Awareness generation, increasing sales, and mass production of content. Influencer marketing quite literally does it all.
In order to understand whether or not your campaign is successful, you need to know how to measure success. With that in mind, your influencer marketing campaign will need a well-aligned set of key performance indicators. KPI’s vary dramatically based on what your goals are. The ROI of an influencer marketing campaign can be difficult to accurately measure, so many brands are turning to other objectives.
Three major categories have emerged as to why marketers are running influencer marketing campaigns. The leading category is awareness with 37% of marketers saying they use influencer marketing for this purpose. Second to awareness is increasing sales with 32% of respondents saying that is their key objective. Lastly, 31% of marketers say they initiate influencer marketing to build a library of user-generated content. Each unique objective comes with its own unique set of key performance indicators.
Awareness Driven Influencer Marketing KPIs
In an awareness driven campaign, there are four standard metrics that you’ll want to keep a close eye on.
Social Reach: The total sum of all the followers for each influencer that has posted. Ex. 10 influencers posted, each with 10,000 followers. Total social reach would be 100,000.
Impressions: Unfortunately, Instagram doesn’t give impression data straight away. Here’s the workaround: ensure your influencers have a business account, and after seven days of their sponsored post being uploaded, you can ask that they send you the post insights where impressions can be found.
CPM: CPM is the cost per 1,000 impressions. You’ll find that micro-influencer marketing CPM can be more expensive than other top of funnel initiatives. Keep in mind that you’re paying for higher quality. Macro-influencers and celebrities can see CPMs under $1, but for less targeted impressions. Nano-influencers and micro-influencers produce some of the highest quality top of funnel traffic available.
Follower Growth: Easy one. How many followers do you have at the beginning of the campaign, and how many do you have at the end of it? This isn’t a rock solid metric, but it can be an indication of how many new people discovered you and liked you enough to want to be in your world of content.
It’s possible to track all this manually in a Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet. However, using a platform like MightyScout allows for automatic content recording. MightyScout will catch your sponsored posts and give user-friendly reports detailing the social reach, likes, comments, and engagement rate.
With an awareness driven campaign, make sure your influencers are using an appropriate call-to-action. Don’t provide discount codes or encourage overly promotional messages if staying authentic and genuine is what you’re after. Instead, you can have your influencers direct traffic to your own Instagram page so they can follow your brand and keep up to date with everything. Alternatively, you can send traffic to complementary content like a blog or webinar where you can provide further value related to your product, while gathering pixel data to retarget them of Instagram.
Sales Driven Influencer Marketing KPIs
Unsurprisingly, a sales driven influencer campaign is going to have different KPIs than one focused on pure awareness. You could simply establish a baseline for sales made through social media channels and note the difference after activating influencers in your campaign, but there are a couple of better ways to do it.
Coupon Code: If you want to solely track the sales any given influencer generates, you can simply provide them with a discount code for X% off your product and you’ll easily track every sale they generate. The downside of this is that you don’t get the traffic data that a UTM code provides. Plus, it makes the caption a little less authentic and cuts into your margins. If you use coupon codes, ensure that they are easy to remember and insert during checkout. Coupon codes such as RerR23Z would be nearly impossible to remember – try for something simpler like Emily10. The way Instagram works for off-app browsing means that a customer would have to quit the in-app browser (while their in checkout) and go back to the caption to get the coupon code – then repeat the whole sales and checkout process again.
Use a UTM Code: Give an influencer a specific link that tracks users they’ve sent to your website. UTM codes are easy to build and you can start using them right away. Since links cannot be clicked in captions in-app, you can have the influencer place the link in their bio, in their Instagram Story as the “swipe-up” link (available only for accounts with 10K+ followers on Instagram), or in an IGTV video description. You can then access your Google Analytics and track every little nitty gritty metric you want.
The catch-22 about a sales driven influencer campaign is that utilizing the tracking and measurement methods can inadvertently reduce the effectiveness of the campaign. Using a UTM code or coupon code lessens the authenticity of sponsored content – it feels a little more like being sold to.
Content Driven Influencer Marketing KPIs
Creating a dynamic, original, and unique library of content can be extremely costly and use an incredible amount of resources. Many brands are now calling on nano-influencers to help lighten the load. Many think that nano-influencers are the future of influencer marketing because they are already the most effective way to create mass amounts of content. Many brands also find that nano-influencers are driving higher ROI and more sales than either of it’s micro or macro counterparts.
You’ll want to be extra careful while sourcing influencers if building a library of amazing content is your end goal. Traditional criteria for assessing influencers get pushed to the wayside. Follower count becomes nearly irrelevant, and a keen eye for branding goes a lot further.
Engagement is king in the content world. If your content resonates with an audience, they will engage with it. If it doesn’t strike a chord, it’ll be scrolled past every time. Ensure that every piece of content counts and give direction in your campaign brief so that content may easily be repurposed for other marketing mediums. Here are the KPIs you need to know with a content-driven influencer campaign.
Total Comments: Tally up all the comments from your influencer posts.
Total Likes: Tally up all the likes from all your influencer posts.
Engagement Rate: You can use the engagement rate calculator found in ‘Tools & Platforms to make your life easier’, or you can do it the old fashion way.
Clicks: Measure the total number of new users coming to your website – this can help to measure the increased brand awareness. You’ll need a UTM code for this, and it can only be used in certain places (not Instagram grid posts), but it’s a great indicator of whether the content inspires action from an audience.
Volume: The raw number of pieces of content uploaded and provided by influencers. Make sure that in a content-driven campaign, you have enough nano-influencers activated to really create a powerful portfolio.
With all that in mind – what will be the objective of your next campaign? Will you create an amazing collection of content, will you drive more sales than ever, or generate targeted awareness? It’s there for the taking, just be sure to have the proper KPIs in place before you start the campaign.
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