There are many reasons why brands must tap into influencer marketing. First, it provides authentic and organic content to people from a reliable source. Additionally, brands can maximize targeted marketing reaching highly focused communities. Furthermore, it improves visibility and trust and establishes authority in a niche. All of this is done in a much more cost-effective way than traditional marketing and with a higher ROI.
All the above sounds good, but how will you know if your influencer marketing investment is paying off? Well, that's exactly what we're going to discuss in this post. We'll share with you how tracking and measuring your influencer collaborations will help you shape your marketing methods, what metrics to monitor, and which tools to use to speed up your efforts and get accurate data.
The Importance of Measuring the Success of an Influencer Marketing Campaign
The digital marketing industry is highly competitive, thus campaign tracking and measurement are the most powerful tools you have to prove your program is successful. See why it's essential to evaluate collaborations.
You’ll get a clear picture of the efficiency of your campaign’s performance in relation to the goals you've established.
Assessing crucial KPIs helps you identify areas needing development.
Analytics and evaluation enable you to make data-driven decisions and better your influencer marketing strategy.
You can prove the value of your work to stakeholders and ensure that an additional budget is allocated to future influencer marketing endeavors.
Last but not least, you can calculate your influencer partnerships' ROI and optimize your spending.
Set Clear Goals to Understand What Success Looks Like
Before we dive into the topic of metrics, let's review what can help you decide what you need to measure. The answer is pretty straightforward: goals. Establishing clear goals will give you a better understanding of what data you need to monitor. They allow your team to prioritize tasks and use resources appropriately while ensuring they are headed in the right direction.
To increase the chances of success, set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals, i.e. SMART goals. Thus, your goals should be well-defined, realistic, and easily measurable to track your marketing progress. Furthermore, you must give a deadline to reach them and they have to be in line with the mission and vision of your business.
With influencer marketing, your brand can achieve a wide range of goals. We are now listing the five most popular ones.
Raise brand awareness: Influencers can put your brand in front of many people, increasing the level of recognition of your brand and product.
Drive sales: Creators can significantly boost the number of purchases by providing social proof that a product or service is worth buying.
Grow website traffic: Working together with influencers whose audiences match your target market will increase website traffic.
Enhance customer loyalty: Influencers who are already fans of your brand can cultivate a warm relationship with consumers and improve customer loyalty.
Establish credibility: Industry experts help you stand out from the crowd and gain dominance in your sector.
Goals, whether they're short-term or long-term, can move your marketing team forward and keep them focused and liable.
Measure Engagement and Get to Know How Users Interact with Your Brand
Engagement refers to the level of involvement between an influencer's content and their audience. Likes, comments, shares, and retweets all count as engagement and give you an idea of how impactful the creator’s content is. They provide vital information about the amount of interaction between followers and published content and are easy to measure.
Likes: The easiest form of acknowledging content is by liking it. It doesn’t require much effort and usually outnumbers comments and shares. 100 likes on a post signify that 100 users clicked on the Like button.
Comments: Comments enable users to express their opinions and allow them to disagree with influencers' ideas. Again, the number of comments left under a post represents the number of people who commented.
Shares: Brands can rapidly gain new audiences if users share informative and inspiring posts. The number of shares reflects how many people shared the content.
Engagement rate
The engagement rate (ER) refers to how the content is received by the audience. By looking at the ER, companies can determine if a piece of content is poor, was not targeted at the right audience, or was published on the wrong platform. If the engagement rate is high, it resonates well with people, meaning the post reached the right audience.
ER is calculated by adding the number of interactions (likes, shares, and comments), dividing them by the total number of followers or views, and multiplying the amount by 100. Let’s say, a brand has 1000 followers on Instagram and one of its posts receives 100 likes. The ER would be 10%, meaning that 10% of the audience has engaged, in some way with the content.
The formula: ER = (total number of a post’s interactions / total number of followers) x 100.
As well as assessing the campaign's success, ER is an effective way to measure the relationship between a brand and its audience.
Monitor Website Traffic to Evaluate the Efficiency of Your Influencer Marketing Approach
Keep tabs on the number of visitors to your website to decipher the success of your influencer marketing strategy. Just as influencers can help promote your brand's webpage and increase traffic with their posts, you can also identify creators whose content generates the most traffic. You can find out which content formats and channels are successful and adjust your strategy by selecting the most effective influencers and promotion types.
Tools for tracking website traffic
Google Analytics: A free web analytics tool created by Google to gain insights into the number of page visitors, the type of device they use, their location, bounce rate, and the average time they spend on a page.
Adobe Analytics: The paid web analytics and reporting solution made by Adobe Systems Inc. enables businesses to analyze their website performance and segment their audiences.
Mixpanel: Mixpanel enables businesses to analyze users’ interactions with their websites and online products to improve conversions and customer retention. They offer some functionalities for free, but their advanced solutions are included in two plans.
Crazy Egg: A paid heat map and analytics tool that analyzes real-time consumer behavior data by displaying the most visited areas on a webpage.
Clicky: A cloud-based web analytics software with free and paid plans. Clicky allows businesses to analyze website traffic in real time.
Use These Methods to Track Sales from Influencer Campaigns
If you aim to grow the number of purchases with influencer marketing, you must track sales to understand the impact of your marketing campaign and calculate ROI. By keeping tabs on the number of sales, you’ll see which influencer’s content drives more sales and enables you to pick those who perform outstandingly. You can also determine what content makes users take action and alter your influencer marketing plans accordingly.
Sales tracking methods
Promo codes: Brands can provide influencers promo codes and count the number of times these codes were used and calculate the purchases related to the collaboration. For example, on HypeAuditor’s platform, you can create unique promo codes once you’ve integrated your e-commerce store.
Landing pages: Businesses can build landing pages dedicated to a service or offer and watch the number of page visitors.
Tracking links: Trackable URLs collect information on the number of clicks and conversions or even other data related to the campaign. With HypeAuditor’s e-commerce integration, you can generate tracking links and monitor sales.
Customer surveys: You may ask customers after each purchase to share their feedback, fill out a customer satisfaction survey or provide a product review.
Analytics tools: With web analytics tools, like Google Analytics brands can measure conversions, track purchases and evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
How Influencers Affect Purchasing Decisions
Creators focus on a specific topic and build their content around that topic, making them a credible voice within a community. With Millenials and Gen Z users, influencer endorsements and opinions outweigh traditional commercials. Rather than listening to a brand's advertisement, they are more likely to purchase a beauty product if it is mentioned by a beauty influencer they respect.
Influencer collaborations can deliver a higher reach and engagement and are considered more relatable by followers. Brands can harness influencers' power to shape purchase decisions and thus push sales by promoting their products through sponsored posts, affiliate campaigns, and brand ambassador programs.
Learn How Your Influencer Campaign is Received by Checking Brand Mentions
As the name suggests, brand mentions indicate how often your brand's name appears on blogs, social media, or other websites. By regularly examining brand mentions, businesses will get an idea of how people perceive them or their products. It helps them identify negative reactions and concerns and take steps to improve their brand image or product.
As well as acknowledging positive reviews, checking brand mentions regularly enables brands to answer users’ questions and address issues. In this way, they enhance the customer experience, strengthen trust, and demonstrate that they care about their opinions.
Tools for checking brand mentions
Influencer marketing platforms: Many influencer marketing platforms offer businesses social listening tools to facilitate mention and hashtag search across various social media outlets. HypeAuditor’s Mention Analytics analyzes influencers’ posts on Instagram and TikTok searching for a particular hashtag and account mention. With our Social listening tool, you can search hashtags with fewer than 5,000 mentions per month.
Social media listening tools: Tools like Brand24, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite allow brands to monitor hashtags, mentions, and keyword usage in social media conversations.
Brand monitoring solutions: By using these tools, businesses can track mentions on the internet, including websites, forums, and blogs. Brandwatch, Mention, and BuzzSumo are some of the popular monitoring tools.
Reputation management tools: These services help brands identify mentions on the internet and analyze user sentiments to improve their online reputation. A few of the most favored tools include Reputology, ReviewPush, and Reputation.com.
Google Alerts: With Google’s free tool, businesses can monitor the internet for keywords and receive a notification in an email whenever that particular keyword appears in any online content.
With these solutions, brands can better understand customer sentiments and identify key issues and opportunities for improving their online reputations.
Analyze ROI and Estimate Your Campaign’s Impact
Return on investment (ROI) shows how profitable an investment is in terms of gained profit and campaign costs. Measuring ROI in influencer marketing is vital to single out creators with high fees and low returns, fine-tuning spending, and discovering tactics and partnerships that contribute to the success of the campaign.
You can calculate campaign ROI by subtracting the total cost of the campaign from the campaign’s total revenue, dividing the result by the total costs, and multiplying it by 100. So if your business spends $5000 on an influencer marketing campaign and the campaign returns $10,000, the ROI will be 100%, namely (($10,000 - $5000) / $5000) x 100 = 100%
The formula: ((Total revenue - total costs) / total costs) x100.
Among other factors, a good ROI depends on the goals, the campaign, and the industry. When developing their marketing strategy, companies should consider ROI and keep an eye on it to help them make informed decisions.
Conclusion: The Importance of Regularly Measuring the Success of an Influencer Marketing Campaign
Regularly measuring the success of your influencer marketing campaign will provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. It helps your business identify areas that need improvement and adjust your marketing methods respectively.
Tracking and analyzing website traffic, sales, engagements, and mentions can help you pinpoint top-performing creators, calculate ROI, and make data-driven decisions for future campaigns. By evaluating influencer collaborations against your goals, you can ensure that your marketing efforts are on track and your resources are being used effectively.
All in all, measuring the success of an influencer marketing campaign helps you tailor your marketing strategy to meet the audience’s demand, forge strong partnerships with creators, stay ahead of the competition, and keep up with marketing trends.
