The Metrics of Success: Measurement Frameworks for Influencer Marketing
With the explosion of social platforms paving the way for brands to connect directly with consumers, brands have needed to follow suit by evolving their creative approaches to stay ahead of the curve. As a result, we’re seeing an increase in innovative ways that brands can reach their target audiences — including influencer marketing, which has grown tremendously in places like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Brands are partnering with influencers on these platforms to promote their services or products to the influencer’s established audience and connect with their target audience right where they are.
Connecting the dots between influencer content and performance KPIs, however, is challenging without the right approach and tools in place. At Rise, here’s how we set up successful measurement frameworks to measure the impact of influencer marketing campaigns on our clients’ businesses, and how we incorporate influencer marketing into a brand’s overall marketing ecosystem.
Laying the Foundation for Your Framework
Before embarking on any sort of influencer marketing campaign, it’s important to determine what results you want out of your efforts and the right KPIs that correspond to those outcomes. Marketers have a tendency to get tunnel vision for bottom of the funnel activity, like conversions and sales, but it’s also equally important to measure and fund top of the funnel results like reach and impressions. These KPIs demonstrate how effectively your content is engaging your consumers.
Like some channels, influencer marketing has both paid and organic components. Paid sponsorships and posts that generate traffic and sales with known UTMs can be directly tied into the campaign itself, while organic posts are more difficult to track and identify. Both organic and paid efforts, however, create a halo effect that likely comes through as organic website traffic. To get a true understanding of the impact of your influencer campaigns, we recommend establishing a performance “baseline” that ties your influencer marketing efforts into the other campaigns you run in your ecosystem. Overall website traffic is an example metric you can track to see how your efforts in influencer are measuring up.
Here’s a breakdown of how you can approach this comparison:
Once you have a framework for what metrics and goals you have at each stage of the customer journey, you’ll need to identify the right tech stack to maintain a holistic view of the full funnel. At Rise, we’ve evolved our proprietary media optimization platform, Connex®, to provide a streamlined view of cross-channel efforts. It’s how we’re able to keep a pulse on the customer journey in real-time on multiple channels and platforms all at once, and how we’re able to drive and prove incremental growth.
How Influencer Marketing Fits Into Your
Broader Marketing Ecosystem
Influencer marketing is one of many levers you can pull to deliver results across your entire marketing funnel. Influencer marketing campaigns are powerful tools for driving brand awareness and engagement via discovery to completely net new audiences. As you run these campaigns, you’ll likely see an uptick in website visits and engagement, which you can then weave into your overall cross-channel strategy for remarketing. By retargeting influencer driven traffic with relevant content, you can continue to nurture and build relationships with potential new customers.
Additionally, influencer marketing should be treated as one of a number of acquisition, engagement, and conversion tactics across your marketing portfolio. You need to hold these campaigns to the same standard of measurement as any other tactic you would execute. For example, we compare the effectiveness and efficiency of top of funnel YouTube campaigns at driving site traffic with investments in influencers to understand which tactics are generating the best results. Knowing how these kinds of campaigns will round out and strengthen your portfolio will equip you to adapt and refine how you use influencer tactics to serve your greater brand goals.
Your Brand’s Influence, Proven
A new normal has arrived for digital marketers: Consumers are turning more and more to their favorite influencers on social media for recommendations on the kinds of products and services that will best suit their lifestyle. Capitalizing on this reality requires marketers to create influencer marketing campaigns that are in harmony with the other campaigns and efforts they’re executing. When you’re confident on how you’ll gather data, you’ll be able to justify your spend on influencer marketing, all while maximizing your budget.
Getting ready to embark on your own influencer marketing journey? Contact us today!