Influencer marketing doesn’t always result in direct sales conversions; marketers need to identify which other tactics need to be adopted to measure ROI.
Social influencers are the most effective marketing tools a brand can leverage to promote brand awareness and customer loyalty. About 92% of consumers trust a social influencer more than a traditional advertisement.
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It is evident how modernized word-of-mouth marketing tactic expands the marketing reach; what’s unclear is how to derive the return on investment. Below are the essential KPIs to focus on tracking progress, measuring success in meeting goals, and stay on track with the influencer marketing campaign.
Conversions
Influencer marketing is focused on increasing marketing reach, growing the audience size, driving engagement, and increasing traffic to the site. But the chief goal always remains driving growth and sales. To track conversions by the influencer marketing campaign, marketers need to compare sales before, during, and after the campaign. For this setting up affiliate links, promo codes, landing pages, UTM parameters, and link tracking for the influencer campaign is essential.
But conversions don’t necessarily refer to sales; it relates to any time that a prospect completes a desired action. This can include activities such as clicking on a link, downloading an ebook, signing up for a newsletter, or anything else that the company wants the prospects to do.
Referral Traffic
The amount of traffic a campaign drives to the site is also worth monitoring to determine the success of a campaign. Referral traffic gives a good idea of the campaign’s reach, indicating the overall success of the campaign. Conversions don’t always tell the real story, as it depends on a lot of other factors like optimization of the site. That’s precisely where monitoring referral traffic can help as it indicates how many visitors came to the site because of the campaign.
Reach and awareness
One of the key benefits of influencers is that they have direct access to a vast audience, increasing brand visibility. This is the first step to boost brand awareness and build new customer relationships. To determine the success of the campaign, marketers need to consider the campaign’s awareness matrix and re-enforcement quotient.
An excellent way to measure awareness and reach is by tracking impression data on various posts, such as blog posts, videos, social posts, and other content created specifically for the campaign. Such data is available through the influencer’s personal (such as blog) site, through social media site analytics, and Google Analytics to compare new versus return visitors while the campaign is live.
Audience growth
Audience growth is different from reach and awareness. Brand awareness does not necessarily indicate awareness of the product or services offered. Audience growth KPI is crucial because it gives a clearer picture of the campaign’s success. It is essential to convert leads into raving and loyal fans.
To track audience growth, firms can use social media site analytics to monitor followers and check on new prospect gain during the campaign, comparing the growth to pre-campaign numbers.
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Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is another essential KPI as it provides a more in-depth view of how the audience received the campaign. Engagement is crucial as it is a good indicator of is the strength of relationship with the target audience, the relevance of the campaign, and hence- customer loyalty. Customer engagement can be determined by several actions taken by the audience, like – sharing, pins, votes, clicks, video views, likes, and brand mentions. Brands can calculate the cost per engagement (CPE) to determine the ROI by dividing the total ad spend by the number of engagements. This gives a perfect picture of the ROI and budget requirements for all future campaigns.
It is vital to measure the success of the influencer campaigns accurately, and KPIs like conversions, traffic, reach, engagement, and audience growth will help do that. By focusing on these five KPIs, firms can assess the success of the campaign in achieving the set goals, which could any or all of -driving traffic, reaching new demographics, boosting sales, re-engaging past prospects, and increasing brand awareness.
