Influencer marketing has vastly grown over the last number of years, and has no intention of slowing down. Be it mega stars or video bloggers, brands are building new influencer linkups, organizing new events and gaining press coverages in multiple ways.
But, here is the thing, an influencer won't sign up to promote your brand until they aren't clear on your brand measurement strategy. If the partnership won't improve their audience reach, they can pull out of the deal, ignore you or create substandard promotional content.
Shortlisting ideal influencers and building credible marketing campaigns with influencer marketing platforms can improve brand measurement and deliver decent return on investment (ROI) for your hardworking influencers. Here is how brand measurement increases your scope of growth and fosters strong influencer relationships.
Brand measurement is a way of sharing your campaign performance insights and key marketing metrics with brand influencers to improve their content marketing and promotion workflows. By showcasing real and actionable metrics, influencers can tweak their marketing campaigns for better results and extend their contract with the brand.
In a recent 2024 survey among marketing agencies and brands, 22.4% respondents said that they invest around 10-20% of their budget in influencer marketing. With a growing interest, one would presume a high level of brand measurement is in place to ensure that the influencer relationship is performing as it should.
The influencers who run these campaigns for a brand have the dream job - or at least that's how it appears. Think about it. Often our social media feeds are overrun with influencers showing off the latest product or the most recent press trip.
Does investing in an influencer program get you in the top leagues? It does.
The relationship between influencers and brands isn’t one-sided. Influencers also strive to work with brands. Collaborations are how they make their money, after all.
Unfortunately, the vast competition between the increasing number of influencers to be seen by brands can often lead to unorthodox practices. This can include buying followers and/or likes. As many brands are new to influencer marketing, they can sometimes choose the wrong influencers to work with as they only look at the number of followers, likes, and so on. Brands just need to remember that the influencer with the largest following may not always be the best influencer to promote a brand.
Source: FasterCapital
Brands who enter contracts with the wrong influencers can often see the relationship turn sour when expectations are not met. If a brand is running a campaign for the sole purpose of sales, then it can be pretty evident if the campaign is working. But what happens if it is a brand awareness campaign? How do you know if people are liking content because of your brand or because of the influencer? This is where brand measurement comes into play.
In all other areas of marketing, there are levels of measurement in place, whether it be how many emails are opened, how many posts are shared on social media, or what the bounce rate of a website really is. All these metrics allow you to understand the health of your company and what areas are performing best. Why not have the same for branding?
Below are some ways in which brand measurement documents the right success metrics for your influencers.
Think about it. Without brand measurement, how else would you see the true impact of your influencer brand campaigns? How would you know if these campaigns have increased brand equity? Awareness? Consideration? Brand measurement is a way of monitoring the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns to ensure the accuracy of content.
Discussing key performance metrics of product campaigns and putting it together in a reasonable deck for your influencers can help you extend the deal. Presenting your numbers is a good way to justify the performance of current promotional campaigns, calculate ROI and put a future course of action to derive the maximum value for brand measurement. This would not only educate influencers on current progress, but also explain the positive perks that they will receive by continuing partnership with the brand.
Likewise, understanding brand measurement will help you with another important aspect of branding: knowing more about your target audience. By implementing brand measurement, you will be able to see how your target audience(s) reacts to your brand. Essentially, you will be able to get inside the minds of your customers.
Measuring the success of your influencer marketing campaign will determine what percent of the revenue budget should be allocated towards future campaigns. If sponsored posts and videos are garnering more audience traction and direct conversions, investing more towards it might improve brand measurement.
Plus, you will be able to find new audiences. Being able to relay to your influencer network exactly who your target audience(s) is, and also being able to pinpoint any new audiences that come as a result of influencer campaigns, enables the transparency that will work to further cement good influencer relationships.
By connecting with other people's audience, you can cast a wider net and expand the follower base or prospect base for your brand.
Below is the set of influencer metrics to track brand measurement and foster stronger influencer partnerships.
Tracking influencer campaigns is the first step in understanding if the partnership is worth having or not. The real-time brand measurement would enable you to grow brand and choose the right influencer.
Below are the ways in which you can track influencer campaigns and visualize real-time performance metrics.
Influencer campaigns helps you monitor audience reach, clicks, impressions, click through rates (CTR) and brand mentions to interpret the direct ROI channels.
It tells you who engaged with your content and who chose to ignore. As a brand, you should get an average of audience reach and personalize future campaigns over it. The influencer also gets better insights for their efforts and can utilize this data to improve future campaigns. It also makes you re-evaluate if present influencer is a subject matter expert or not.
Both you and your influencer can look at accurate and reliable insights in the areas of brand awareness, engagement, brand perception, traffic, conversion and brand loyalty across your target audience. These insights can be set with the data the influencer has from their personal accounts regarding the campaign. With all cards clearly on the table, the trust will become stronger and the relationship improved.
Look at the data across different timeframes and connect the dots with influencer campaigns. This will help both you and your influencer understand how campaigns have impacted your brand performance over time. All parties involved will be happy to be able to pinpoint the success of a campaign.
With the insights, it is possible to further tailor your influencer campaigns to fit your target audience(s) and improve brand performance. This can be a collaborative effort with you and the influencer and is something that will once again strengthen the relationship.
It can be very tempting to just throw money at a hot new trend that seems to be working for your competitors: but that's not how influencer marketing should be done.
They key to doing influencer marketing the right way is patience, practice, and planning. Understanding brand measurement will help you choose the right influencers to help you grow your brand, provide an accurate representation of how influencer campaigns are performing, and show exactly how an influencer campaign has impacted brand performance.
Share this data with influencers so the relationship is built on transparency and get them on board in devising campaigns that will not only reach your target audience(s) but also help grow brand awareness, brand consideration, and brand associations. Over time, it won’t be hard to see how understand brand measurement can improve influencer relationships.
Influencer marketing platforms narrow down the best bunch of influencers that operate in the same industrial niche as you and create sales pitches for your products and services for future marketing campaigns. Through these platforms, you can sync up with influencers, optimize email communication and supervise PR events all from a single platform
Below are the top 5 influencer marketing platforms that can help you surf the right influencer network and land effective marketing deals.
These solutions have been pulled from G2's Fall Grid Report for Influencer Marketing Platforms in 2024
Investing in a right influencer partnership is the hallmark of brand growth and success. Shaking hands with approachable, talented and experienced influencers can ensure higher marketing success, bolster customer loyalty and create a credible clientele in the fast-evolving martech landscape. The goal is not to just invest in your own brand measurement, but also offer better benefits and perks to your influencers.
Learn more about the recent influencer marketing strategies to diversify your marketing initiatives and optimize marketing spends better.
This article was originally published in 2019 and has been updated with new information.
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