How to Measure the Success of your Influencer Marketing

Measuring and benchmarking an influencer campaign is an essential step to determining the success of your projects and identifying areas for improvement. Below are some key tips for measuring and reporting on an influencer campaign: 

• Set clear goals and KPIs: The first step to being able to measure the success of an influencer campaign is to set clear goals and KPIs at the start of the project. Your goals should be aligned with your overall objectives, and your KPIs should be specific, measurable, and relevant to your campaign. Some common KPIs for influencer marketing include number of pieces of content, engagement rates, impressions and click throughs (if relevant to your objectives). 

• Selecting the influencers: Once you have your KPIs set it’s important you partner with influencers who have the followers, engagement or influence over their audience in your segment  that will allow you to achieve your KPIs. For example, if you have a KPI engagement rate of 2% you shouldn’t engage and work with someone who has an engagement rate of less than 2%. 

• Monitor influencer performance: When working with influencers, it’s important to monitor their performance closely and have them go live with their content at a time their engagement is highest. If you notice their content isn’t performing well, you can always ask them why they think it’s underperforming – don’t be afraid to ask for their recommendation on what they think they can do to help boost the performance. Perhaps they share an additional Instagram story to encourage their audience to check out the post. 

• Look beyond likes: Whilst likes and comments have their place, if the comments are irrelevant e.g. discussing the influencer’s haircut when you’re trying to promote a pair of headphones then then the resulting engagements are worthless. Influencer marketing is largely a solution to drive word of mouth, so to not study the commentary around each post is a huge missed opportunity. 

• Compare performance against KPIs: To determine how your overall campaign performed, you need to compare the influencer results against your KPIs. It’s important you look at how each individual influencer performed to see who was successful and what sort of content performed well. This will help you determine which influencers to work with in the future and who not to.  

By setting clear goals and KPIs, working with the right influencers, monitoring influencer performance and comparing results against KPIs will help you provide the necessary recommendation for projects moving forward.