing prospects.
A good way to measure it is by tracking impression data on your posts. There are plenty of tools such as Google Analytics or Hootsuite, that can help you to measure reach, impressions and referrals.
3. Engagement
Monitoring the engagement rates of your influencers throughout the campaign is extremely important. After all, the success of influencer marketing eventually boils down to the rate of engagement.
81% of marketers believe that engagement is the ultimate influencer marketing KPI.
Tools such as Google Analytics and BuzzSumo, for example, can track and measure engagement for you.
Impact or engagement, reveals how effective your influencer is at actually driving customer behavior. It measures how many times the influencer’s posts are liked, shared, or spark responses. It is a good indicator to see how your brand is being received, how strong your relationship with your audience, how loyal your customers are, and how relevant you are to them.
4. Traffic
The amount of traffic the campaign drives to your site is also worth monitoring. The reason for this is that it will give you a good idea of the campaign’s reach and tell you a lot about the overall success of the campaign.
Often, measuring traffic also includes these parameters: new users, total sessions, time on site, total page views, and referral sources.
Whether you use Google Analytics or some other tool, the only direction your website traffic should be going is up. What’s more, if you have historical data from before implementing your influencer campaign, you can conduct a comparative analysis.
5. Conversions
Granted, influencer marketing has a number of goals, such as increasing your reach, growing your audience, driving engagement, and increasing traffic to your site. But as with all marketing, the end goal is always driving growth and sales, and that’s what conversion is about.
“Conversions don’t always have to do with sales.”
Any time a prospect completes a desired action, that also counts as a conversion. To help measure the conversions that are coming via your influencers you can use trackable links, unique codes, and UTM parameters. This way you know the exact impact each of your influencers are having on your business.
In Conclusion
Influencer marketing is an effective way to drive more traffic to your website, increasing sales and awareness, and expanding your followers. As such, there are numerous KPIs you could be tracking, depending on your goals.
Although the metrics mentioned in this article are important to measure retention and the effectiveness of your influencer-driven campaign, but social media growth can be difficult to truly quantify.
As a forward thinking modern marketer, you need to continue learning and expanding your digital knowledge and skills while adapting to the technological and behavioral changes of the market.
=======================================
Viral Access is an AI and data-driven social communication company — we help you tell your story through social media. We pair your brand with relevant micro and nano influencers that help you increase awareness, engagement and conversion. We have the systems and team in place to support large scale communications throughout Asia.
For business inquiries, contact us at: info@viralaccess.asia.
