How to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaign

Influencer marketing is a part of marketing that involves communicating with social media-based influential individuals also known as influencers in order to promote a brand or service. Due to their large following it is easier to target the audience on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even TikTok towards the service or product a business has to offer via these influencers.

The Rise of Influencer Marketing:
Influencer marketing has been gaining popularity for quite a long time now particularly since 2010 because of the rise of Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, and other influencer-centric social media platforms. The widespread use of such platforms offered ordinary individuals an opportunity to express themselves creatively and allowed them to create and share material, drawing a significant number of people engaged in their specialized areas. As a result of this, internet-savvy people quickly began making use of online platforms and social networking sites to consume their content since they were so easily accessible and the content they engaged with was more pertinent. However, it is important to note that this differs from niche to niche but fashion, gaming, beauty, lifestyle, and fitness witnessed a significant surge in brands turning to influencers for the promotion of their products or services. Due to this influencer marketing started to grow and is still rapidly growing as businesses want new and cheap ways to promote themselves.

Methods to gauge the effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign:

Utilizing affiliate links:
There are a lot of methods that are involved in measuring the effectiveness of your influencer marketing campaign in which utilizing affiliate links is one of them. Businesses can generate URL’s consisting of a distinct code that recognizes a username or person’s ID entered via Amazon Associates. Affiliate links are very helpful when it comes to measuring the success of your influencer marketing campaign since they allow you to see what products are being viewed by the consumer and by extracting the data of the best-selling product on your website. When you partner with an influencer, ask them to implement your affiliate link in the stories or posts they upload for your brand so that you can track interaction while earning money from people who click through.

Monitoring Impressions:
It’s hard to tackle impressions and is a challenging task to determine the number of people that have interacted with your influencer campaign. Tracking impressions gives you an idea of the audience that can be reached by that influencer. It is important to note that the impressions are not equivalent to the engagement. Studying impressions only means that you are able to identify the number of people on whose feed your product or service has been promoted. It does not mean at all that they have interacted with the advertisement or read what the advertisement says. Even though monitoring engagement is an important aspect of seeing the overall size of the influencer’s audience, it doesn’t provide the potential traction your campaign has received.

Monitoring Engagement:
Have you ever thought about the use of the like or share button under these advertisements on social media platforms? Well they all count as forms of engagement and are available and can be a helpful initial phase in the process of screening for possible influencers because it shows the amount of interaction that an influencer’s posts have with their followers. If you want to calculate the engagement on your posts to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns, follow the steps listed below;

Add up all the likes, comments, shares, and all other forms of interaction in order to know the number of people that engaged with that content.
An additional way of determining the engagement rate is by dividing the total number of impressions by the total number of comments, likes, and shares.

We like to share this additional tip when we discuss monitoring engagement, that is there are a lot of different niches so the level of engagement for each niche would differ from others. To understand this better let us consider an example where a business reaches out to an influencer whose level of engagement is high almost 5 percent but the outcome of that influencer promoting that brand is less than 1 percent. This signals that the influencer’s audience is not fit for that brand even though the influencer’s engagement is really high.

Keeping track of the traffic prior to and during the influencer marketing campaign:
It is important to keep a check on your website and social media traffic before, during, and after initiating your campaign. Try your best to monitor and note down the traffic on your social media platforms every day. After your campaign is finally over, compare how you started, the traffic that the site bought during the initial stages of your campaign versus the traffic that it bought towards the end. In the case of social media platforms compare the likes, comments, shares and followers from when you initially started till the end. You’ll absolutely notice a major difference and notice that you were able to meet your goals. If in case you failed in achieving your goals try to think to what extent did you miss your goals? You can decide whether influencer marketing was worth the effort and money by analyzing this data in the larger context of your marketing plan.

KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators):
If we can sum everything up and recommend one technique to measure the success of your marketing campaign it would be to determine your KPI’s. Keeping it simple, a KPI(key performance indicator) is a value that can be measured. It helps in determining how well the organization succeeds in achieving your goals. These will vary according to your sector. To establish them, consider these fundamental inquiries regarding your brand:
Which effect are you hoping to achieve?
How can the world be made better?
What financial objectives do you have?

When you set your goals, always make a habit of following the SMART method(specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based objectives). In addition to this set KPI’s that match and go along with your niche and industry.

Attach UTM parameters:
In order to monitor or track traffic developers have created a UTM short for urchin tracking module. Linking this at the end of the website’s URL assists businesses in figuring out which links people visited the most, which campaigns generated the most traffic and more. To prevent errors, Flaherty suggests utilizing the Campaign URL builder in Google Analytics.