Marketers turn to influencer marketing to show their brand, product or service in the best possible light. Partnering with an influencer means getting exposure to that creator’s community. Done right, it’s instant credibility for the brand.
To be called a success though, an influence creator partnership needs some performance numbers behind it. Numbers that help marketers track the return on investment (the all important ROI) of their influencer marketing campaigns and to tell the success story within the organization.
Tracking influencer marketing ROI can be challenging. There’s a bit of art to it, but it’s mostly science.
Here are some ways to track influencer marketing ROI, along with the pros and cons of each method.
Talk to BENlabs (that’s us, hi) to unlock smart creator pairing that connects brands with incredible influence creators. Predictive analytics, driven by AI, provides valuable, reliable data on how effective an influencer content creator partnership will be before you commit spend.
Use coupon codes or unique links
One way to track the ROI of an influencer marketing campaign is to provide influencers with coupon codes or unique links to use when promoting your product. This is direct attribution. Every use of the unique code or link is a clear action driven from the engagement. In this way you can directly track visits and attribute sales to the promotion.
Pros
- Provides a clear and direct measurement of the influencer’s impact on sales
- Can be used to track sales across online and offline channels
Cons
- Promo codes can feel disconnected from the content, interrupting the flow
- Reduces the campaign to its most basic outcome, ignoring lift, affinity, etc.
Use analytics tools to track influencer ROI
You can use the usual analytics tools and combined with UTM codes or link shorteners to help you track the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns. Use these tools to dig into website traffic, social media engagement and sales data for your reports.
In this case, the marketer’s role is to put a lens on the data; to build a data story that makes sense and that can be shared.
Pros
- Allows you to track a wide range of metrics and get a complete view of your influencer marketing campaign performance
- Can be automated, making it easier to track data over time
Cons
- Can be difficult to set up and interpret data if you are unfamiliar with analytics tools
- Some tools can be expensive
Monitor brand mentions
Tracking how people talk about your brand online is always important, and especially so during an influencer marketing campaign. Use tools like Google Alerts, Brand24 or Mention to monitor brand mentions on social media and the web.
Pros
- Allows you to track the overall reach and impact of an influencer marketing campaign
- Can provide valuable insight into how people respond to your brand and products
Cons
- Can take time to manually set up and monitor brand mentions
- Some tools can be expensive
Track sales data
One of the easiest ways to track influencer marketing ROI is to simply track your sales data. If you see an increase in sales during and immediately following an influencer marketing campaign, that’s a pretty good indication that the campaign was effective.
Pros
- Provides a clear and direct measurement of the influencer’s impact on sales
- Can be used to track sales across online and offline channels
Cons
- It can be difficult to attribute sales to a specific influencer marketing campaign if you are running multiple campaigns at the same time
- May not capture the full impact of the influencer promotion or the longtail
Calculate influencer ROI
None of these influencer ROI tracking strategies stands alone. The best advice is to choose the ones that make the most sense for your campaign and to stay consistent as you track future campaigns.
With data in hand (or in spreadsheet), the influencer ROI calculation itself is pretty simple.
Simply divide the amount of revenue generated by the campaign by the total cost. Multiply by 100 and you’ve got your ROI as a percentage.
This provides a clear and easy to understand measure of the overall effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign and can be used to compare the ROI of different influencer marketing campaigns.
We haven’t captured the full impact of an influencer marketing campaign though. Less tangible benefits such as increased brand awareness or customer loyalty need to be considered too. The simplest way to do this is to get stakeholders to align on a multiple that includes the intangibles. Consider +10% as conservative.
Track your influencer marketing ROI
Tracking ROI is important for any campaign and that certainly includes influencer marketing. By using the methods outlined above, marketers can get a clearer understanding of how effective influencer marketing might be for their brand, product or service.
A clear understanding of influencer ROI lets marketers make more informed decisions about how to allocate marketing budget and how to optimize campaigns going forward.
In addition, you’ll start to hone in on the most effective influencers for your business. By analyzing the ROI of different influencer marketing campaigns, you can see which influencers are generating the most value for your business and focus your efforts on collaborating with these people — and others like them — in the future.
So as with all marketing, collect the data, analyze the data, and use these findings to spend even smarter.
Look within
If you notice that an influencer’s promotion has generated a lot of website traffic but few sales for example, you might consider adjusting your marketing message or offering a stronger call-to-action to drive conversions. You might take a close look at the landing page where you’re sending people to ensure it gets visitors across the finish line.
Tracking ROI can help you make more informed decisions about your marketing budget. By understanding the financial return of your influencer marketing campaigns, you can decide to allocate more or less budget to this tactic in the future.
BENlabs can help
You can’t manufacture authenticity or shortcut trust but you can give them a helping hand. BENlabs Smart Partnerships uses AI to pair brands with the ideal influence creators. Similarly, Predictive Analytics lets you see how successful your campaign will be before it even launches and gives meaningful data at every step from beginning to end.
We can help your next (or your first) influence campaign be the hit it deserves to be. Let’s talk.
