How to Track and Measure Influencer Marketing Campaigns

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By this point, influencer marketing is probably a central part of your brand’s marketing stack. That’s because, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rise in popularity of social media platforms, more consumers are going online and counting on digital platforms to help them make their purchasing decisions. So step aside print advertising, and hello cool, creative influencer marketing! Working with influencers, macro and micro (nano, too!) gives you an endless creative springboard to play with diverse types of content, features and promotions.

The only issue: there is SO much data to track! If advertisers and marketers used to look mainly to the return on investment (ROI) from a campaign to gauge its success, nowadays influencer marketing has introduced a slew of new metrics like engagement, conversion rate, impressions, URL tracking and more. 

So how can you clear the noise and track what’s necessary to measure the success of your influencer campaigns?

Here are our tips for optimal tracking and measurement:

1. Make sure you’re working with the right influencers

This is such a key tip because it’s where a lot of brands get it wrong. In order to achieve marketing success with influencers, you need to make sure that you’re choosing the right ones – the influencers that will give you the ROI and quick conversions that you’re looking for. 

With IMAI’s platform, you can estimate the total exposure for your posts based on the influencer (or influencers) that you choose to work with. This gives you a sense of how many influencers you should work with in order to get the campaign exposure that you need and if their bang is worth your buck, so to speak. Influencers are getting more competitive with their pricing of sponsored posts, so this is a good indication if what they are asking for actually makes sense and will be worth the investment.

2. Measure according to your strategic goals

The cardinal rule of influencer marketing is to align your campaign with your strategic goals. For instance, if you are trying to raise brand awareness, you should closely track the engagement with your content. Once you establish the baseline for the particular campaign, then you can compare it to other campaigns or your KPIs for intended engagement, like the number of people engaged or the number of people that clicked on your links to purchase.

On our IMAI platform, you can do this by looking at the “Engagement” metrics. These metrics give you a comprehensive look at the total engagement with the influencer’s post as part of the campaign. This gives you everything from total engagement to engagement per story and post. 

The coolest part: before you launch a campaign, you can use these features to estimate the total engagement based on the influencers you’ve chosen to work with (a step that we also help with, by the way, through our Discovery platform).

3. Target the right audience

With over 3.6 billion people using social media worldwide (as of 2020), targeting the right audience has never been more critical to the success of your campaign. What’s more, all of your investment in getting the right engagement and exposure for your posts won’t make a difference if you’re not targeting the right audience that will convert and purchase your product or service.

On IMAI, you get super detailed demographic and psychographic drill downs so that you can make sure that you’re getting to the right audience. All of this data can be derived even before you launch your campaign so that you can vet your influencers ahead of time. 

It’s also possible to dive deeper into the quality of the influencers’ followers to get a better understanding of any false positives, ahead of time. Make sure that the influencer doesn’t have too many fake followers and eliminate bots from your calculations and engagement, exposure and conversion estimations.

In summary, there are a bunch of smart ways that you can track and measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns. But the main tip is get a hold of the right data at the right time, and you’ll be golden!