Creating an influencer marketing campaign doesn’t end when the influencer has promoted your product or service. You need to measure its performance to see if your campaign or influencer  was a good investment and how to do better next. For this, social media listening and analytics tools can be extremely valuable. 

Determine Your KPIs

Before launching your influencer marketing campaign, it is crucial that you determine your goals for your campaign. Are you a new brand that is aiming to get your name out there? Or do you want to create a closer relationship with future customers? This will determine what type of influencers you would want to work with, what type of campaign you would like to create, and t also which KPIs you will need to measure your campaign’s success.

It’s also important to take stock of your current situation, such as your number of followers, level of engagement, volume of sales, and more, so as to benchmark the results of your campaign accurately. 

• KPI #1: Brand Awareness

Influencer marketing is a great way to create awareness around your brand, especially if you are a newcomer to an industry and need to drive visibility in order to gain market share. Thus it is an important metric to measure to analyze your campaigns’ results. For this, it is important to look at your brand’s share of voice and quality of audience.

For instance, take a look at the demographics of the audience reached, either through your influencer, or new followers who have joined your page as a result of your collaboration. Does it correspond with your target audience? Is there a match between your customers in terms of sociodemographic qualities or interests? This data is essential to know if you are getting the awareness you want through your influencer campaign.

Take a look at the social interactions around your branded content. Has your brand’s following increased? Are your new followers interacting actively with other posts? 

A share of voice chart comparing the volume of online conversations between consumer electronics brands. Use a social media listening tool to visualize online visibility around your brand in real time. 

Another way to determine the success of your influencer marketing campaign is to look at your brand’s share of voice before and after engaging your influencers. A higher share of voice equals more online visibility, user generated content, and buzz around your brand. Were the influencers you engaged effective in helping your brand earn more of these? 

• KPI #2: Engagement

Take a look at the interactions your influencer’s posts have earned. While looking at the number of interactive actions seems like the most obvious place to start, it’s even more important to analyze the comments and replies to the posts themselves, to see if they are about your brand and products, and not just simply about the influencers. The more genuine the comments are, the better.

Example of an influencer sponsored post with followers commenting on the brand featured. 

Search for mentions of your brand beyond  posts by your influencer, and try to determine  if your brand is being talked about by followers of the influencer you’re working with. For this purpose, it can be helpful to create a specific hashtag around your campaign, and use a social listening tool like Digimind Social to track all mentions containing this hashtag, determine the scope of its use, and see if the overall sentiment is positive and negative.   It will also enable you to know more about the influencer’s following, specifically if they are your core demographic, are receptive to your brand, and are responding appropriately to your campaign.

 

• KPI #3: Public Sentiment

Ensuring your brand is portrayed in a favorable light is an important objective in any campaign. If the influencer’s posts have earned a lot of engagement, and drove awareness around your brand, that’s great! But if reactions aren’t positive, it can be detrimental to your brand’s image, especially in front of potential customers. 

Social media listening tools are often able to analyze the sentiment of mentions around your brand resulting from influencer campaigns. But don’t just look at the overall statistics of positive versus negative mentions. Take your analysis a step further by analyzing specific conversations behind each sentiment to understand what is driving customers to be receptive or opposed towards your brand. From here, you can gauge where you have gone right or wrong. 

Doing this will give you valuable insights into how you can create better targeted influencer campaigns, and align external creators better with your sales and marketing funnels. 

 

• KPI #4: Sales 

Most importantly, don’t forget your customers! 

One way of gauging your campaign’s impact on your company’s bottom line via social listening, is to compare the volume of posts that explicitly mention purchase intent, or purchase of your brand’s monitored products during your campaign run. 

To evaluate your sales performance following the campaign, you can use a tracked link or a special code specific to your campaign or influencer. 

The data you get from these tracked links or unique codes will enable you to measure the conversion rate accurately and precisely, as well as determine what offers are most enticing to your influencer’s followers. 

Putting It All Together

Measuring the performance of your influencer marketing campaign is essential to ensure that you have made a good investment and you have met your goals, based on analysis of your KPIs. 

A social listening tool can go a long way in helping you determine how much awareness and engagement your campaign has received, and the extent to which your campaign has garnered potential new followers and customers for your brand. These KPIs will help you evaluate your campaigns and determine how you can do better next time.  

Compare data gathered from social media listening and analytics tools with findings from your sales and customer relationship management (CRM) database, to see if you can determine a pattern that will help you re-calibrate your brand’s future approaches to influencer marketing, and get the best returns.