Six Ways to Improve Your Influencer Marketing Analytics

Influencer marketing is continuing to gain popularity, and it is paying off for many brands. When people see that some of the individuals they follow on social media have links to particular products, they often want to give them a try.Using influencers to improve your marketing efforts makes sense, especially since members of the public have a certain level of trust built up in them. However, it’s impossible to accurately know the effects of influencer marketing unless companies use relevant metrics and purposeful analytics. Here are six ways you can enhance the ways you use analytics for influencer marketing.

1. Understand what influencer marketing success looks like for your brand

Brands use influencer marketing to achieve various goals. The goals you set for an influencer campaign — and the metrics you track— should fit in with accomplishments that help the brand prosper. A company may want to increase the number of times a person clicks on a social media link. If an influencer includes a promo code in a tweet, brands can directly connect sales to their content and reach. If companies aren’t succeeding with influencer marketing yet, they may need to set a clearer definition of success. Does that mean increased sales, more social media engagements or something else? When companies don’t have a well-defined reason for working with influencers, it’ll be difficult to determine results.

2. Use a customised tool for measuring influencer analytics

Analytics tools exist to help companies track influencer analytics. If you work with several influencers and want to compare their performance, such a tool could be a good investment – there are plenty of options out there.Companies should request things like product walk-throughs or trial periods before committing to a product. That way, they can ensure it meets their needs and is sufficiently user-friendly.

3. Keep an eye on engagement rates and how they vary by influencer type

The type of influencer you hire could heavily determine the engagement rates and kind of content followers respond to best. Some people are most interested in who the influencer is and what they do rather than the endorsed products. Conversely, some items are perfect fits for certain influencers. If someone travels a lot and always looks stylish, it’s understandable for them to promote an upscale suitcase or a travel eye mask. These variations mean engagement rates can vary among influencers. One useful thing to do is spot trends. For example, do you notice that moms over 40 respond exceptionally well to what a particular influencer posts? If so, you might instruct them to cater their content to such an audience.

4. Determine which KPIs to track

While companies tweak their influencer metrics to make them more useful, key performance indicators (KPIs) will likely come into the discussions. A KPI is a value companies can measure to figure out whether they’re moving closer to business objectives. Those that could relate to influencer marketing include clicks, comments, conversion rates, and product sales. Since social media platforms are generally the primary domains of influencers, referrals calculated in Google Analytics could be especially valuable for determining how much traffic comes to your site from the platforms where the influencers post content. If a company sees a major bump in user traffic coming from Facebook after it starts working with an influencer, that’s a sign the progress could align a KPI. A KPI should directly link to a firm doing well, so you must define success before taking a deeper dive and choosing one.

5. Analyse every piece of content to check the performance

Predicting what content or which campaign will thrive and which will falter is not easy. Most people have witnessed how things go viral overnight. Getting to the bottom of why that happened is not straightforward, and it’s typically even more challenging to replicate such rampant popularity. One effective way to step up your influencer marketing analytics efforts is to analyse each piece of published content. Then, you should start recognising patterns and formulating educated guesses after checking to see what kinds of content people liked most. As you scrutinize the data, don’t let assumptions get in the way. Some of your expectations might prove correct, but you could also be surprised by how some content performs versus others. Moreover, be careful not to stick too rigidly to what you know works well. It’s smart to do that to some degree but you risk becoming too repetitive and boring.

6. Move away from only looking at follower counts

In the early days of influencer marketing, people mainly checked follower counts when deciding whether to hire a particular influencer. Brands assumed a high count equaled bigger payoffs. However, due to things like bots, they are not always accurate. That doesn’t mean you should automatically believe a follower count is not trustworthy, but it’s best to look at other metrics, too.There’s now more of an emphasis on performance. Can an influencer continually demonstrate that they’ve captured the attention of a substantial percentage of followers? Asking for evidence of what influencers have achieved for clients is an excellent way to determine the expected outcomes. Additionally, looking at any other metrics you have can help. Even confirming the date when a person started using a social media platform is worthwhile because it allows you to gauge how long they’ve spent building an online persona. Evaluate the quality and tone of the influencer’s posts, too. If the person shows a historically high-quality level, that strongly suggests they care about doing a good job and meeting expectations. Studying the tone lets you see if the influencer’s attitude fits with your audience.

Show patience when improving your metrics

It takes time before changes in influencer marketing metrics show positive effects. Marketing professionals should not let that discourage them from making some of the changes recommended here, however. An ideal approach is to have a check-in about every three months to investigate what’s going well and if some metrics need improvements.