The objective behind any new marketing activity undertaken by brands where they make certain investments upfront is to achieve various goals in line with the organization’s objectives. The same is the case with influencer marketing campaigns. Therefore, brands should be able to track the essential KPIs to determine the state of their influencer marketing campaigns. Without monitoring these metrics closely, it will be difficult or impossible to understand whether the activity was a success or a failure. And to meticulously measure the campaign’s success, brands should look beyond the vanity metrics like followers and stature of the influencer and focus on key metrics like sales, conversions, and engagement. This blog will discuss five key KPIs brands should measure to get clear visibility into the campaign’s success.
Conversion
Influencer marketing campaigns have various goals for brands like increasing each, improving brand awareness, and driving traffic and engagement, ultimately leading to increased revenues. But among all these factors, a critical KPI that comes in handy to rightly gauge the impact of your campaigns is conversion. Any desired outcomes a brand seeks from the audience on their influencer marketing campaign can be termed conversion. This action can be anything from subscribing to e-mails, and newsletters, clicking on a link, following the brand on social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok, or making an actual purchase. Therefore, it is vital for the brands to clearly define what they mean by conversion well ahead of launching the influencer marketing campaign. The move will ensure no ambiguity in measuring this KPI to gauge the project’s success.
Brand Awareness
One of the top reasons for newer brands to get into influencer marketing is to create awareness for their brand amongst their target audience. And influencer marketing, with the help of the influencers, can introduce your brand to their followers and help it reach a broader audience, which was unavailable till now to the product. Therefore, any brand that has devised an influencer marketing campaign on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok with the primary objective of creating awareness and buzz for the brand or product should track this KPI very closely. Once the campaign ends, brand marketers should check factors like the brand’s reach, mention of the brand names on social media platforms, and their followers. Tracking these factors will help brands determine whether the campaign achieved its objective. Brands can gather this information through social media analytics, influencers’ sites, and their own analytics tools.
Website Traffic
Besides conversions and increase in brand awareness, brands should also monitor the increase in traffic on their website, driven primarily by the influencer marketing campaign. Tracking the rise in website traffic will give you a good understanding of the reach of your marketing activity. Sales conversion does not always show the correct picture, and judging the campaign’s success based only on the sales it has managed to generate can be a misleading factor. Why? Because if your website is not meticulously optimized for conversions, it is possible that the campaign was successful by driving the traffic to your website, even if you do not observe much change in the sales figure. So, referral traffic becomes an important KPI when it comes to measuring the success of an influencer marketing campaign.
Also Read: Five factors to consider when deciding how much to pay an influencer
Engagement
Another important KPI that is equally significant for brand marketers to determine the campaign’s success is to monitor the post’s engagement with the audience. The better the engagement on the post, the more likely it is to succeed. Brand marketers should not put their entire focus on the number of followers that the influencer has. Instead, they should look at the conversation around the campaign, which can be in the form of likes, comments, shares, brand mentions, and reactions. To get the maximum eyeballs, brands should track if the audience engages with the content and if the influencer engages with their followers.
ROI
If the brand’s primary objective is to generate sales from its influencer marketing campaigns, then tracking ROI becomes the most critical KPI to assess the performance. Understanding the ROI will help the brands and marketers know if the money they have spent on the campaign was worth it. Unfortunately, tracking ROI is the most common yet very difficult to measure KPI, and many brands struggle to estimate the sales generated solely through their influencer marketing campaign. Most brands engage with influencers to boost their sales at some levels, so understanding and measuring their efforts’ impact is apparent. According to an industry report, if the influencer marketing campaign is efficient, each dollar can generate up to $18 for the brands, which is a massive number. On average, the same report said that the brand could generate up to $5 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing.
