When it comes to influencer marketing, there are a lot of conversations around return on investment. While marketers the world over understand and experience the benefits of using influencers, they still struggle to measure ROI or fully comprehend the importance of KPI to organizations
It is a marketer’s job to ensure their brand gets its money’s worth of exposure, but often this can be a challenge. How can you tell that your influencer marketing campaign is delivering the most value for your money? You measure KPI’s for Influencer marketing.
KPIs for Influencer Marketing
One excellent way to measure and analyze influencer marketing is to look at key performance indicators and here’s how to put them to good use for your next influencer marketing campaign:
1. Website Traffic
Chief among influencer marketing campaign goals is to increase traffic to a brand’s website. Referral traffic is easily the first influencer marketing KPI that can help you determine the success of your marketing efforts.
Traffic KPIs include new visitors, site visitors for a given period, and time spent on site. With traffic KPIs, you get to see just how effective an influencer’s campaign is and how much the traffic generated values the site content (from the duration of stay and interaction)
2. Conversions
Driving growth and sales is the core function of marketing and conversion will tell you what number of your target audience end up clicking through or making a purchase as a result of an influencer campaign. A straightforward way to track conversion rates is to measure pre and post-campaign sales.
Another great way to check conversion is by setting up affiliate links and then tracking the amount of traffic that comes through the ends up making a purchase. With custom code, for example, you can determine the number of purchases made at checkout.
3. Brand Awareness
Using influencer marketing is an excellent way for you to introduce your brand to new audiences. Their reach and clout can go a long way in creating brand awareness in previously hard to reach consumer segments. Pushing and creating positive brand sentiment among their followers is exceptionally beneficial to you as a marketer.
While awareness and reach are harder to gauge than conversion and traffic, but you can generally tell if the influencer is affecting your business if you can see a demographic shift in your followers and customers.
Conducting surveys on new customers, asking how they came to know your brand is a great way to find out how many people you reached with your campaign. The number of new prospects that became aware of your brand is a good indicator of campaign success.
4. Social Media Growth
An increase in new social media followers for your brand after influencer activity is evidence that the campaign is working. To further help you determine if your influencer campaign is driving people towards your social media pages, note the number of new followers and the number of views and likes.
Social media site analytics is a great tool to monitor followers and see how many your pages gain over a campaign period. Comparing pre-campaign and post-campaign numbers on your social media pages and email lists will reveal success rates.
5. Engagement
Brands seek out influencers because they create high-quality and original content (blogs, photos, videos, and so on) which they repurpose for campaigns. As a marketer, it is crucial that the quality of content your chosen influencer generates is beneficial to your brand.
Engagement is an essential KPI because it paints a clearer picture of how well your campaign was received. Engagement is the tangible interaction your content gets and measuring it will give you great insights into how consumers are reacting to you on a brand level.
Metrics to look out for are:
- Likes
- Clicks
- Shares
- Reactions
- Brand Mentions
These engagements are a reasonably accurate way to gauge interest levels in your audience. Likes indicate content appreciation while shares serve to promote and recommend your brand. When people increasingly share content online, it is a good KPI of an influencer campaign.
Comments are another great way to measure engagement. The number and nature of observations will give you first-hand and precise feedback on how well your audience is receiving the content pushed to them.
While it is true that each brand, each industry, and each marketer may have different goals for influencer marketing campaign, the fact is you can only manage what you measure. Figuring out the right metrics to monitor will depend on what matters most to you and your target audience.
Influencer marketing can do wonders for a brand, and you should, therefore, pay close attention to KPIs. These indicators let you know what is going on with your influencer marketing campaign is on track.
If you’re not paying attention to various KPIs, you have no way of knowing how influencer marketing is fairing, whether to continue the engagement or which areas need adjustment or completely different strategies.
