“Subtle” can be a scary word in marketing. It’s easy to think the loudest ad with the biggest numbers is the most successful, but that isn’t always the case.
Influencer marketing is one of the most lucrative strategies out there. It’s been found to return an average of $6.50 for every $1 spent. And yet across the board, marketers have difficulty measuring the ROI of their influencer campaigns because the results are often, well, subtle. They’re looking for a simple return that clearly says, “This post drove X sales.” But influencer campaigns and customer journeys are more nuanced than that.
Think about it. A customer might see a product in one influencer’s Instagram post, then see it in another influencer’s YouTube video, then visit the brand’s website, and then come back a few days later to buy the item or buy a different product entirely. In the end, the sale was made. But the marketer is left wondering where it came from. And without this information, they can’t effectively understand and optimize their influencer marketing campaigns. They’re basically just driving blind.
Here’s the good news: It is possible to measure sales and leads from your influencer marketing campaigns. You just need the right metrics and tools to help you do it.
Define your influencer marketing goals
You can’t measure your campaign if you don’t know which goal you’re trying to reach. Well, we guess you can. But you’ll waste a lot of time and cause a lot of confusion by tracking the wrong metrics. For example, if you want to score more points in basketball, you’re not going to use a football scoring system to measure your progress — especially when there’s company money on the line!
That’s why the first step in measuring ROI is setting your goals, which might include:
- Brand awareness: Reach 500,000 social users in one month
- Social engagement: Generate 100,000 likes and comments on Instagram
- Social followers: Gain 3,000 new social followers in one week
- Website traffic: Increase website traffic by 10%
- Sales: Drive $10,000 in sales in one month
- Email signups: Generate 100 email signups in two weeks
Once these goals are set, you can get to those metrics.
Choose your influencer marketing metrics
There is a range of influencer marketing metrics to choose from — and the ones you need will depend on your goals, content, and influencer partnership.
Let’s go through the big ones and break down how you can track them.
Reach
Reach determines how many people are potentially exposed to your campaign. If your goal is to generate brand awareness, this is your go-to metric. It can also be a helpful baseline for any other goal since the more people you reach, the more sales, traffic, and engagement you might get.
The easiest way to calculate reach is to add up the number of followers your influencers have. Still, follower count doesn’t exactly correlate to impressions, so this is more a “best guess” scenario. It’s just another reason why it’s crucial to work with influencers who are authentic (meaning they don’t buy followers) and have niche audiences that you know will be engaged with their content.
Impressions
Impressions measure how many people were actually exposed to your campaign. This distinction is especially crucial now that social platforms like Facebook and Instagram filter feeds based on people’s interests and engagements. This is difficult to track on your own so it’s best to ask the influencers themselves if they can provide these numbers for you.
Engagement
Here’s where we start to get into the action — people actually interacting with your brand and its content. You want to take into account likes, comments, and shares on all of your influencers’ social posts.
Remember again that if you’re looking to generate engagement and not just awareness, you may want to partner with micro-influencers who have smaller but more interactive audiences.
Brand mentions
This metric falls under the awareness and engagement goals, since mentions show that more people are aware of your brand and are also taking that next step to actually talk about your brand. You can use tools like Hootsuite and Mention to track this metric.
Website traffic
If you don’t want the engagement to end on social media, you might want to send consumers to your website, product page, or landing page. This is an especially valuable metric if you want to generate sales and conversions, since it can help you track the customer journey. You can use tools like Google Analytics and trackable links (which we’ll get to in the next section) to measure website traffic and connect it to your influencer campaigns.
Sales
Ah, sales — the great achievement of many marketing campaigns. Isn’t it what we all want at the end of the day? After tallying the followers, engagements, and impressions, the most satisfying metric is just watching those purchases come in. And if you’re running your influencer campaign effectively, they will. The only caveat is that they may be hard to track.
That’s why you’ll need certain tools and tips to help you.
Use tools to help you track your metrics
Ready to track ROI from your campaigns? Here are the tools you need in your influencer marketing toolbelt.
Promo codes
Everyone loves a good promotion. Customers love them because they get a nice deal and influencers love them because they can make a special offer to their audiences and build affinity. But for your brand, these promos are particularly important, since you can create your own codes and use them to monitor which purchases come from influencer campaigns.
For example, say you gift a certain mascara to your influencers. You can give them a promo code for 10% off (using a platform like Shopify) to share when they post a review of your product. Every time someone from their audience uses that code, you know it came from an influencer’s campaign.
And ta-da — you have trackable ROI.
Trackable links
If you’re looking to generate website traffic or aren’t ready to run promos yet, you can create trackable links to your website or landing page. Just kindly ask influencers to include the link in their posts and when someone clicks on it, you’ll know that they came from an influencer. You might even create unique links for each influencer, social platform, or product. It’s easy to do with a free tool like bit.ly.
Custom hashtags
If your goal is to generate brand awareness, mentions, or engagement, custom hashtags are your best friend. And you don’t even need a third-party tool to help you make them. Just brainstorm your best hashtag idea (make sure it’s not already associated with another big trend or event), share it with your influencers, and watch the conversation unfold.
The how, what, and why of influencer ROI
Influencer marketing is a unique beast. It’s one of the most effective strategies in the industry but it can also be one of the trickiest to track, especially if you’re looking to measure direct sales. And that’s not a fun thing to pitch to your CEO or VP of Marketing. You need to show them results, of course, so that’s what we’re here to help you do.
By working with a platform like Octoly, marketers can measure the ROI of their influencer marketing campaigns and get a comprehensive overview of all their influencer posts in one place. That includes the number of influencers activated, the number of reviews generated on Instagram and YouTube, and interactions and engagement rates for each review, product, and campaign.
That should help you breathe a sigh of relief! Because as tough as it can be to track ROI, you don’t have to do it alone or waste hours scouring social media and filling spreadsheets. Platforms like Octoly can automate and organize this process for you so you can get back to running your business and building more effective, scalable influencer campaigns.
Ready to get started? Request an Octoly demo. Don’t forget to sign up to our newsletter for more influencer marketing news.
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