What Gets Measured Gets Improved
The basis of efficiency and effectiveness in an Influencer Marketing strategy is without a doubt a good measurement plan. When starting a campaign, it must be a conscious and well-thought process taking into account the business and communication objectives, and when influencers are used to support this strategy the most important is to keep well-defined KPIs to guarantee results by a constant follow up.
Measurement is one of the most challenging stages to go through, the lack of knowledge around what is trackable or not and the absence of clarity in the goals settings are two of the most frequent issues that I have identified when working with influencers. Brands seem to not be prepared to work with them; sometimes they only use these assets without any clear purpose and would rather have a well-known face posing with a product to post a picture on the brand’s social media. Certainly, it is not about paying them for getting Likes, it is about what both the brand and the influencer can create and achieve when working collaboratively.
Influencers are helpful when it is needed to increase brand awareness, but the big question is: how can the influencers’ actions be measured and understood if it is not just about Likes? It depends on whether you can translate their actions into numbers to report or understand the influencers’ performance as a learning process to grow. Nevertheless, the brands are undervaluing the power of influencer marketing and spending lots of money due to the absence of clear objectives establishment.
First of all, it is important to draw a customer journey to understand in which moment the audience is prone to be reached by content that influencers post, the message has to be aligned to the brand purpose and the communication objective. To show you what I mean, suppose that someone who wakes up at 5:00 AM to workout probably is checking their Instagram notifications, and also swiping left to the stories that people shared last night. Among those, it is highly probable that almost one story from a celebrity or content creator appears, and here is an opportunity to ask the influencers to deliver a message and create relevant content around wellness topics. Here the objective is to engage with the audience and even if the brand is aiming to get registrations from people who are interested in wellbeing and healthy lifestyle topics, it is possible to track metrics such as Swipe Ups (click-throughs) to a web site. In this case, using an influencer can support a Consideration Phase in which engagements such as Clicks determine the performance and effectiveness of a campaign.
On the other hand, Influencers can also support Awareness Phases due to their potential reach. The larger the influencer community size is, the higher the chances to deliver a message to more people are. The metrics to consider in this case are the number of Followers and the Interaction Rate, these metrics are helpful to understand if the message is being displayed to the right audience and also are part of a bundle of a macro goal called “Engagement”. Influencers’ effectiveness can be measured and compared to other brand initiatives, even those that are paid, but it is crucial to identify which metrics are part of a macro goal.
To conclude, Influencer Marketing Strategies can be used for different campaign phases, they are an important touchpoint that belongs to the communication ecosystem. They help boost specific messages, can also be used from the beginning of the campaign to generate awareness, or from halfway to assist the brand relevance while generating more interactions and conversation. Influencers are useful resources for strategies with a full-funnel in which the wider side on top starts by building around its main goal of reaching larger audiences, and ends with the purchase of a product by specific consumers. Everything is possible when it is measured, every campaign is meant to be outstanding if the goals are clear and specific from the beginning. You only have to ask yourself, what do you want to get from the collaboration? And start to track because what gets measured, gets improved.
