3 simple ways to know you are successfully #slaying your influencer marketing campaigns

Digital marketing spend will near to $120 billion in the US alone by 2021 says Forbes.

Digital is not such a new concept these days however this rapidly changing space is something that organisations need to keep up with if they are to stand a chance of success.

Dave Chaffey laid out 6 channels of digital marketing that provides a guide for organisations wanting to ramp up their digital marketing efforts.

Source: 6 Key digital marketing tactics from Dave Chaffey’s Digital Marketing Strategy, Implementation and Practice (6th edition, 2015)

Social Media Marketing

One current and global trend in the digital marketing space at the moment is ‘influencer marketing’ (IM). Simply, the use of influential people on social media to promote brands via sponsorship’s.

Adweek describes influencer marketing as ‘a new channel for brands to connect with consumers more directly, more organically and at scale.’ While eMarketer reports that 84% of marketers said they would launch at least one influencer campaign within the next twelve months.

So what is all of this hype about?

Currently, Instagram boasts over 800 million monthly active users per month with the average person spending roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes on social media every day (Telegraph).

It is clear that this is an opportunity that needs to be tapped into by brands.

But is influencer marketing for you?

The most important thing to understand about IM is that it is all about brand awareness, so if your aim is to drive sales or App downloads then many people would advise against pumping a lot of money into trying to create a viral social media campaign.

Is your target market right for IM? Millenials are reported to use social media as much as 100% more than Babyboomers (Expand Online). With a study by Sproutsocial finding that 63% of millennials stay updated on brands through social networks. So clearly if this is the market you are in then it’s time to get on the social media hype.

But how do you really measure the success of your influencer marketing campaigns?

There are a number of success metrics that you can look at when running your own social media campaign:

1) Engagement Rate (ER)

ER is simply the percentage of followers or viewers that engage with your post/profile and is deemed as one of the most commonly used method of tracking campaign success.

Calculating ER:

• Instagram Engagement= likes + comments/ follower number.
• YouTube Engagement= likes + comments + dislikes/ video views.

Evaluating the ER of your campaign as a whole gives you a useful top level metric of campaign performance.

Additionally, you can delve deeper into this by monitoring the ER of the individual influencers content to determine which influencer’s you work with are creating the most buzz around your brand.

Typically, an ER of 1% or higher is deemed as ‘satisfactory’ however there are many factors that will determine this.

For instance although working with micro influencers gives you a lower overall reach, typically having between 1,000 and 50,000 followers, they tend to yield higher ER due to these influencers being able to connect more personally with their followers.

Example of a Mega and Micro influencers ER V follower number.

Source: Brandnew IO

 

2) The power of the hashtag

When it comes to setting up your campaign choosing the right hashtag is vital in harnessing your brands message and tracking its use is a highly simple, but incredibly useful way of tracking all user generated content (UGC).

Missguided is a clear example of a brand that has taken their influencer marketing to another level using the simple hashtag #babesofmissguided which currently has over 100,000 tags on Instagram.

Source: Instagram

Using influencer marketing tools allows you to track not only the ER and hashtag use of your paid influencers but also tracks any content using that specific hashtag outside of your campaign- thus showing you how viral your campaign is getting.

Source: Brandnew IO

3) It’s all about your brand awareness.

Monitoring your brands social media profiles followers is another simple tool to track campaign success and can be used to further drive it.

There are many ways that this can be used to a brand’s advantage but here are just a couple:

• To identify which influencers give you the highest ROI

Knowing which influencers work the best to garner followers allows you to establish a more long term relationship with them- In a study undertaken by Brandnew IO 46.76% of influencers surveyed identified brand ambassadorships as their preferred way of working with brands.

• To understand the style of content that s the most successful in engaging people with your brand.

Growth can be tracked against influencers posts which gives a good indication of the most influential content. Understanding what the people want simply allows you to provide more of the same!

Source: Brandnew IO

Every silver lining…

With brands increasingly tapping into the phenomenon of IM, more and more people are trying to monetise their social media profiles.

Come in the ‘InstaFrauds’

Nowadays there are many ways for people to use bots to generate engagement by buying likes and comments. Thus it is becoming more difficult for brands to identify genuine, organic influencers likely to drive awareness and ROI.

Things to look out for:

To determine the validity of a profile you must look at the ‘big picture’ and ask yourself. Do their likes and comments align with the follower number? Does the follower number align with the quality and quantity of their content?

Looking at every part of an influencers profile can help you to determine whether that profiles followers are organic and save brands from wasting money on fake engagement.

 

Where to start?

Now you know the basics I bet your excited to get started.

But how?

There are many tools on the market that allow brands to simply setup, run and track your social media marketing campaigns such as Brandnew IO, blogfoster and Sprout Social.