First and foremost, we have to think about influencer marketing as an organic ecosystem with a will of its own. Such a modern network aims for inspiration, creativity, higher life quality, connectivity between users and influencers, community, and trust. This is the source of both its beauty and frailty.
Primarily, marketers find it hard to track a fluid environment. This is the reason why they need to set clear influencer marketing KPIs before launching each campaign. It’s never a good idea to measure success on social media after things happen.
In this article, you’ll get the chance to understand which metrics are good indicators of marketing performance. More importantly, you’ll know how they can help whenever brands cooperate with influencers. We’ll go through a bevy of KPIs like impressions, sentiment or trackable links that can truly make a difference in your monthly marketing reports.
Compatible with This Goal: raise brand awareness
The reach marketers have been using for years is also extremely useful for influencer marketing. To maximize the number of unique views, influencer lists need accounts with a great many followers.
One of the perks of working with influencers is access. By placing your brand in front of a new audience, more people are going to become aware of your offerings for the first time.
Out of these activated leads, a percentage of them will engage one way or another. They will try out your products, sign up for newsletters or visit your website. Any of these actions makes the influencer campaign a valuable asset for the company.
By keeping tabs on reach, marketers can assess how much their investment was put to good use. You can track it by either keeping a record on the number of followers an influencer has or the number of users your post reached.
The latter is the favorite course of action on Instagram. However, marketers need insight into the influencer’s Business account to get these numbers.
It has become common knowledge that the greater an influencer’s community is, the lower the engagement rate becomes. For instance, only 15%-30% of users out of 1 million followers are going to actually see the content. This is why international brands have no hesitation in working with micro-influencers.
Compatible with This Goal: high post visibility
Compared to audience reach, impressions (which reveal how many unique plus recurring views a post generated) are better at keeping track of the number of people that interact with your campaign. This is one of the influencer marketing KPIs that can counteract the recent changes social networks made to their algorithms.
What social platforms are now after is growth sustainability and industry innovation. However, the framework for these ambitions requires large investments. This is why social networks are pushing forward paid ads, leaving organic posts with weaker reach. Posts appear mostly in feeds of those who showed an interest in the topic.
On the other hand, the number of impressions bypasses platform constrictions. It shows the level of magnetism influencers have over their followers and to what extent they succeed in making users return to their well-designed sponsored posts.
Compatible with This Goal: Users Taking Action
Dedicated influencers who are there for their community at any moment of the day are acing their engagement rates. What does this mean?
Some accounts might generate a lot of impressions. However, if their followers stick to just sightseeing, it means their content is not engaging enough to encourage likes, comments, shares, and clicks. In other words, influencers are not influential enough to their followers.
Engagement rate is a useful marker for the impact a post is making. If you were to categorize them in order of their importance, this would be the resulted list:
Compatible with This Goal: Social amplification
If you consider social media is a great channel to run campaigns for your brand, you definitely want to grow your followers. One of the key influencer marketing KPIs that help you in this endeavor resides on your profile: number of followers.
Influencer campaigns can very well instill urgency in new leads to follow your account. However, to reach this point, your account should be ready to welcome them with quality content. This goal entails setting core moral values for your brand.
By humanizing your corporate culture, the brand gains depth and starts sharing the same interests as your target audience. As a result, the profile will have a less promotional look and a more captivating one worth sharing. This is how companies can encourage social media growth, much like influencers.
Compatible with This Goal: Sales
Influencer marketing KPIs can help you measure ROI by revealing the website traffic influencers generate for you. However, there is one hindrance: how can you differentiate campaign visitors from the others? One dedicated landing page can help with that.
By sharing this special page with influencers only, marketers know that all the traffic coming to this web location originates from sponsored posts. This way, it’s a piece of cake to calculate the conversion rate.
You can use this technique to put your list of creators to the test. If results are satisfactory, replicating the same collaboration with your official website instead of a landing page will deliver similar quality.
Compatible with This Goal: Profit Increase
Measuring ROI across organic campaigns on social media is never straightforward. However, the entire operation can be built with trackability in mind in the first place. Use coupon codes and custom URLs to monitor how users interact with them at any given hour.
One strategy that is in the interest of both creators and publishers is a personalized coupon code. By turning influencers’ name into a 20% discount, creators increase their engagement rates while companies record a boost in sales. At the same time, marketers can track the number of coupon activations and measure the impact such a move produces.
Compatible with This Goal: Revenue monitoring
Influencer marketing KPIs can monitor investments, revenue, and draw the line to assess the outcome of a social media campaign. You can do all that with ROI. To do this the right way, tick all the necessary phases:
Compatible with This Goal: Social awareness
From a reverse engineering perspective, new leads go to a brand profile as long as they trust influencers enough to click on their promoted username. In other words, profile visits are a result of a great brand-influencer match.
This KPI will tell you if a second collaboration is recommended or not and how impactful one of the layers of your campaign is. A great profile visits number is a good indicator of a trusted influencer. Plus, you also achieve social profile growth along the way.
Compatible with This Goal: company growth
How persuasive sponsored posts are gets reflected in the number of sales it generates. As long as influencers create quality content, their community will have it easy to see the value of promoted products. In the end, influencer campaigns are playing a decision-making role and convince consumers to purchase the recommendations.
Each partnership proves effective when it generates sales or subscriptions, whether directly or as a side effect of a campaign. After all, revenue is what any business wants to achieve at the end of the day.
To keep track of this influencer marketing KPI, marketers have to register the number of sales per day during the official campaign duration. The higher the sales are during influencer promotions, the more effective your partnership is.
Compatible with This Goal: Social media engagement
How users react to a campaign dictates how additional users are going to shape their first impressions. For instance, if the feedback in the first days of advertising is positive, this will only make it easier for further waves of visitors to come to like it as well.
Social sentiment is one of the main influencer marketing KPIs that take into account the nature of social networks. First of all, users come on these platforms looking for a connection. Therefore, they are inclined more towards emotion and less on reason.
Brands are starting to be aware of the importance of social sentiment. Comments are the easiest way to take the pulse of the public. These are the most common signs of a positive feeling: friends mentions, happy emojis, usage of branded hashtags, brand mentions, keywords in comments (love, need, amazing, congratulations, etc.)
Nonetheless, as technology is making progress, so does tracking systems. As of recently, Flaminjoy started offering clients sentiment analysis based on user-generated content. Basically, it scans photos posted on social media and identifies feelings, moods, locations with the help of AI.
Flaminjoy leverages the latest martech solutions to offer marketers a clear image of their results on social media.
Flaminjoy clients gain access to a platform created for big data analysis. How many times users searched for your account or hashtag on Instagram, impressions, demographics, follower growth, website clicks, and lots of other insights are delivered in real-time.
Another complementary service comes in the form of recurrent reports. These in-depth account reviews offer various clusters of information such as audience quality score, audience type (real users, influencers, mass followers, and suspicious accounts), organic growth, audience interests, and more.
Nowadays, marketers and influencers can create amazing things together. However, one of the core tasks of marketing specialists remains data monitoring. Without this process, there can be no clear vision for evolution.
Therefore, the 10 influencer marketing KPIs we identified today are powerful enough to unlock the potential of social media. Enrich your monthly reports with these insightful metrics and resort to Flaminjoy for access to social media backstages.
Next time Influencer Marketing makes a move, you'll be the first to know!
