In the last few years, brands have been increasingly focused on influencer marketing. A successful campaign depends largely on whether your efforts are well focused or not. How does a brand know if its influencer marketing strategy is successful? There´s an obvious answer: sales.
Yet, a major challenge arises when measuring success only through sales. On average, it takes up to eight points of contact with your product before a consumer decides to purchase, as it´s very likely that the influencer´s audience is not familiar with your product. Because an audience may need more time to get familiar with your product, results in the form of conversions may take patience.
While measuring success by sales number is an option, you should also measure brand awareness. Here are the most important aspects to consider when looking to increase brand awareness.
Engagement
Any type of engagement (likes, comments, shares, or clicks) is a sign that the people seeing your product are interested in learning about it or even purchasing. Some of the engagement metrics that you must consider are:
- Link clicks: it is the most important metric for measuring engagement. When your influencer´s audience is actively clicking on the link provided, it is safe to say that the campaign is doing its job.
Of course, not all people that click the link are going to purchase your product, but they are aware of your brand´s existence. Other tools come in handy at this point, like tracking where people go on your site or seeing what they put in their shopping cart. This will help you adjust details for completing conversions.
- Questions: If people are asking questions, it means they are interested in your product and are considering purchasing it. Questions are not only a good point of reference for brand awareness, but they can educate you on what´s important about your product to consumers. You can take that information and use it to modify whatever is needed for future campaigns.
- Comments: If people are talking about your product, then there´s interest. It is especially good for the campaign when the influencer is really good at engaging with their audience because comments can lead to conversions with the right kind of interactions. (Klonopin)
- Shares: People can share your influencer´s post about your product for a lot of different reasons, but even if the person wasn´t interested in your product, they´re helping you create more impressions since your post will reach more users.
- Likes: Likes don´t often mean as much as other forms of engagement, but it at least shows that people are noticing the influencer´s post.
Earned Media Value
Earned Media Value (or EMV) can help you know the status of your campaigns via the word of mouth your influencer is generating for you. You can select only the forms of engagement that matter to your brand, and leave out the forms that you don´t consider as important.
- Impressions: They are the number of times different viewers have seen your content.
- CPM: Cost per mille is the amount that you pay for every 1,000 impressions your content makes. You can calculate it: (1000 x marketing fees) / impressions.
- Adjustable value: You can use any metric value that holds any importance for your brand, like story views, followers, comments, clicks, shares, and favorites.
The most commonly used formula for EMV is: Impressions x CPM x Adjustable value. EMV will help you measure the overall buzz that they´re creating for your brand.
Tracking Numbers
Other ways of quantifying the results of your campaign are:
- Affiliate links: You can create a unique link for the influencer that they may share with their followers. The unique link leads to a specific page on your website and allows you to track how many of the influencer’s followers have clicked on the link. This will help you measure the leads you´re getting, and it will help users to learn more about you.
- Customized coupon codes: When giving the influencer a specific coupon, you will be able to check your sales numbers and see how many of them were thanks to the influencer.
- Mutual followers: If the influencer´s audience likes what they see and start following you, you should be able to notice a difference in your follower count.
If you need help with your digital marketing strategy, the Miss Ink team is ready to help. Miss Ink offers an array of digital marketing services from basic social media management to content marketing campaigns and more.
Get in touch with us to learn how we can help your business.
Resource: Sideqik (2022) A guide to tracking and measuring success in your influencer campaigns.
