The rise of the digital landscape has created significant opportunities for businesses. Among these is a range of accessible and practical content marketing options. With some effective tools and planning, even small enterprises can make an impact on the global marketplace.
In a marketing environment that often straddles traditional and digital approaches, social media influencers can be a great asset. These collaborators can be an impactful part of campaigns. Their creative skills, trusted reputations, and social media reach can be a game changer when it comes to attracting engagement from your target demographics.
However, when this method is so tailorable and subjective, it can be a little more challenging to understand exactly to what extent they’ve been successful components of your marketing strategy.
Let’s take a look at a few ways you can measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns.
Adopt Effective Data Analytics Practices
While social media marketing campaigns are an integral part of business today, there are a lot of elements that can make it appear as though an influencer marketing campaign is a success or failure. After all, the impression of how social media posts are received can be subject to cognitive or cultural biases — not to mention that trends are susceptible to the relatively unpredictable actions of the public or key internet personalities.
The primary reliable way to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns is to take a data-driven approach. One of the challenges some businesses find here is the sheer volume or complexity of data. Indeed, the idea of effectively handling and utilizing this information can be overwhelming to the point of immobility.
Overcoming data analysis paralysis involves adopting practices that help you take better control of the data. This includes gaining clarity on the specific data points you need to review rather than trying to analyze multiple metrics at once. It can also be effective in improving the visibility of your data within your organization. This way, you can benefit from the diverse perspectives of professionals throughout your workforce.
Additionally, it’s worth narrowing down a selection of tools that are most appropriate for identifying and handling data related to your influencer marketing campaign. There’s a range of data analytics software platforms on the market that track metrics from all your social media platforms and those of your influencers.
Some platforms, including Google Analytics, allow you to review data on return on investment (ROI) for social media campaigns. Then you can assess the financial success of your influencer marketing.
Review User Engagement and Conversion
Customer engagement and conversion are among the core components for the success of any influencer campaign. They’re often the most direct potential impacts of social media marketing methods — not to mention that they tend to produce clear metrics that can help you to establish how effective the influencer’s approach has been.
From the perspective of engagement, you’re looking at how keen the audience has been to actively respond to each post. To establish the engagement rate:
- Look at the influencer’s analytics tools for every post on every platform where they’ve released content on behalf of your business.
- Add together all the likes, shares, and comments on each post.
- Divide this number by the total number of impressions for the posts.
It may be the case that you already had a target engagement rate for the campaign to judge its success. Alternatively, you can compare it to the engagement rate of previous campaigns.
While engagement can be good for raising your brand profile in general, one of the key purposes of any campaign is to boost conversions out of consumer interest. There are a couple of effective ways to assess conversion metrics.
Firstly, if your influencers post tailored links in their content, you can track the sales that came directly through those links. You can also look at your overall marketing conversion rate and any changes that have occurred during the influencer campaign. Anything higher than your previous efforts or that sees an ROI of over the average of 3% can usually be considered successful.
Consider Qualitative Data
You can also establish how impactful your influencer efforts have been with qualitative data.
This process is often called sentiment analysis or opinion mining. Essentially, it involves collecting and reviewing the feedback your influencer’s posts have received throughout the campaign.
You can take a more general approach to this process by placing feedback into categories of positive, negative, and neutral in nature. If the majority of comments have been positive, this could be considered one judge of success for your campaign.
However, you can take this further by looking at the specific details of each comment or piece of feedback related to the campaign. This is particularly relevant if one of the goals of your strategy is to improve your brand positioning. Brand positioning relates to the role your company holds in the minds of consumers.
Some components of brand positioning can include the recognition of your company’s identity, the perception of your values, or even the reputation you have for certain price levels. The point is that you want your company to stand out for certain characteristics against your competitors.
Reviewing the qualitative data of your influencer campaigns allows you to see what consumers are saying about your business. You get to see what impact the posts have had on audiences’ opinions of your company. Or you get insight into where consumers see you in the marketplace.
By assessing whether audiences are using certain types of terminology you are keen to have associated with your brand, you can judge whether the campaign has been successful.
This type of data analysis is useful for risk management techniques as well. If the marketing campaign you enacted with an influencer does not generate the results you want, you can use quantitative risk analysis to determine if a shift in your approach is feasible or needed.
In addition, this type of analysis can be useful when considering whether to continue a partnership with an influencer if multiple campaigns have proved to be unsuccessful.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing campaigns can be an effective component of your wider strategy, but it’s important to understand how to effectively measure their success. It’s wise to take a data-driven approach wherever possible. Adopt practices for identifying, collecting, and handling this resource.
Take the time to look at both your engagement levels and conversions, as each of these plays a role in an effective influencer strategy. That said, performing sentiment analysis with qualitative data is also helpful in understanding how your actions have impacted your brand positioning goals. By adopting practices that help you assess influencer success, you can make more informed decisions about which influencers you use and how you use them moving forward.
