Influencer marketing is gaining tremendous importance in the marketing world, and brands from all niches seem to be hopping on this trend. But, that might not be enough. The Influencer marketing strategy backed by the previous data is what helps brands create performance driving influencer marketing campaigns.
Designing a data-driven influencer marketing strategy involves gathering data from the activated influencer marketing campaigns. The key objective of collecting data is to measure influencers’ performance and understand how the campaign is doing, which can be gauged by various metrics. These insights can be used to determine ROI and optimize future influencer marketing campaigns.
How to Find an Ideal Influencer for Your D2C Brand?
You need to find the right influencer for your Direct-to-customer brand to start your influencer marketing campaign. Your ideal influencer should be popular in your niche. Some questions to consider to spot your perfect influencer:
• Do they advocate your brand?
• Does their personality match your brand’s personality?
• Can they produce high-quality sponsored posts?
• Does their creative style suit your brand’s identity?
• Are their followers your potential customers?
• Are they easy to work with?
• Would they love to work with your brand?
The answers to these questions will help you narrow down your search in finding the best influencer for your brand.
Important Metrics for Data-Driven Influencer Marketing
Once you’ve activated your influencer marketing campaigns, you need to collect and evaluate data on the following 5 metrics:
Reach & Impressions
Reach explains the number of people viewing a post, while impressions account for the number of times the content is displayed, irrespective of whether the same person views it multiple times. Analyzing the Reach & Impressions of each post helps in deriving the growth of your campaign.
Cost per Impression
Cost per impression is the measure of the cost that a brand needs to pay when their post is shown per one thousand impressions. It helps in determining other calculations such as cost per click and the click-through rate.
Audience Engagement
Since social media algorithms use audience engagement as the key factor to decide the audience that sees a post, it has become extremely important. When evaluating influencers, remember that you don’t want to measure audience engagement based on unprocessed data alone. Instead, compare an influencer’s engagement with respect to their audience’s size.
Social Media Traffic
While audience reach is important, the majority of influencer campaigns include a call to action to bring social media audiences to the company’s website. Analyzing traffic coming from social media will give a fair idea of whether their audience is receptive to brand collaboration or not. It might be a possibility that their audience is exhibited to your brand for the first time, although if their users land on your site, they can then be reoriented with branding content and may potentially convert later on.
Return on Investment
ROI is about tracking your campaign performance. This allows you to gauge if the returns balance the time and money spent on the campaign. If you’re seeing positive ROI, that’s great! If ROI is going south, it’s not the end of the world, it just means you need to change your approach.
These 5 metrics can help you collect an endless amount of data that can be used to optimize your data-driven influencer marketing strategy.
Why Should You Use Data-driven Influencer Marketing for Your D2C Brand?
Keeping up with the rapid development of the influencer marketing industry needs a data-driven approach. We give you four reasons why data is important in a successful influencer marketing strategy:
Reach the right audience
Your influencer marketing campaign will succeed only if you partner with an influencer whose target audience is the same as yours. Most marketers make the mistake of going by instinct to choose influencers. For example, if your target audience is women of 18 to 25 years, it will be a wrong decision to partner with an influencer who is 35 years old. Data plays an important role in choosing the right influencer.
Using data, you can find influencer profiles that will help you reach your target group. Data also helps you to avoid accounts with fake followers.
Optimize the outcome
Like other types of marketing such as Facebook or Google Ads, influencer marketing collaborations also need to be tracked to see how they are performing, what needs to be changed or replaced to achieve the best results.
You can use AI-enabled tools for data to identify influencers that have historically performed well – they are your best bet for future campaigns.
Get insight into the true reach of an influencer
Most people think that the higher the number of followers, the higher would be the influencer’s reach. But that’s always not the case. An influencer with 150,000 followers can have a 12% true reach on their posts. On the other hand, an influencer with only half as many followers can have close to 80% true reach. Using data, which is accessible with the right tools, can help identify the influencers that reach the highest number of people, regardless of the number of their followers.
Evaluate your return on investment
It’s important to measure and follow up on your influencer marketing campaigns. This is where data comes into the picture. First, you need to know what KPIs are relevant to measure. If you don’t know this, it’s like you are on a wild goose chase. So, take a step back to get an overall picture of the results.
How does your influencer marketing complement your other marketing efforts?
Have you seen an increase in organic traffic? Has the effect of your search advertising improved?
Analyze the data. Also, use brand surveys to determine how influencer marketing has affected factors such as brand perception, brand awareness, and purchase intention.
In summary, to evaluate your influencer marketing efforts, data plays an important role in helping you get a holistic picture of your investment.
About the Author
Rachel Smith is a communication executive who works with the content marketing team at Affable, an influencer marketing company that provides AI-driven solutions that allows you to plan and execute your influencer campaigns strategically. She develops content around social media and marketing topics that can help her readers understand how to pick the right influencers, measure their impact, and run effective influencer campaigns. In her free time, she loves meeting new people and attending workshops on communication and psychology.
Thanks for this amazing article and infos 