Reading Time: 4 minutes
You can’t discuss modern-day marketing without bringing up influencer partnerships. The age of the internet and the increasing popularity of social media have made influencers a valuable asset when promoting your brand, products, or services.
You could say we live in the “era” of influencer marketing—just under 57% of the world uses social media of some kind and is engaged within a particular content niche, whether that be music, books, skincare and makeup, tech, or any number of things. This creates the perfect environment for influencers to thrive and thus increases the prevalence of influencer marketing.
If you’re just starting out with an influencer marketing strategy and hope to boost brand awareness and customer loyalty, it’s important to remember that tracking performance is just as important as it is with any other kind of marketing. So keep reading to learn more about the importance of influencer tracking in your campaigns and get some tips on how to do it.
Why It’s Important to Prioritize Influencer Tracking
Measuring the effectiveness of your influencer marketing is essential; otherwise, you may end up throwing money down the drain. Looking at crucial metrics for influencer posts and keeping tabs on significant campaign KPIs is a vital part of campaign management that you shouldn’t skip.
Sometimes, you might find that you’ve partnered with an influencer that aligns perfectly with your brand on paper, but their promotional posts or other content just isn’t resonating with their audience. Or maybe an influencer’s audience slowly changes over time, and their engagement rates or audience composition is no longer aligned with your goals.
The only way to catch these kinds of roadblocks in your campaigns is to keep track of the data! So take a look below at the five essential tips outlining which metrics to track, how to measure influencers’ engagement rates, and how to identify your top-performing influencer partnerships/brand ambassadors and content types.
5 Essential Tips for Influencer Tracking
The way you track your influencer marketing campaigns depends entirely on the end goal you want to achieve with your efforts. Setting clear KPIs from the get-go will help you determine what important metrics to track and how to do it. Here are some tips for making tracking more manageable.
Set Campaign Objectives
Once you know what business goals you want to achieve with the help of your influencer campaign, you need to do some reverse engineering to figure out what the campaign objectives will be. Usually, goals that align with marketing efforts are things like getting more brand awareness, upping engagement, becoming an authority in your industry, or increasing conversion rates. Based on that, there are several KPIs you can track, such as:
- Impressions and views for brand awareness
- Likes, DMs, and comments for engagement
- Web traffic and affiliate link performance for conversions
These are just a few examples—there are many metrics you can use to measure performance depending on your unique goals.
Frequently, companies have many goals and work with influencers to boost their brand image and improve engagement, which then leads to more conversions. That’s why it’s vital to work with influencers who already have a following made up of people in your target market so you can leverage their success to your advantage while staying true to your brand identity.
Create Coupon Codes to Track Sales
If you want to see how an influencer marketing campaign impacts your sales, you need to start tracking conversions. To do that, you need to have data on sales numbers before the campaign launches. Make a note of your weekly and monthly averages and keep that data as a benchmark.
Then initiate your influencer marketing campaign and give your influencer partner a unique discount code that they can provide to their followers. That way, you will see how many people bought from your store as a direct result of that influencer’s promotion. After that, you can calculate how your sales numbers were affected by your campaign and analyze how your marketing efforts have impacted revenue.
Use UTM Parameters
In order to have a sound tracking system for your influencer marketing campaigns (especially if you have more than one influencer partner), you should consider providing each person with their own trackable links, or UTM parameters.
This allows you to collect data on how people make their way to your website, which is incredibly helpful when trying to decide which influencers are the most effective at promoting your brand. An easy way to build your own trackable URLs is on the Google Analytics platform.
Create Personalized Landing Pages
One of the best ways to monitor an influencer’s performance is by giving them a customized, unique landing page. That way, you will be able to monitor how they impact your company in terms of leads and sales, even without giving them a custom discount code.
Along with that, you should remember to pay attention to SEO changes and the growth of brand-related keywords. One of the most beneficial parts of using an influencer marketing strategy is that it genuinely helps grow brand awareness and can make you more visible on search engines and social media.
Measure Social Media Engagement Metrics
Monitoring how your social media stats flow during influencer marketing campaigns is vital. One of the best metrics to track on your social profiles is engagement rate. Yes, we’re talking about your brand’s social profiles, not the influencer’s.
Take a look at the number of mentions, shares, comments, and likes you got before you started a campaign, and then track any fluctuations that occur during each stage of the campaign. Seeing how the numbers flow will give you a clear idea of how that campaign influenced your brand’s popularity on social media, including what kind of content is most appealing to your (and your influencer partner’s) audience.
Takeaway
The only way to effectively determine whether your influencer marketing campaigns positively affect your brand is by using a data-driven approach and tracking performance.
The market for influencer marketing still isn’t nearly as large as, say, traditional social media marketing, but that doesn’t mean it should be taken less seriously. If you don’t track metrics, you’re likely wasting money and reducing your chances of meeting your campaign goals.
