Influencer marketing has emerged as an innovative strategy for businesses that want to connect with their target audience genuinely, increase brand awareness, and boost their sales numbers. However, what's the point if you can't communicate the results of all your hard work and creativity?
An exemplary campaign report goes beyond data points and numbers. It will provide valuable insights, highlight major achievements, and identify critical circumstances that you can use for your next marketing initiative. On top of that, a great campaign report verifies your value and showcases your efforts to investors and clients.
In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to ten constructive tips that allow you to make an insightful influencer marketing report.
1. Start Your Report with a Campaign Summary
Instead of jumping right into the numbers, offer a short campaign overview. On the one hand, this sets the tone and gives background information to your clients and stakeholders to understand what you want to achieve. On the other hand, it is a good reference point for you and your team to use when analyzing your campaign’s outcomes.
Your campaign summary shouldn’t be too verbose, yet has to outline the campaign’s main idea and message, specify your goals and target audience’s characteristics, and discuss the strategies you employed. When the time comes to analyze the results, these details will help you understand your strategy’s efficiency and identify approaches and areas that need adjustment. Furthermore, in your campaign summary, you may lay down your timeline, roles, responsibilities, and expectations which makes your campaign transparent.
2. Highlight Your Campaign’s General Impact
You may dedicate a page to the broad results of your campaign, such as stressing the overall reach, views, campaign ER, and any other performance data you deem relevant. You can summarize the number and types of content published during the campaign, the number of influencers with whom you collaborated, and the duration of your program.
3. Include KPIs that Align with Your Goals
Next, you can dig into the details by presenting as many relevant metrics as you want. The key is to display information that is in line with your goals, backs up why your campaign is a success or serves as a basis to refine your strategy.
Remember, that there is no universal solution when you assemble your report. Your campaign goals, budget, industry, location, company size, clients, and several other factors affect your campaign creation and execution. Therefore, make sure to fit your measuring and reports to your campaign specifics, and don’t copy another brand’s approach word by word.
With that in mind, feature information that is necessary for your team to prove success and analyze your efforts. You may mention reach, views, impressions, key engagement metrics, and engagement rate. Apart from these, add as many other KPIs as you want, including brand mentions, conversion rate, and different conversion types like sign-ups, downloads, lead gens, and purchases.
4. Elaborate on Your Campaign’s Monetary Aspects
Of course, it is totally fine if you provide cost-related metrics in the previous section. However, it is better to allocate a separate page for all data associated with spending and revenue. Thus, here you can present your net income, ROI, and EMV.
Start your summary by listing the total budget and total expenses. You may break down your expenditures by direct, indirect, fixed, and variable costs. You can showcase how much earnings each influencer generated if your goal is to increase revenue and sales.
5. Showcase Audience Insights
Provide information about the age groups and gender your content reached. Was it successful among Gen Z or Millennials, women or men? Include the top cities your promotion was popular, or top countries if you ran a global campaign. As a nice touch, you can provide sentiment analysis, featuring the percentage of positive, negative, and neutral reactions the promotion generated.
With this information in your hand, you can analyze how efficient your campaign was in terms of targeting and how it was perceived by the audience.
6. Spice up Dry Data with Visual Aids
Your reports need to be to the point, and simultaneously easy to understand. Data visualization and images will tick both requirements. Use various charts, graphs, and infographics to present your key findings, and compare current performance with previous ones.
Choose visual elements, colors, and fonts in your report that align with brand consistency and identity. Be organized; break down data, and introduce one idea on one page. Edit and format the report so that it doesn’t seem overwhelming. Enrich the text with diverse visual components, from screenshots to charts.
7. Provide Context to Your Campaign Results
Naturally, you include the numbers and percentages in a report, but your stakeholders will want to know how your campaign performed compared to previous campaigns or your competition. Utilize industry benchmarks, and compare your outcomes to your major competitors to explain in what areas you outshine them and where you need to improve.
Influencer marketing doesn’t always produce tangible results. You must put a lot of work into interpreting and quantifying qualitative data, still, you shouldn’t count only on measurable metrics. A campaign report can include influencer and customer feedback, audience sentiment, and case studies to furnish a background for stakeholders and clients to understand the broader scope of the campaign.
8. Ensure Data Accuracy by Using Tools
Influencer marketing doesn’t stop on the weekends. If you don’t use tools or automation, you will likely be forced to work on weekends and holidays so that you can keep your spreadsheets up-to-date and factual. Social media management tools and influencer marketing platforms with analytics functions capture data every day, even for content formats such as Instagram stories that disappear after 24 hours.
You can still use spreadsheets and other manual methods but the more approaches you apply the more exact your compiled stats will be. In this sense, you can use tools to cross-check and validate manually gathered data and your calculations will be more accurate.
Furthermore, in a world where manpower is needed for strategizing and decision-making, using analytics and reporting tools is not a question. Instead of allocating several people to collect and record data manually, use tools to save time and effort.
9. End Your Report with Key Takeaways
Finally, outline what you learned, including the positives and the negatives. Let’s be realistic; even if your marketing activities were highly efficient and you managed to reach all your goals, there is always room for improvement.
Sure enough, you must communicate successes, strengths, and strategies that worked well. But don’t forget to identify challenges, weaknesses, and key learnings you and your team faced during the program. Gathering together all this information enables you to extract valuable insights and phrase actionable tips you can use in future campaigns.
Reflecting on your campaign’s performance will assist you in making informed decisions in the future, optimizing your strategy, and reducing risks. Your findings help you improve your creator selection, allocate your resources better, and stay on top of your game. All in all, key takeaways and recommendations ensure that everyone is on the same page and knows what their responsibility is in future initiatives.
10. Tailor Your Reports to Your Audience
Stakeholders
Focus on their priorities and address their concerns. Provide them with strategic insights, and showcase the campaign’s long-term benefits. Your stakeholders will be curious about how their business stacks up to other industry players, so present your outcomes in relation to broader business goals and industry trends.
Demonstrate what metrics contributed to financial growth, and detail the campaign’s ROI. Offer them strategies on how to scale future campaigns and insights into market opportunities.
Clients
Your clients will be more interested in how the campaign performed in relation to the determined goals. You must inform them how the influencer marketing collaboration affected their brand awareness, engagement, and bottom line.
Summarize the campaign’s impact on their business with key metrics, including reach, ER, and ROI among others. Prove influencers’ value with success stories, highlighting top performers and key findings.
Teams
When reporting to your team, go into specifics about what worked and what didn’t and why. They need granular performance metrics and detailed insights to refine the overall strategy and improve individual skills and knowledge.
Point out specific areas that need optimization, and pitfalls that arose during the campaign. Come up with ideas on how to resolve challenges, and learning points that will enhance execution. And of course, don’t forget to highlight personal achievements as well!
Recapping
A great influencer marketing report is more than just numbers and stats. It can serve as a guidance for your team and can secure the trust of your stakeholders and clients. By following our ten steps, marketing professionals can craft influencer marketing reports that can be used as roadmaps for growth and as a reference for future endeavors.
