This is How you Evaluate an Influencer Marketing Campaign

Influencer marketing campaigns have been in vogue since the advent of social media marketing. With celebrities, subject matter experts, social media enthusiasts and entrepreneurs building their own world of fans and followers, influencer marketing has become more of a trend than an invaluable business marketing tool.

The Need to Evaluate
It is very easy to employ a group of small to mid-level influencers for short campaigns or outbursts like contests or offer announcements and get your hashtag trending or acquire the set number of followers or sign ups. But if you are looking at building your brand image through an influencer marketing campaign, it calls for a thorough evaluation of your influencer targeting process, your campaign agenda and execution, and how best do you use your learnings for the next campaign.
Daunting, is it? Relax. There’s an easier way to go about this. Simply seek answers to the following questions and put them to good use.

Questions to ask while evaluating an influencer campaign

1) Are you working with the right influencers?

When it comes to the influencers, it’s not just their incredible number of followers that matter but also the kind of conversations they have with their network.

You are working with the right influencers if they love your brand by genuinely tagging/mentioning you in most of their conversations or if they are already talking about your forte/industry and all you need to do is give them a brand name as a plugin to their social chatter.

When Amazon India launched Kindle Paperwhite in India, they wanted to inculcate the habit of e-reading among the Indian readers. So, they got bestselling Indian authors Ashwin Sanghi and Amish Tripathi to feature in digital films which showcased the authors’ journey from reading books to e-books. These film spoke volumes to the Indian readers subtly highlighting the features of Kindle.

2) Do your influencers have the right followers?

All influencers have extensive reach owing to their massive fan following.

But the kind of followers they have plays a crucial role in an influencer marketing campaign as that defines the actual reach of your content. For e.g. if you are a brand selling baby products, say Smart Bottoms Inc, and you have teamed up with mothers, it is essential for them to have other mothers as their major followers with active conversations revolving around babies and motherhood. Only then will your brand mention seem relevant and authentic.

3) Are you supporting your influencers?

Your collaboration with your influencers doesn’t end at briefing them about your objective and letting them do their work by mentioning you everywhere. As a brand, influencer promotion is your responsibility wherein you leverage the content shared by your influencers by sharing, re-sharing and posting them on your brand pages periodically (with relevant tags and mentions) to appeal to your influencers’ network and attract loyal followers for your brand.

Disney Baby’s Instagram account has built its popularity solely by repurposing and re-posting UGC content sent by moms from around the world. By giving out themes and tips on motherhood and parenting, this account has not only encouraged moms from around the world but has also shown them ways to have fun creatively with their babies.

4) Have you set any guidelines?

Setting up ‘influencer guidelines’ for all your influencer marketing campaigns is essential as that will influence your sales through top-of-mind brand recall than just increase the number of followers. For e.g. on platforms like Instagram where you can tag brands in the photos, setting up a clause to tag you in the comments/caption will help as the tags are generally not readable on the photos whereas in the caption they are loud and up front.

5) Is your campaign social enough?

Finally, is your influencer marketing campaign social enough to be talked about in a wide network as opposed to a niche audience? Does your campaign have the potential to be a social media influencer in itself, trend for a while and lead to a V.2.0 purely on the basis of its popularity?

Well, let’s evaluate it together by looking at an example.

Consider Tata Bolt’s #GetSetBolt. It looks like Tata Bolt had all the answers to the above questions before coming up with an idea for its launch campaign #GetSetBolt. It teamed up with just four powerful twitter influencers and #GetSetBolt to reach out to its social savvy millennial TG (Q1.) — who also happened to be the followers of the said four influencers (Q2).

Unlike the usual influencer campaigns where the influencers are asked to tweet and make noise, Tata Bolt created a reality show called #GetSetBolt where the influencers were locked in glass cubicles. To get out of these cubicles, the influencers had to procure the symbolic Bolt key. They had to achieve this by generating maximum buzz amongst their followers (Q4) using the hashtags #GetSetBolt and their team names — #TeamAshwin,#TeamGabbar, #TeamTrendulkar and #TeamRahul named after their twitter handles.

During the campaign, Tata Bolt through its own twitter handle seeded tweets, updates, video snippets featuring the influencers and the progress of the contest regularly to leverage the accelerating buzz created by the influencers (Q3). But what made this campaign a social media influencer in itself was the type of engagement. (Q5).

The fact that it got the followers to actively participate along with the influencers with gratifications lined up for both the top influencers and followers (here supporters) made this influencer marketing campaign one-of-its-kind. Also, the gamification bit added a lot more fun and frolic to the campaign where the Twitterati actually played along to unlock the key instead of tweeting a cascade of senseless tweets. Simplicity and tact, that’s all it took Tata Bolt to #GetSetBolt and make the best out of an ordinary influencer marketing campaign.

So, how do you evaluate your influencer marketing campaigns? Have you come across any unique insights that are share-worthy?

Go ahead, spill the beans. We’re all ears!