How To Measure ROI of Influencer Marketing
A Forrester report, named “The Right Way to Measure Social Marketing,” found that more than half (53%) of the marketers surveyed said measurement was their main challenge with social marketing.
This is of course a big issue because measuring results of your marketing is crucial. Not only to see if it actually pays off but also to learn how you can improve and get a better understanding of how the audience responds to your influencer marketing campaigns.
Influencer marketing is growing rapidly but think about the time when there are better ways to measure the ROI of influencer marketing, that’s when it will start to gain real ground. Once there are better standards, influencer marketing will gain more ground, experts believe.
While many brands are only looking at sales, marketers can benefit from influencer marketing in lots of different ways. If you are new to the market, gaining exposure is the first step to gaining ground and ultimately driving sales in the future as a result of the brand recognition you got.
When it comes to measuring ROI from influencer marketing, you have to know what your goal is. While some marketers only look at sales and when they can’t see a single sale within the first hour of a influencer marketing campaign, they think that it didn’t work, which certainly isn’t true.
While some brands have the objective of increasing sales with an influencer marketing campaign, some are only looking to get their name out there and spread the word about themselves within their niche.
This is why it’s important that you are fully aware of the fact that there are plenty of things you can measure when it comes to influencer marketing, apart from sales.
In this article, we’ll give you some of the ways you can measure the ROI and results of your influencer marketing campaign.
As mentioned earlier, measuring ROI depends on what your goal is so let’s break the ROI down in a few categories:
Revenue
This is what most people think about when they hear ROI. “Do I get any return from doing this?” is a common phrase you can hear marketers say. And, yes, in the long run, it is reported that per every $1 you invest in influencer marketing, you get $6.5 in return. Not bad, right?
Many marketers and CEO:s are mainly focusing on measuring the revenue return and there are actually very clever ways you can track your revenue from influencer marketing on.
2. Engagement
3.Brand awareness
4.Content
To measure Revenue:
1. Promo Codes
Promo codes is a common way of tracking the sales made through influencers. If a brand is running several influencer marketing campaigns at once, promo codes can help track every single one of them and see which of them are generating the most sales.
Promo codes are also a great way to track sales after an influencer marketing has ended.
Influencers often have the power to influence people’s decisions in the long run, not only short-term, after seeing the influencer’s post. A post can influence people’s buying decisions days, weeks or even months after they’ve seen the post.
This is where a promo code comes in handy because you can track the results of the influencer marketing campaign long after it has ended.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a super effective tool for measuring sales.
By simply setting a so-called “Event” goal, you have the possibility of tracking people who came to your e-store from an influencer’s social media channel or blog. You can also see how many people were visiting the influencer’s website during the campaign.
With Google Analytics, you can also see the overall results of the campaign.
Isolated marketing
This is a trick that not too many marketers are using, but it works if you’re looking to track your generated sales from influencer marketing campaigns.
Choose a single product and promote only that product with the help of influencers.
By only running campaigns which promotes a single product, you will be able to see if people are buying it and if the overall sales of that particular product are rising.
To measure Engagement:
2. Engagement
You can get a ton of information about the ROI of the influencer marketing campaign by looking at engagement.
This information is usually easy-accessible as well.
If you have done the campaign on a social media platform, getting things such as likes and comments is super easy. Write the results down and read the comments carefully. Are they genuine comments, as a result of true impact or are the comment-section filled with comments like “nice” and “awesome”.
The quality of the comment can tell a lot about the true engagement of the post so make sure you read them carefully.
Depending on which platform you have used, a lot of them are offering the account user, the influencer insights tools which can tell a lot more about the reach of the post, the total engagement and total reach.
On Instagram, there is Instagram insights (if the influencer has made their account into a business account)
On Twitter, there is Twitter Analytics
On Facebook there is Facebook Insights
And so on..
Ask the influencer to send a screenshot of the statistics of the post that has been made so you can see what engagement results it really generated.
To measure Brand awareness:
3. Brand awareness
Obviously building relationships long-term will tend to be more valuable than one-off campaigns, but the factor that many people miss is the “cool” factor. By incorporating influencers into a campaign in which they are identified as being special, you receive natural benefits that would otherwise have to be paid for.
For this particular ROI measurement way of influencer marketing, it is all about the amount of people you can reach.
Brand-awareness is not only about reach however. It’s about reaching the right people.
It is about getting as many new potential customers aware of your brand as possible with the help of the influencer marketing campaign.
To be able to get the best ROI possible, you need to make sure your campaign is targeting “potential customers” and not those who aren’t within your target audience.
This is where the influencer plays a big role. Make sure you are selecting bloggers who are aligned with your target audience. In this way, you cane sure that their followers are as well.
To find these kinds of influencers, use the Veloce Network directory and filter influencer based on your brand’s needs.
To measure content:
4. Content
Creating content is often really expensive for brands. They have to set up a photo-shoot, hire photographers etc.
Most influencers are doing the product photography all by themselves which means that you get access to a bunch of new product photos by working with an influencer.
This is something many marketers aren’t thinking about but influencer often spend hours photographing your product so brazed on how much time they spend, are they really expensive? I would say the opposite.
The good thing with influencer-images is that a lot of people can see instantly that the photo has been taken by that particular influencer, even if you are posting it on your page and often, those types of influencer images increase your credibility and trust.
