Since influencers have the collective ear of a larger audience, businesses are given an opportunity to branch out their brand to new-age audiences, giving them the bonus of better reach and brand awareness. The final stage of influencer marketing, however, comes down to measuring the performance of their brand campaign. 

“Content is king, but marketing is queen, and runs the household,” said one of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world right now, Gary Vaynerchuck. The formidable truth behind influencer marketing is that it you can make it work for you if your sole aim is to leverage authenticity, and you measure true influence through data-driven technologies. Whether you’re running an influencer marketing campaign or driving third-party brand promotions, it is essential to understand the effectiveness of influencer marketing. Learn how to measure the success of your influencer marketing efforts through key performance indicators.

Impressions

Marketers often confuse impressions with reach. Reach is the number of unique users who have come across your post or story on a particular day. For instance, if 250 people have seen your content, the reach is 250. Impressions, on the other hand, refer to the number of times the content has been displayed on a screen. If the content has shown up on people’s screen 100 times, it means that the impressions for the content is 100. 

When impressions exceed the reach, it’s an indication that people are viewing the content. It goes to show that the content is engaging and viewers find it interesting. Whereas, when there’s more reach and better conversions, it shows that the content is getting accessed by new users.

When you divide the total impressions to the total reach, you get the average impression rate. Identifying impressions is a great way to measure brand awareness.

Engagements

Engagements rates is the total of all the likes and comments divided by the number of followers. While Instagram has indirectly asserted that ‘likes’ isn’t an indicative factor of success with its ‘like ban’, it is essential to monitor likes to understand audience behaviour. Comments are, in fact, a better sign of engagement because users have put in the effort to critique the content, which shows interest. It’s an excellent way to understand qualitative user response to the post. Another important factor to consider is the total number of shares and saves received, which means that users have liked the content enough to share it among their networks or have saved it for later.

Positive Social Sentiment

When followers spend their time reacting to sponsored posts by influencers by sharing it positively across platforms, there’s a good chance that the influencer marketing campaign worked. Some of the important signs of positive social sentiment are optimistic emojis, using branded hashtags, portraying exuberant zeal around the product or service and of course, spreading the word among their audiences. Positive reactions are reflective of happy customers and better conversion rates. 

Website Traffic

When influencers share sponsored content, their followers almost always follow the lead. If there’s an increase in website traffic during and after the influencer marketing campaign, it indicates that the followers of influencers are taking actions. Google Analytics can measure the change in website traffic and help you determine engagements, such as new users, users per session, total page views, total actions taken etc. It can help you identify common user patterns and predict customer behaviour and purchasing trends beforehand. 

Direct Sales

Brand discount codes shared by influencers commonly leads to conversions. If there is direct sales from users using the discount codes, brands can easily track it. In fact, by letting the influencers use a call to action feature on their post, it will steer their followers to take action. This simple Instagram marketing campaign can help brands increase their sales, ensure quality leads, and evaluate the success of their campaign. You can calculate the campaign result by totalling the amount of sales you’ve received from the influencers’ discount codes and divide it by the amount spent totally for influencer marketing. 

At WORD, we believe brands can manage their time productively by handing over the reins to experts when it comes to conceptualizing and executing an influencer marketing program. In fact, industry experts can help brands leverage the right influencer from their exhaustive, exclusive list for their brand campaign. The entire process is taken care of responsibly and effectively, giving brands a trusted source to take their influencer marketing a step further.