Earned Media Value (EMV) is your brand’s social recognition. It’s what your brand has earned in social media in the form of recommendations, reviews, user-generated content, and shares. Maybe you would have seen the Starbucks page with a lot of people enjoying their coffee. That’s their EMV.
You can also refer to it as uncontrolled media as you often don’t control what others are talking about you on social media. Influencer marketing is an attempt to control earned media value and make it more lucrative.
When brands hire social media influencers to promote their products, they are partially controlling the earned media value and creating a positive brand experience online. Influencers can make their followers like the brand, engage with it, and even try their products. Then these users promote the brand on their social media accounts or share their experience amplifying the earned media value of a brand via influencers.
In this article, we will focus on how influencer marketing affects your brand’s EMV and how to calculate the EMV earned from social media influencers.
How Earned Media Value and Influencer Marketing Go Hand-in-Hand
The basic concept of earned media is what you earn from your results of owned media and paid media. In owned media, it’s a brand posting content about themselves, like their social media posts. In paid media, it’s a brand promoting their content, like sponsored posts. And, then, earned media is what your social earnings are as a result of your marketing efforts.
When businesses work with influencers, they amplify their brand’s reach beyond owned media and paid media. Influencer marketing helps brands connect with social media users by generating more impressions and getting more conversions. Here are a few ways influencer collaboration can help you increase earned media value:
Break the barrier: Influencer marketing helps break the barrier between brands and social media users. When an influencer posts about a brand, it has better chances of users sharing or mentioning it than when a brand promotes itself.
Change negative sentiments to positive: Influencers can help change the sentiment associated with a brand. For example, if some users are not happy with your brand, an influencer post can change their minds and motivate them to trust your brand again.
Get more engagement: Influencer posts get many likes, video views, comments, and shares compared to the level of engagement a brand might get for the same post. If you’re hiring influencers that resonate with your brand, you are gaining quality social engagement.
Some of the reasons above have motivated brands to collaborate with social media influencers, and that helped them improve their EMV. But how is earned media value calculated?
How to Calculate Influencer’s Earned Media Value
Measuring EMV in influencer marketing and implementing it to your marketing strategy can be challenging. However, when it comes to an influencer campaign, earned media value is a key metric that shows you what impact your marketing efforts have on your company’s success.
In a research that analyzed more than 5.5 million posts and 20 retailers, it was found that retailers spent $172 million in influencer marketing and received $3 billion in EMV. Calculating EMV can help you know how fruitful your influencer efforts have been.
There’s no definite formula specified in books that can tell you how to exactly calculate earned media value. But, there are ways that can help you determine how you can evaluate your EMV.
Earned Media Value in HypeAuditor’s Analytical Report
Method 1: Based on Impressions
In this method, we calculate EMV based on organic (non-paid) impressions and viral impressions that the influencer has received. You can calculate CPM based on what you would pay for other media.
Impressions could be anything ranging from reach, views, story taps, and story views.
EMV formula: Impressions over the last 30 days x Average CPM of Ads
Marketers should use this method when their primary goal of hiring influencers is generating brand awareness. Calculating EMV using impressions will help them understand how influencer’s reach has amplified brand awareness in monetary value.
Method 2: Based on Engagement
Engagement on social media could be anything including likes, comments, shares, replies, messages, story replays, story mentions, and more. For an accurate calculation, you need to make sure you get accurate engagement data from your influencer.
EMV formula: Engagement over the last 30 days x Average CPM of Ads
Using this model to measure EMV is helpful when the primary objective of your campaign is to increase the brand’s social recognition. Tracking every form of engagement helps to learn what you have earned from audience engagement.
Method 3: Based on Customer Value
If you want more quantitative results of your influencer campaigns and understand how EMV helped gain customers, we suggest following this method.
EMV formula: (Impressions over the last 30 days x Average CPM of Ads) x Customer Lifetime Value
For brands looking at the long-term picture of how well their campaign converts to customer retention and lifetime value, this method is the best option.
Method 4: Based on Conversions
To align sales with your influencer campaigns, you need to calculate your EMV for the conversions.
EMV formula: Reached Users x CPM x Conversion Factor
This is the most important formula to calculate EMV as this relates EMV to the sales or conversions your influencer campaign brings. Marketers should use this method of measuring earned media value when their primary goal is to increase conversions.
Key Takeaways
To measure EMV, you can create your own formula too that encompasses all the essential metrics. Make sure to invest in influencers who can considerably improve your Earned Media Value in social media.
Use reliable influencer tools to make sure that you find the right influencers who can generate the desired EMV. HypeAuditor’s Analytical Reports provide multiple metrics for in-depth influencer analysis, including their earned media value.
Maximize your ROI from influencer collaborations
Find influencers with authentic engagement and a relevant audience. Compare creators’ EMV estimates and collaboration costs to maximize your ROI. Ensure you only work with authentic creators using influencer fraud checks.
