For communication and public relations agencies, finding innovative and ever-improving strategies to strengthen the reputation and visibility of our clients is a permanent task. And along the way, as you probably already know, influencer marketing has become a fundamental tool for the strategic communication of brands, their products and services in the era of social media marketing. Of course, doing it well requires skill and, for that reason, at MileniumGroup we have developed and perfected our method to create successful influencer marketing strategies.
Influencer marketing not only helps generate more conversions, but is also ideal for achieving better brand positioning and attracting new customers through fresh and dynamic content. However, many brands avoid this type of strategy due to the difficulties in measuring its success and determining whether it has paid off.
Fortunately, this is not as difficult as it seems: in this article, we will show you how to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaign and the key metrics you should take into account.
How to achieve a successful influencer marketing strategy
For an influencer marketing campaign to work properly, you need to understand how the relationship works between an influencer and their audiences, whose attention you want to captivate and direct to your brand’s channels. But also find the best way to engage with the influencers you want to collaborate with.
Our approach has proven to be successful, mainly because we understand it as something much bigger than an exchange; we understand that an influencer marketing strategy is successful when it is conceived not as a service order, but as a romance: affinity, conquest, loyalty, care and complicity. A collaborative rather than instrumentalist approach to this practice guarantees better results than the mere purchase of services per campaign, thus creating the opportunity to establish a community that is genuinely willing to collaborate with your brand over time.
In any case, our work method involves knowing your audience, choosing by affinity rather than by numbers (for which we have developed a methodology called 5 Stars Influencer Program), innovating when creating and co-creating content, consolidating a community based on a genuine interest in your brand, and learning to establish agreements according to the circumstances and needs of the parties.
Once the strategy, like any other strategy, has been planned, it will need planning and execution, for which there are excellent management tools available. With respect to measurement, we do it in two ways:
- Qualitative: evaluate if the influencers gave a little more than what you agreed, if they worked together harmoniously, if they established a lasting relationship that can be mutually beneficial in the future.
- Quantitative: define and record the most relevant metrics according to the objectives you set for your strategy. It is often necessary to import indicators from other techniques or disciplines.
Below you will find a list of the most commonly used indicators to quantitatively evaluate the success of an influencer marketing strategy.
Metrics you can use when implementing an influencer marketing strategy
- Impressions and Reach: While impressions represent the total number of times a post has been shown on a given channel, reach indicates the number of unique people who have seen the content. These metrics help you determine the exposure and radius your brand reached on the networks.
- Engagement: Engagement is a measure of audience response to content created by influencers. How much they interacted with your brand’s content that influencers posted on their own channels. This metric reflects the impact of the campaign in terms of interaction with users. It is measured from the total interactions (likes, comments and shares) and the total reach (number of people who saw the publication).
Engagement Rate = (Total Interactions/Posts reach) * 100 - Conversions: Conversions are actions taken by users as a result of the campaign, such as clicks on links, subscriptions, downloads or purchases. These metrics allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of the influencer in motivating your audience to take actions aligned with your strategy goals.
- Brand recognition: Brand recognition indicates the level of exposure the brand has obtained through the campaign. It is important to evaluate whether the campaign has succeeded in increasing brand awareness and establishing a positive impression in the minds of consumers. In general, the measure of this recognition is in website traffic, social media mentions and similar data. In this case, it is best to create a custom URL for the campaign so that you can track the performance of your content.
- Community growth: The number of followers your brand gains as a result of an influencer marketing campaign can be estimated directly from other indicators.
- Sales: If the main objective of your influencer marketing campaign is to increase sales, it is essential to measure this metric. You can do this by assigning unique promotional codes to each influencer, tracking clicks on referral links and monitoring the traffic generated by the collaboration.
- Costs: Calculating cost per conversion, cost per engagement and cost per click allows you to evaluate the economic efficiency of your campaigns. These metrics help you identify which content creators and types of content generate the most engagement, clicks and conversions.
- Return Of Investment (ROI): this allows you to evaluate the profitability and effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaigns, in financial terms. It determines if you are reaching your target audience and achieving your objectives within your budget.
ROI = [(Profit – Investment) / Investment] * 100
In this formula, profit refers to the results of the campaign and investment refers to the amount of money spent on the campaign. This will show you how much you have earned for each amount invested, expressed as a percentage, and determine if it was worth it.
The challenge of measuring the results of an influencer marketing campaign
While these metrics, in theory, can give us an idea of whether an influencer marketing campaign was effective and worthwhile, if it left real benefits for your brand, in practice the challenge lies in how to obtain that measurement, since most of these indicators or metrics cannot be accessed directly but depend on the report made by our collaborating influencers. Here it is essential that in the agreements or contracts it is very clear what the deliverables will be and what figures they must deliver in addition to the content. And this is where it becomes important to aim at creating a community of influencers who are genuinely interested and in love with your brand, since this type of agreements and access to information becomes much easier.
Measuring the success of an influencer marketing strategy is fundamental, remember that the results obtained become inputs for the strategic analysis and planning of next steps. If you want to know how we implement and measure successful influencer marketing strategies, contact us.
