We live in an era of data and information, and that means we have more knowledge about our business than ever before. This leads to a tendency of constant measuring, which makes many companies only take decisions they can set goals for, with a clear ROI.
This, in turn, makes both agencies and clients ask themselves the same question over and over: How well will my strategies with influencers work?
(Read the Spanish version here)
Let’s be honest here: currently, it’s impossible to calculate the ROI for an influencer before they post, and whoever says the opposite is lying. In fact, not even influencers know how many sales they’ll make for the brand they’re working with.
When hiring an influencer, we must consider them as another type of media. Media guarantees a certain amount of audience, and they can estimate a number of interactions… but they can never guarantee a specific number of sales, right? Well, it’s the same thing with influencers.
However, the outlook is not as bad as it seems. Here, we’ll tell you what you CAN estimate before launching your influencer marketing campaign:
1. Reach:
Knowing the average reach of a profile’s posts, we know what we can expect..
2. Impressions:
Being aware of the average impression their posts leave can help us set our expectations for the campaign.
3. Interactions (likes, views, comments and etcetera):
If our post works well, it will have a similar amount of interactions as other posts from the same profile (read the article Why influencer marketing doesn’t work to learn more).
Only the influencer knows some of this data (don’t trust agencies that offer data they cannot have), like the volume of impressions and clicks, but we can analyze the rest ourselves.
Being aware of all of these metrics before launching a campaign is key to know what we can expect and set realistic goals for ourselves.
Here you can see a screenshot of Sway Map, with some data for a campaign before its execution.
We’re sorry to say that ROI can only be measured in retrospect, calculating the sales increase of the advertised product after the post is uploaded.
If you want us to tell you how to calculate a campaign’s ROI, leave a comment here! :)
And if you want to try out Sway Map, you can ask for a demo or a test version in our website :)
