HOW TO ASSESS THE TRUE VALUE OF INFLUENCER MARKETING
Updated: Oct 28, 2021
As influencer marketing becomes an increasingly popular way for brands to reach potential customers, these companies need to know how they can evaluate the success of their campaigns. After all, brands want to be sure that they are benefiting from their investment in influencers.
Knowing how to judge the success of an influencer campaign will help brands to make decisions about which influencers to work with and how to move forward with their marketing.
“ROI,” or “Return on Investment,” is the term used to describe the ways in which brands benefit from money spent on influencers. While the “return” can mean different things to different brands, depending on their product, reputation and overall goals, looking at certain pieces of information can give investors a sense of their return.
Watch our episode of Thinking Outloud on ROI, Trends, and Campaign Analysis
BRANDING AND REACH
No matter what the goal of the brand is, a good influencer marketing campaign should help the company reach more viewers and potential customers. For this reason, marketers often look to work with influencers with a high number of views, click-throughs and overall engagement. Looking at the rate of likes, shares and comments on a sponsored video can be a good metric of how connected the audience feels toward the content. It's helpful to compare these numbers to an influencer's average to determine how the the sponsorship was received by the audience. A channel’s ability to generate traffic from YouTube to other websites is a strong indication of how impactful they are in advocating for a brand. The willingness of an influencer's audience to take action based on their recommendation is crucial.
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Ultimately, the most concrete measure of ROI is determined by looking at the ability of the campaign to generate product sales. This can be measured by tracking click-through to conversion using unique URLs for each influencer campaign. Implementing a survey on your registration or purchase page that asks customers where they learned about the company's product or service can also help attribute sales to different marketing initiatives. This allows the clients to gauge the effectiveness of marketing channels as drivers of acquisition.
MISSED OPPORTUNITIES
Many current ad campaigns could have utilized influencer marketing techniques to increase their chances of customer acquisition. Purple Mattresses’ recent “Raw Egg” ads, for example, were absolutely brilliant advertisements that could have been supplemented by influencer engagement with their product. An influencer marketing component utilized alongside these ads could have created a more well-rounded campaign.
Millennials tend to distrust brands -- influencers help brands mitigate this distrust. If the brand’s message were to be delivered by actual users of the mattress the company may have had an easier time marketing to the millennial demographic.
AUTHENTIC INTEGRATION
It is important for both the brand and influencer not to sacrifice either party’s identity in the process of integrating their content. This can come across as inauthentic or forced and risks not benefiting anyone. When the online game World of Tanks approached Matt Carriker of the popular YouTube channel DemolitionRanch, he was not sure what to do. Because the content on Demo Ranch deals with guns and explosives in real-time situations, Carriker did not see it fitting to advertise the game by playing it on his channel. Instead, DemolitionRanch and World of Tanks collaborated on a video in which Carriker used a real tank to destroy his old truck. The video seamlessly integrated the content of both Demo Ranch’s content and World of Tank’s game, allowing the game to advertise with a popular influencer and Carriker to provide his audience with an authentic and unforced video.