The influencer marketing industry is expected to grow to $21.1 billion by the end of 2023, with 67 percent of brands reporting they increased their influencer budget. Still, brands cannot expect growth without a strategy social media marketing strategy. The best way to hone your strategy is to establish goals, determine how to track progress toward the goals, and consistently evaluate those metrics.
Are you a brand or marketing professional wanting to uncover the real impact of your influencer marketing campaigns? Whether it’s the top TikTok metrics to track or how to set full-funnel KPIs, this guide will illuminate your journey toward mastering influencer marketing metrics!
Why It’s So Important to Measure Influencer Marketing
Yes, collaborating with creators is the cool thing to do. But it’s also a major business opportunity for brands, which means every dollar counts! Influencer campaigns are an investment cheap, so let’s make sure you’re making them work for your brand.
So, how do you slay this game? The secret sauce is all about campaign measurement. The next sections are your roadmap to setting goals you can actually measure, picking the right influencer metrics and KPIs, and steering clear of the common traps that mess with your ROI.
3 Things to Do Before Launching Your Campaign
While everyone is clamoring to launch their next social media influencer campaign, successful brands know that diligent planning is critical. If you commit to taking these four steps now, you’ll position your brand to get much better results in the long run.
1. Dream Big: Set Goals for Your Influencer Marketing Campaign
First things first: set the vibe for your influencer marketing journey. Before we dive into those fancy KPIs, determine what you want your campaign to accomplish. Are you out to boost brand awareness? Is your sales team looking for more leads and sales? Or is it all about leveling up your reach and engagement? Each goal adds a different flavor to your campaign – ideally, these elements will come together to create a recipe for content development.
But here’s the kicker: your goals have to be precise and time-based. For example, if your goal is to improve conversions, you need to ask yourself by what percentage you’d like to increase those conversions and when you expect to see this change.
2. Identify the Best Path Toward Influencer Marketing Measurement
Once you’ve got your goals set, figure out the green flags to look for to know when you’ve reached them. If your mission is to level up your reach, don’t just look at impressions – as that alone won’t tell you how many unique users have seen a piece of content. For this, you can also track unique followers or your share of voice.
Your outcomes need to be crystal clear, paired up with some solid numbers, and in sync with your brand’s goals. It’s time to make those results pop!
3. Let’s Talk About KPIs
When we’re diving into influencer metrics, there are a few things to keep in mind. Some data points, like audience growth rate, need to be checked over a specific time frame to really understand performance. However, measurement frequency for most influencer marketing metrics will depend on your marketing team’s preferences, the length of your campaign, and any deadlines or events you have coming up.
For quick-fire campaigns, you might keep tabs on progress as you go. For longer-haul creator campaigns, you could opt for monthly or quarterly check-ins to see how performance has changed over certain periods of time. This can also prompt strategy updates, so your creator content stays fresh!
How to Measure Your Influencer Marketing Campaign throughout the Funnel
While there are no standard procedures for measuring marketing success, tracking influencer marketing metrics by funnel stage will allow you to gauge the overall value and ROI of your creator campaigns.
The marketing funnel represents your audience’s path to purchase. Choosing goals and tracking KPIs throughout the funnel will help you hone in on what type of content is most effective at each stage. Here, we break down which goals and metrics to track at the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel.
Above is a look at the marketing funnel, and where certain metrics tied to brand lift come into play. These brand lift metrics are trickier to nail down, but follow along to see how they can be calculated!
Top of the Funnel: Awareness
At the top of the marketing funnel, your goal is to introduce your brand and its products or services to more people. Consider partnering with influencers on unboxing videos or a tutorial about a new product. Share a branded hashtag that a creator can use and encourage others to use when posting about your product or company.
A few brand awareness KPIs for this stage include:
- Impressions: The number of times your content is seen
- Reach: The number of unique users exposed to your content
- Follower Count: The number of unique users following your brand account
- Audience Growth Rate: How fast the follower count on your brand account increases over time
- Share of Voice: How often your brand is mentioned, relative to your competitors
- Brand Recall: A part of overall brand lift, brand recall measures how many more people remember your brand after seeing content about it
- Brand Favorability: The sentiment around your brand. This can be measured by tracking the percentage of brand mentions that are positive, negative, and neutral. You can also compare likes to dislikes.
The audience growth rate is equal to the number of new followers over a set period divided by your total number of followers and multiplied by 100. Share of voice is calculated by adding the number of your brand mentions to your competitors and then dividing the number of your mentions by that total. Brand mentions can include hashtags and direct mentions.
Middle of the Funnel: Engagement & Consideration
The middle of the funnel is all about edutainment: keeping audiences’ attention while you make them laugh, surprise them, or somehow add value to their day. This audience already knows about your brand, and now it’s time to teach them about what sets you apart.
At this stage, you’ve already got some followers interested in your product or service, and giveaways or contests are a great way to get them to try out your offers. How-to videos and informational live streams are also perfect middle-of-the-funnel content.
As far as video KPIs are concerned, it’s a good idea to track the following at this stage:
- Engagement Rate: How many times the audience interacts with the content
- Shares: How many times a video has been shared
- Like-to-Comment Ratio: Number of comments per 100 likes
- Audience Growth Rate: How fast the follower count on your brand account increases over time
- Brand Recommendation: The percentage of people more likely to recommend your brand to others, after having seen a piece of content.
Your like-to-comment ratio should be in line with other accounts in your niche. Posts with a low number of likes and a high number of comments may indicate that the audience needs help understanding the content. However, posts with high numbers of likes with very few comments indicate an engagement issue.
It can be tricky to put a number on the quality of your engagements but don’t stress. Keep an eye on social media shares and comments – see what questions are asking about your brand and what specifically is sparking interest.
Bottom of the Funnel
Here’s where the magic unfolds – the bottom of the funnel is where followers become customers. Bring in the heavy-hitting content at this stage, like in-depth product reviews, raving testimonials, and exclusive discounts and promos. Here you’ll be tracking many of the expected KPIs for influencer marketing, including:
- Click-Through Rate: The number of link clicks divided by the number of content impressions
- Conversion Rate: The number of transactions (or leads) divided by the number of clicks
- Bounce Rate: The number of visitors who only view one page of your site divided by the total number of visitors to your site
- Purchase Intent: How many more people are interested in purchasing from your brand, after seeing the content
- Sales: How many sales your brand has as a result of this campaign
- AOV (Average Order Value): the average amount a customer spends as a result of clicking on creators’ links
If you’ve created trackable links or discount codes for specific influencers, this would be an ideal time to track those, as this can provide yet another indicator of how much value individual influencers bring to your brand.
Campaign Measurement Best Practices
For brand marketers, there’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for measuring your social media campaigns. It’s a journey of trial and error, and each campaign brings new insights.
Even so, some standard practices often lead to success for brands that use them. These include:
- Distinguishing between impressions and reach, because big impression numbers don’t always mean unique eyes on your content
- Be mindful of how often creators drop those branded content, to avoid oversaturation
- Setting the right expectations based on influencer follower size—nano and micro-influencers can pack a punch
- Ensuring creators earned their followers organically and didn’t take shortcuts – with MagicLinks, creators are always vetted!
- Kicking vanity metrics to the curb and focusing on data that drives business decisions
- Communicate your goals and even metrics with influencers (or your influencer marketing partners) so everyone’s on the same page
- Continuously evaluating your influencer campaign performance to keep raising the bar for future success
While the “perfect” strategy may be a unicorn, with these tips, you can create some seriously awesome campaigns that’ll rock the social media world.
Getting the Most Out of Your Social Media Influencer Marketing
If you’re not measuring your campaign success, it’s like streaming without Wi-Fi—you’ll miss out on all the action! There will be no way of knowing whether you’ve achieved your objectives or received any return on the investment you made in the campaign. And with so much competition, not tracking your KPIs just isn’t an option.
One consideration for brands to make as they set goals and look to measure their progress is to use an influencer marketing platform. These platforms are your one-stop shop for connecting with top-tier influencers who are acing the social media game. Plus, they do the heavy lifting by tracking those all-important KPIs and serving up the data to you for easy, clear analysis.
With the MagicLinks Brand Portal, brands get a personalized and insightful look at their MagicLinks’ creator campaigns and content, in real time. Plus, it’s included with every campaign! To learn more, schedule a time to chat with our team!
