July 10, 2024
6 min read
An influencer films a get-ready-with-me video on her phone, set on a tripod and ring light.
Influencer marketing is growing. In 2024, advertisers will spend $5.89 billion on influencer marketing, a 14.7% increase year-over-year, according to eMarketer.
As more brand marketers hire influencers, they’ll need to prove its value. In today’s competitive world, marketers divide their budgets into everything from social ads and events to professional product photography and influencers. Each effort gets a sum of money, but each must prove its worth. So, how do you measure the value of influencer marketing?
Ways to Measure Influencer Marketing Value
For most brands, measuring influencer marketing value means quantifying ROI. However, influencer campaigns do have measurable value beyond dollars and cents.
Influencer marketing can improve brand awareness, social metrics, and your brand’s reputation. Take a look at the different ways to measure influencer value:
ROI
To judge the value of money spent, marketers quantify ROI. To do so, you’ll take the total revenue generated and subtract your campaign costs to see how much money you earned.
With Mark My Ad, you can leverage a robust reporting dashboard that can quantify ROI for you, and even break it down by influencer so you can see the individual impact of each.
Brand Awareness
Influencer marketing can introduce your name and product to a whole new audience. To measure brand awareness, watch metrics like reach, engagement rate, and follower count.
Social Engagement
Influencer marketing often takes place on social channels, which can benefit your social engagement metrics. Watch the number of likes, comments, and shares you receive.
Brand Reputation
Sharing organic influencer content often improves customers’ perception of your brand. How do you measure a reputation boost? Track brand mentions and the comments associated with your product during the campaign.
Understanding Influencer Marketing Value Beyond Financials
While you can measure the impacts of influencer marketing beyond its base ROI, there are additional benefits that appeal to brands.
The Role of Trust in Influencer Marketing
Our research shows 42-57% of all consumers follow 1-20 influencers. Influencers are becoming a consistent part of consumers’ social feeds, which builds a connection between the two. As with any relationship, over time, consumers come to trust influencers and often see them as a friend.
Influence Purchase Decisions
Today’s consumers prefer product suggestions from influencers, with 35% of buyers saying influencer posts are the best way to get them to try a new product.
Since influencers have built a trusted relationship with followers, when they recommend a product or service, followers take note. Influencers can sway purchase decisions by endorsing a product, offering a testimonial, or giving followers a discount code.
Ability to By-pass Ad Blockers
Consumers can set up ad blockers to avoid being bombarded with ads. Since influencer content is shared by the influencer on his or her channel, ad blockers can’t intercept it, which means your sponsored content has a bigger reach.
Flexibility of Campaigns
Brands can plan a number of campaigns with influencers. From asking an influencer to endorse a product on social media or host a giveaway to asking influencers to host a panel discussion at your next conference, your brand has the flexibility to leverage influencers in a variety of ways.
How to Maximize Influencer Marketing Value
No matter how you measure influencer marketing value, you can take steps to improve your campaign and the results you see. To increase measurable metrics, marketers should:
Set Goals
When it comes to maximizing influencer marketing value, it’s important to set a goal and list KPIs you’ll use to gauge efficacy. By stating a specific goal, like increasing brand awareness with a 10% lift in follower count, you can shape a campaign to meet your goal and monitor specific KPIs to measure success.
Choose the Right Influencers
While influencer marketing campaigns involve a handful of steps, one of the most important is the selection of influencers. Spend time finding the right fit.
Search for the Right Fit
Use an influencer marketing platform to discover creators in your niche and narrow your results with advanced filters. For example, search for “fashion influencers” but narrow your search by follower count, location, and demographics. In other words, you could get a list of female fashion influencers living in Austin, Texas, who are in their 50s with a follower count of 50K.
Vet a Shortlist of Influencers
Once you have a shortlist of influencers you’d like to work with, review their profiles. On Marketplace, you’ll find an influencer’s social accounts, work examples, and metrics, including average engagement rate. Use the information provided to make the right choice.
Don’t Get Hung Up on Audience Size
While you might be drawn to influencers with bigger audiences, it’s best to focus on engagement rates over follower count. You aren’t just looking to get your product in front of a bunch of people, you want them to take action. Look for influencers with engagement rates above 2%.
Provide an Influencer Brief
One of the best ways to communicate your expectations is through an influencer brief. In your brief, provide company and product information, and campaign specifics like content type, deadlines, and what the approval process is.
A brief is meant to guide influencers, but it’s best to give the creator creative control since he or she has a rapport with the audience.
Promote Influencer Content
Once content is published, spread it far and wide. Edelman notes that changes in various social media platform algorithms mean that brands can’t rely any longer on a purely organic, social-based influencer campaign. To ensure that your campaign has the largest reach possible, you’ll want to investigate all the various ways to promote it across paid, earned, and owned channels.
Examples of Effective Influencer Marketing Campaigns
Reviewing examples of successful campaigns can inspire your own. Each of these campaigns had a clear goal, with KPIs selected before influencers were selected or content was published.
To market Netflix’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” we partnered with visually impaired creators, promoting inclusivity and authentic engagement with the content. The campaign’s top-performing content achieved an impressive engagement rate, but more importantly, it stimulated significant conversations about inclusivity and the experiences of visually impaired individuals.
In a campaign for Academy Sports + Outdoors during Black History Month called “Gifts That Give More,” our efforts centered on magnifying influential Black voices and creating narratives that authentically connect and inspire. Influencers emphasized key selections from the ASO gift guide via engaging and thoughtful content.
While we have the ability to quantitatively assess the performance of this campaign through metrics such as engagement rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, it also possesses an impact that transcends numerical evaluation. This intangible impact can be seen in the way the campaign resonates with audiences, fosters a sense of community, and potentially influences attitudes and behaviors. These qualitative aspects, though not directly measurable, are crucial in understanding the overall success and reach of the campaign.
Today’s marketing team works to maximize every dollar, which is why proving influencer marketing value is important. Some metrics are straightforward and easy to identify, while others are less tangible. To understand the holistic scope of influencer marketing, remember to review financial metrics like ROI, but don’t discount the metrics that measure brand awareness and engagement.
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Marketers:
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