In the early days of social media, everyone was focused on the number of likes a photo or video received: “I’ve made it! 250 likes!” Once influencer marketing started to grow as an industry, this sentiment carried through to the space, with brand leaders primarily looking at the number of likes, comments, and followers as indicators of content performance. Spoiler alert: these are often vanity metrics. The numbers may look strong, but they don’t always give a true indication of success.
So, What Should Brands Be Looking For?
Every influencer campaign or partnership should be tied back to clear objectives on the brand side. Is the ultimate objective to grow brand awareness, increase engagement, drive sales, or are you looking to achieve something else? Once a single, or multiple, key objective(s) are established, brands are well-positioned to develop a campaign and engage influencers who can support the objectives through content performance.
Common Mistakes to Look Out For
This influencer has 8M followers! We need to work with them and get our brand in front of their audience! Not so fast, brand friends. Simply because an influencer has a healthy following does not necessarily mean they are the right fit for your campaign. Think back to your objectives. If you’re looking to increase engagement with your brand, you have to look at how engaged an influencer’s audience is with their content. What good is 8M followers if only a percentage of their audience sees the content and even a small percentage of that audience is engaging with the content (liking, commenting, and sharing it with others). Oh, and you want to expand your awareness in a specific market? But 7.5M of the influencer’s 8M followers are located in markets that aren’t relevant to you? You get the point. You need to ensure that the influencer's audience demographics are aligned with your objectives. These insights (engagement rates, audience demographics, reach, fake followers, etc.) all need to be gathered prior to confirming a partnership. Where do you get all this information when your internal team is tapped out working on other projects? The benefit of working with an influencer marketing agency (like our sister agency Sundae Creative!) is that they can do all the research on behalf of the brand (and they likely have these insights on-hand, already) so that you can make the most informed decision on who you’d like to partner with. Your agency partner wants your campaign to be as successful as possible, so they’ll arm you with estimated results metrics that can help give you a better understanding of what your campaign could achieve.
And, lest we forget to mention, influencer campaigns don’t always lead to immediate, visible sales results. If your higher ups are asking why they didn’t see a spike in sales after an influencer campaign, there might be a need to have a larger conversation and educate about campaign objectives and the value of long-term brand awareness that comes through partnering with influencers.
- Large follower count does not always = maximum reach
- High likes + comments does not always = maximum engagement
- Social media is global and an influencer you love does not always = an engaged audience in your target market
Some Bonus Metrics to Consider
We won’t discount the importance of numbers and reaching your target KPIs, BUT you should also be looking for HOW people are responding to your brand or product on social media:
- What are people SAYING about your product (“I just bought this product yesterday and already recommended to three of my friends” OR “I bought this and I hated it, don’t spend your money on this.”)
- What are people SAYING about your brand (“I’ve never bought anything from here, but have always heard amazing things.I’m definitely going to check them out now” OR “I’ve never had a good shopping experience here, anyone else?”)
- What are people SAYING about the partnership (“I love that you’re working with them now, show us more!” OR “Kind of a weird choice for you to work with this brand, they are so different from the brands you usually work with.”)
There’s a lot to consider when evaluating the success of a campaign and the results start at the campaign development stage and continue into the response to the content itself. Higher ups may want to see numbers that show the success of a campaign or think that the numbers will dictate the success of a campaign, but those are only small pieces of the campaign pie. There’s a whole picture that needs to be painted and can tell the story of how people respond to your brand and product(s)!
