So, you’ve tapped into the most effective marketing trend to take the screens by storm in the last few years – but how do you know it’s been effective? Yes, there are tangible ways to tell if it’s worked (like someone enquiring and specifically saying that they saw your business mentioned by someone else on YouTube), but not everything is that clear-cut, unfortunately.
So, here are several ways to tell if you’ve reached out to the right influencer – and that they, in turn, have reached out successfully to your audience.
Establishing the reach.
Starting with the simplest method, if you’ve engaged with an influencer on YouTube, Instagram or another frequently-used platform, you can instantly see how many people impressions (views) have been generated by their posts.
As you’ll already know how many followers the influencer has, you can quickly ascertain what percentage of their audience has seen the post. If there is a specific link from the influencer’s post to your website, you’ll also be able to ascertain how many viewers visited your site as a direct result of the post.
Track engagement.
This differs from establishing the reach, in that you delve further into how people responded when they viewed a post. For instance, something as simple as a like or a click tells you the difference between how many people viewed the post and how many people genuinely interacted with it.
Shares prove that some people found it genuinely interesting, while comments prove that certain individuals cared enough to enquire about or critique the published content. By tracking engagement, you can then work out the cost per engagement for your campaign.
Determine revenue.
Even if you suddenly receive a few extra calls or enquiries during and after the campaign via traditional methods, it’s difficult to establish whether these directly resulted from your influencer marketing efforts. However, there are several simple things you can do to determine the revenue of each campaign.
Firstly, even if you’re not promoting your website directly, you could generate affiliate links to send to the influencer and set up landing pages to measure response. Your Google Analytics can also tell you who visited your site directly from the influencer’s posts, and there’s also the opportunity to use specific promo codes.
If someone visits your site and enters a promo code unique to that particular campaign, you’ll know that this particular sale was a direct outcome of your influencer marketing efforts. When you’ve established every penny generated from the campaign, you can then simply calculate how much each sale cost you in influencer fees.
Other methods.
There are also plenty of software packages available to buy or subscribe to, which can further aid your influencer marketing efforts. Such packages are designed to ensure that you do less of the work when it comes to measuring success, and you can subsequently spend more time coming up with a strategy for further engagement.
Plus, with influencer marketing now so popular, there are also specialist digital marketing companies operating that focus either closely or entirely on this new brand of marketing. Influencer marketing agency Socially Powerful is one of the agencies that have really carved a niche for themselves in the world of influencers, so much so that they actually guarantee results to their clients.
This just goes to show how powerful a tool influencer marketing can be, no matter what sector you operate in or how niche a product or service you specialise in. That old cliché of there being ‘someone for everyone’ certainly applies in this incredible branch of modern marketing.
