There is no denying that influencer marketing works, or it wouldn’t be an $8 billion industry. Several case studies suggest that influencer marketing yields vast returns. However, you won’t start getting results with just high spending on influencer marketing software and good content.
But why not?
Because there are various complexities in influencer marketing, from fake influencer profiles to bloated performance data. So it’s essential to know which KPIs to look out for so you can accurately track and measure your influencer marketing campaign. In this article, we will discuss which influencer marketing KPIs are critical for understanding the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign.
But before discovering these metrics, you must set your goals and objectives to know which metrics you should be tracking.
Setting Your Goals
Why are you planning to collaborate with influencer? Is it for promoting a new product line? Or to increase your brand’s general awareness? Your campaign’s KPIs change according to what your endgame is.
So it’s essential to set a clear goal before moving ahead with the influencer marketing campaign planning. This will help you move in the right direction.
There are various campaign objectives you can set based on your overarching business goals.
- Engagement – Get as many interactions on your posts as possible.
- Awareness – Expand your brand’s visibility to new audiences.
- Conversions – Optimize your campaign strategy for leads and sales.
These are three commonly-used goals used for most influencer marketing software platforms. To get the best result out of your campaign, it’s crucial to analyze your marketing or business goals and align your influencer marketing goal with them.
Finalize Your Goals
Before setting your goals, analyze prevalent industry benchmarks to keep your goals realistic. Average spending, engagement rates, reach, etc., will vary significantly based on the social channel, industry, content category, etc.
So be sure to find the latest statistics for the social platform you wish to run the influencer marketing campaign through influencer marketing software and note down the KPIs relevant to your campaign.
Success KPIs for Influencer Marketing
Now that you are well-versed in setting realistic goals, let’s discuss various metrics that help you track the performance of your influencer marketing campaign.
Engagement
Engagements are considered quintessential metrics of influencer marketing success. This is because engagement directly reflects the quality of an influencer’s content and their audience’s loyalty.
It can be challenging to maintain high engagement. Influencers need to regularly create authentic and engaging content to do so. It’s the mark of a top-notch content creator.
Here are some standard engagement parameters used to calculate influencer performance in influencer marketing software:
- Likes: A simple indicator of how popular a piece of content is to an audience. Generally higher than comments and shares, Likes are good indicators of content quality.
- Reactions: Similar to ‘Likes’ on Instagram and Twitter, Reactions are equivalent on Facebook and LinkedIn. Reactions provide deeper insight into how a piece of content affects your target audience.
- Comments: The total comments received on a post will help you decide whether the content is engaging. Comments are a highly valuable metric that shows that a viewer finds the content attractive enough to take a higher-level action than just tapping to Like it.
- Shares: Authentic and top-quality content will help you get more shares. Content is shared when consumers feel it is valuable to their social community or adds value to their own profile when they share. Shares are e-Word-of-mouth in action.
- Reach: The reach of your influencer marketing campaign is an essential benchmark of success. The reach of your influencer marketing campaign is usually affected by the follower-count, content topic, and audience interest of the influencer you wish to work with.
These Important parameters you can find via better influencer marketing software
Apart from the organic growth of your campaign, which will take place when follower shares your brand’s post on their feed.
There are some simple metrics to analyze if you wish to calculate the reach of your influencer marketing software campaign.
- Impressions: Impressions signify how many times a post has been viewed. It includes both unique and multiple views. Requesting this information from the influencer you are collaborating with is vital because they have access to these metrics.
- If there were several posts for the campaign, measure Impressions for every post, and analyze the most popular ones.
- Follower Growth Rate: This metric describes the increase in the follower count of an influencer over time. If there is steady growth, the influencer makes good content regularly and attracts followers regularly.
It’s essential to note sharp upward spikes in growth rate or constant growth over periods may allude to suspicious activity. Using influencer marketing software with social media listening tools can be beneficial in these scenarios.
Organic Campaign Growth
Some of your influencer marketing software campaigns might experience growth beyond your paid efforts. For instance, their audience might share a paid influencer post often enough to become viral.
This growth can be considered organic and usually occurs when the content is ‘meme-worthy’ or ‘shareable’ and appeals greatly to online audiences.
Conversions
The primary goal of most businesses is to get relevant leads and convert them into sales. So Conversions become an indispensable measurement of influencer marketing success.
You may be thinking:
What exactly is a conversion?
Conversions include sales and calls to action, such as website visits, newsletter sign-ups, etc. It is anything that leads potential consumers to take any action that confirms commercial interest in your brand.
Calculating Conversions is essential to understanding the ROI of your campaign.
Sales
Sales are straightforward yet vital indicators of success when it comes to conversion-optimized campaigns. Sales interactions can be done by simply inserting a link to the product page on the influencer post.
While working with influencer marketing software, there are various ways to enhance your marketing sales activities using real-time data insights, promo codes, affiliate links, etc.
You may wonder:
But which website visitors and purchases come from my influencer post?
To track sales and referrals from influencer campaigns, you can use unique, trackable codes and UTM parameters and insert them into the links in the promoted content. So when they click on the link, your analytics tool will attribute it accordingly.
Traffic generation through influencer marketing software platform
Defined as a user who visits one of your landing pages, website traffic is a critical benchmark for any digital marketing activities. In influencer marketing, it is enabled by inserting links in influencer content that lead to your website.
Observing website traffic only scratches the surface. To truly gauge the quality of these visitors, you need to also look at session time, unique visits, and more such metrics.
You may ask:
How do I track these metrics?
Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for tracking your website traffic, page views, bounce rates, etc. To effectively measure the efficacy of your campaign, it’s crucial to leverage multiple digital tools for a truly comprehensive analysis.
Explore Qoruz – A dynamic influencer marketing software that delivers data-driven influencers insights.
Leads
In a marketing context, a Lead is an individual or organization interested in your offering. Generating Leads is the final stage in the marketing process.
In influencer marketing, leads can be generated similarly to traffic. But unlike website traffic links, these links lead to the collection of consumer information by form fills, collateral downloads, or similar actions.
You may now ask:
What are the Leads for?
Once you gain a Lead, the following steps involve nurturing them with your brand’s content and encouraging them to purchase.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing software is a powerful platform for brands to upscale their marketing activities. But any digital marketing initiative falls flat if you need to know how your campaign performs.
Numbers and figures form the foundation of successful marketing practices and are essential in evaluating campaigns and also help you make changes in future campaigns based on your learnings.
As a marketer in an increasingly digital world, one thing is constant: data and analytics are the keys to unlocking the secrets to incomparable success, whether in influencer marketing or traditional marketing.
