Influencer marketing is basically word-of-mouth marketing on steroids. It harnesses the influencer’s heft to encourage targeted audiences to buy.

This sounds fairly simple, right? It seldom is. Influencer marketing is not something that you can do within a day, it requires careful planning and development to design a strategy that works well. A lot of research needs to be undertaken to choose an influencer that suits the brand’s identity.

Unlike traditional marketing mediums, each sale or conversion can be tracked from its source these days. This extreme efficiency is what makes influencer marketing such a potent tool for brands.

Just running an influencer marketing campaign is not enough, you also need to track every sale to know exactly how much return you get from your investments (ROI).

Goals That Meet Your Influencer Marketing Success

Conversions (Influencer Marketing)

What is the main consideration for any influencer campaign? It’s to increase sales, right? Though this is true, it is a very generalized view. To get to this, brands have to track many metrics. Each one measures how well the influencer has performed while also measuring insights into the brand’s social media accounts.  

An easy way to track the influencer’s performance is to track sales before, during, and after the influencer marketing campaign. If the campaign is working well, there should be a spurt in sales during and after the campaign.

However, this is not everything. Many times, customers do not want to make a purchase then and there. They will think about it, search for various other options and then make a decision. This gives brands another window of opportunity to increase sales. This happens mostly with products or services with a big-ticket size- like buying a holiday or a car.

Referral Traffic

It is not possible to measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign only with the sales and conversion numbers. Referral traffic, where people land at your website from your influencer’s blog or website links, shows just how well the campaign has run. In a way, we can say that referral traffic boosts your brand’s awareness amongst your target audience.

The same tools used for measuring conversions can be used to measure referral traffic to your website. 

This includes the use of promo codes, User Generated Content (UGC) sourced traffic, and traffic from other sources. The tool that you need? Mainly Google Analytics which you can use to measure- time spent on site, new visitors, total page views, and other metrics.

Brand Awareness

This is a crucial first step in gaining new customers, especially for newer brands. Influencer marketing gives new brands a door to access their target audience. This is crucial if you are looking to build relationships with potential customers. To determine brand awareness, you will need insights into how many people viewed, liked, commented, and shared your or your influencer’s social media post. You will need to know how many of these people visited and followed your social media pages and website.

For this, you will have to track the impressions across your social media and online assets. This is easily available through social media platform insights, your influencer’s blogging platform, or Google Analytics if you are looking for pre- and post-marketing campaign insights.

Audience Growth

This refers to gaining new customers who might not know about your product. However, this does not mean you get new customers, it just means more people have been impacted by your marketing campaign.

Let’s say you’re scrolling your Facebook newsfeed. You find a certain restaurant online that interests you. You visit its Facebook page and check its website. While going through the menu, you realize its food is not according to your tastes. You promptly close the window and continue scrolling your Facebook newsfeed.

On the other hand, if you have found the restaurant’s menu to be interesting, you save the post and like its page. The next time you think about eating out, this restaurant is where you would like to go.

You can track audience growth with the help of social media site analytics. Measure how many followers you gained before and after the influencer marketing campaign. Another way to know audience growth is by measuring how many people have signed up for your newsletters and other promotional activities.

Engagement

While reach and traffic show the success of your campaign in figures, engagement shows you how well the marketing campaign has done. This shows the authority the brand receives online, and how people perceive the brand online. This is done through shares, likes, reactions, comments, clicks, brand mentions, etc.

You can measure engagement through BuzzSumo or other social media-based tools that can help you to determine your campaign’s ROI. To know your engagement rate better, you can calculate the Cost per Engagement (CPE). This can be done either manually or with the help of your engagement measuring tool.

Also Read: Build Your Unique Needs Marketing Strategy

Wrap Up

Smart use of influencer marketing can help brands reach the heights of success. This is only possible with a creative influencer marketing campaign that you should measure to ensure each dollar’s worth of investment. Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or marketing goals, you can make tweaks to the campaign and help you allocate a budget for your future campaigns.