Have you started up your next influencer marketing campaign?
There’s a reason why this type of marketing is booming. It delivers average returns that are 11 times higher than traditional digital marketing, so it’s worth the investment. But it can be difficult to calculate ROI.
In this guide we’re going to go into how you can measure influencer marketing ROI.
What’s Your Primary Goal?
Did you know that in 2019 the number of influencer marketing campaigns is expected to double?
Yet most of these influencer campaigns will never get off the ground because the businesses behind them don’t know what their primary goals are. Any influencer marketing agency must be aware of the different key performance indicators.
These are:
- Reach.
- Engagement.
- Follower growth.
- Traffic.
To begin calculating your ROI, you should first determine which performance indicators are relevant to your campaign.
Look into the Cost Per Action
The reason why calculating ROI is so difficult is because it’s almost impossible to attribute your influencer marketing campaign to a specific sale. That’s why businesses typically use cost per action.
These are things like cost per 1000 impressions, average cost of sale, and conversation rate.
These are then compared to baseline averages from different social media platforms. They all differ per industry and this information can be readily found.
You can then adequately compare your influence marketing stats to these averages to determine whether you’re doing something right.
Use Your Own Baseline Stats
Smart businesses keep the stats from their previous campaigns for years after they end so they can use them to gather data. The chances are you have stats from social media campaigns before you started an influencer marketing campaign.
If you have data from a couple of years, you’ll get more accurate results because then you can take into account seasonal trends.
You should use these baseline stats to calculate the ‘lift’ from your next influencer marketing campaign.
Naturally, there’s going to be some guesswork involved due to seasonal trends.
Was the Cost Worth It?
Even if you’re not launching an influencer marketing campaign to specifically generate sales, you should still take a broad view of how your most recent campaign generated more money for your business.
Run a campaign to promote follower growth and ultimately it should still lead to sales, so go out of your way to figure out whether your campaign led to increased sales.
As a business, the only thing that matters is sales. We don’t build big social media followings for fun. We do it to generate revenue, so always have that in mind.
Last Word – It’s Not an Exact Science
You’ll never be able to calculate influencer marketing ROI down to the dollar. There’s some guesstimation involved. You just need to use common sense when it comes to determining whether your influencer marketing campaign is a success.
Review every campaign upon its conclusion and think about how you can get better results going forward.
How is your latest influencer marketing campaign performing?
