As influencer marketing continues to grow, digital marketers must now face the challenge of justifying their expense. So how can you make influencer marketing measurable? Today, we’ll see what the metrics are and how you can benchmark them.
The Metrics of Online Marketing
As we’ve noted in previous posts, there are numerous benefits of choosing influencer marketing, all of which have to do with the following metrics:
Reach – the ability to access audiences across the world
Engagement – the chance to get people to reply, comment and share content based on your brand
Views – simply putting your content in front of of people’s eyes
Landing page visits – bringing people to your online home
Conversions – turning clicks into actual sales, signups or other actions
The Best Metrics for Influencer Marketing
The answer varies a lot on your goal. Do you want people to sign up to your newsletter? Do you want to increase the sales of your product? Or just create brand awareness among your target audience? Different companies and brands have different goals, but influencers can help you reach any goal.
The best metric in terms of “influence” is undoubtedly that of reach and engagement. This is because the benefits can be both short term and long term. For the short term, you can see how people who engage with the content are more likely to visit the landing page of the product and produce conversions. In the long term, you will also benefit from activating users by creating a stronger brand presence, and keeping your name in their mind for future campaigns.
ROI
Measuring the ROI is one of the most important things when it comes to experimenting with new strategies, which influencer marketing is for some companies. Although many think influencer marketing is performance based, it often doesn’t work that way. Influencers are real people and bring way more for your company than just dollars. Additionally it’s important to not only perceive them as money making machines. It simply doesn’t work like that.
They provide you with a more complete package. Especially when it comes to long-term engagement. Like mentioned before, retention is important to create stickiness in the minds of your audience.
Measuring Metrics
Implementing influencer marketing from a performance marketing perspective is not necessarily difficult. Okay, you have to be tech-savvy at the least, but any digital marketer should. Below we’ll study a number of techniques that are easy to apply, even for beginners:
- Reporting dashboard
Working with Join’s software, we’ll take the most effort out of your reporting. You can focus in in-depth analysis and improving your strategy. We will provide you with a clear overview of the produced content and the statistics, so you can focus on your goals. - UTM codes
An UTM code is a technique to add extra information to a link. If someone clicks the link, the information from the URL is saved in a cookie. This lets you track the actions of a person on your site – which is quite useful. Moreover, if you give personalised UTM codes to all the influencers you work with, you can benchmark them against one another. If done correctly, you can see exactly how many conversions an influencer has realised. - Coupon codes
A similar technique is using coupons in your (web)shop. If you let your influencers share a coupon code with their followers for, for example, 10% discount, you can use the code to see which influencer brought the customers to your shop. Similar to UTM codes, using this technique you can compare the results and costs per influencer. - Tracking
Lastly, there’s a lot you can learn without using the links. If you have a strong online analytics system you can track your audience. You can check for yourself if your traffic is coming from influencer blogs, online news articles or your own Instagram. Invest some more time in Google Analytics – it will pay off in the end.
Conclusion
While there is no one-size-fits-all for what makes a successful influencer marketing campaign, it doesn’t mean you can’t justify your ROI using clear numbers and data. Using your preferred analytics tool, it’s actually pretty simple to see what works and doesn’t, and to justify your spend to executives.
