The Need for Better Influencer Metrics
Marketers do not know if influencers campaigns are making a difference
There is a wide reaching debate about the value influencers provide to marketing campaigns. On one hand, influencers are loved by their audiences because of the awesome content they create. Brands can borrow that equity to drive awareness and consideration for their products and services. On the other hand; costs are rising, influencer efforts are usually fleeting and we don’t know if the work is actually working.
Today, most influencer campaigns measure functional metrics like engagement and reach. However, functional metrics don’t tell us much about the impact on brand perception or the likelihood that audiences will buy. We generally do not know if the audience understands or remembers the influencer’s delivery of the marketing message, or if they can recall what brand the message came from. This is a major problem.
To dig into this issue further, BBDO Comms Planning launched the following Twitter survey that was targeted to Julian Cole’s followers, who are primarily advertising strategists and creatives:
56% of respondents did not believe that influencers are effective at driving message recall and brand association. That belief is driven by our collective experience. But that is not a fair assessment. Brand lift metrics have not been part of the KPIs that we measure consistently, so we have not been able to see the full picture.
Let’s help the industry move forward
The best influencers understand brand ideas, and work hard to bring them to life. We love working with the best of the best, and we believe their work is effective. The issue today is that our post campaign reports do not contain the information we need to evaluate impact. Likes and views are not enough. Let’s accelerate industry efforts to help drive change.
Step 1: Continue to learn from research
We need to have broader discussion about whether or not brand lift measures should become a standard KPI for influencer campaigns. BBDO Comms Planning believes that they probably should be. What do you think? Please share whatever research or ideas you have below in the comments.
This new report from Twitter demonstrated that brand tweets can be more effective when they are supported by influencer tweets. Purchase intent rose from 2.5x (brand tweet only) to 5.7x (brand tweet and influencer tweet). We need to conduct research like this more often.
Step 2: Make brand lift studies widely available by incentivizing the platforms
We also need to figure out how to deliver brand lift surveys to influencers’ audiences, with the same scale and ease with which we deploy creative effectiveness studies on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms. Many influencers would probably be fine with the ask, but there is no technical way to deliver on it. To address that, we need to encourage platforms to build the tools. It’s a win win for the platforms. They do not make money from most influencer campaigns. By building self-serve and low cost survey tools, the platforms will become a natural part of the revenue model.
Step 3: Build value for brands and influencers
Today, most marketers treat influencers like a commodity. This is flawed and leads to all kinds of systemic issues. It drives short term thinking that is quantified by the volume of likes or views you can gather in a short period of time. Influencers are incentivized to work with any brand that will make a payment. It does not matter if they post for a DSLR brand touting the power of the camera, and then post for a smartphone maker a few days later about how the phone’s camera is awesome.
Instead, brands should form longer relationships with the right influencers. Brand lift studies will help marketers become more comfortable with that kind of investment, and influencers will be able to form more meaningful engagements with brands that generate a steadier income stream.
