Last Updated on June 8, 2020

Without some clear means to measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign, it’ll be difficult to find out what’s working and how to improve. Marketing is an iterative process, especially in the online world where you can change something in seconds. Take a look at our guide on how to measure the success of your marketing campaign. If you use these tips from the outset, you’re sure to improve your results and save time.

Remember Audience Reach

Reach means how many people on average a person or company is able to contact online. You can usually track reach through a literal number of combined followers a brand has among all of its social media accounts, but different people will command different amounts of sharing and interactivity among their fans. One million followers who rarely share an influencer’s post may not be as valuable as 10,000 followers who always share.

Related: How does Intellifluence for Brands work?

The most reliable way to track audience reach, from a business perspective, is checking how many people actually see the campaigns your chosen influencer creates for your brand. This number is called “impressions,” and it shows how well that content connects with the influencer’s audience. For instance, a person with 5 million followers but only 100,000 impressions might not have a very active or fresh audience.

Track All Referral Conversions

Imagine a business selling dating advice products. A blogger gets paid to post a review of the business’s e-book, and the post has a referral link to get that business more sales. Obviously, this sort of metric is easily measured. Simply take into account the cost for the influencer’s contribution and compare it to the sales revenue of the products, with a little adjustment based on factors like potential repeat customers.

However, not all conversions involve an exchange of money. If your business has email marketing, a free trial to a subscription service, or something else that’s valuable for attracting leads, you should factor those conversions into the performance. Know the average value of an additional subscriber, track how many new subscribers are coming in thanks to the campaign, and compare it to your costs. A little tooling with Google Analytics can help you form a library of useful data about the people who come to your site and convert into leads or customers.

Define Engagement for Your Campaign

The third and last important factor in measuring a campaign’s success with an audience is engagement, which indicates how much and in what ways the audience interacts with the content of the campaign. For example, if an influencer creates social media videos about your product, useful engagement statistics might be how many shares each video gets. You could also measure engagement through likes, comments, clicks, or even participation through user-generated content.

Related: How are influencer blog scores determined?

Without engagement, a marketing campaign has no chance of becoming a viral sensation. Once you get a sense of what sort of content gets the most and best engagement, you can focus on that to improve your return on investment with all paid influencer marketing deals and other marketing efforts.

Attract the Right Influencers With Intellifluence

Accelerating an influencer marketing campaign to full speed isn’t just about how the influencer markets to his or her audience. You should also take a top-down approach, considering how you communicate with influencers so that they do their best. If you use the Intellifluence approach, improving your performance is much simpler.

Let’s suppose you started a campaign and wanted influencers to create social media posts. Your metric for success was post shares, but you didn’t get as many as you wanted. You could ask yourself:

  • Do the campaign’s title, product name, image, and other factors make a strong first impression that interests the right influencers?
  • Are your instructions detailed without being intimidating or confusing?
  • Are you targeting the ideal types of influencers for your business?
  • When searching for influencers using the Intellifluence Discover Tool, are you being too specific with the filters, such as minimum reach or location?
  • Are you not offering any cash payment? Adding even a small amount might broaden your appeal greatly, exposing you to more awesome people whose reach will more than pay off.

You may also want to try opening your campaign to the public if you had it marked as private and were simply pitching influencers directly. You may be surprised by the types of people who apply, thinking they’re a good fit, and you might have missed a potential branch of the influencer world that is especially suited to getting you good results.

Influencer marketing stands highest among all online marketing methods, with the most potential to rapidly grow your business. However, it doesn’t often turn into an easily measurable situation, such as tallying up sales. Whether you use influencer marketing through Intellifluence or on your own, remember to form a game plan for how you’ll judge the success of any given influencer relationship so you can focus on areas that need improvement. This kind of attention to detail is what turns influencer campaigns into the first-choice marketing method of successful online brands.