Understanding and (Boosting) Your Influencer ROI in Three Minutes

The number one issue faced by companies running Influencer campaigns is calculating ROI at the end. Therein lies the biggest problem: you can’t start at the end! When it comes to Influencer Marketing, calculating ROI is a process that accompanies the campaign from start to finish. Ready to get Influencer ROI savvy? Here’s our three minute breakdown:

First: Know why Influencer Marketing is different than other forms of marketing

At face value, global ROI computes as follows: (turnover – budget) / (budget). Normal, right? This familiar formula stays the same regardless of whether a conversion equates to impressions on a post, sales, store-clicks, or app downloads. That being said, tracking results in Influencer Marketing is complicated by two unique factors:

• Virality. It’s easy to track your influencers posts but how do you measure overall generated awareness, or viral content?
• Social networks that don’t allow the tracking of links (U.T.Ms) or rewrite them when shared (Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter.)

How to track viral content across all social channels (and calculate earned media value)

When selling: Dedicated hashtags and coupons are metrics that show who is buying and talking about your campaign. The use of coupons allows businesses to attribute sales to sources and hashtags are a passive way to know who is talking about your brand. Hashtags can be measured by social listening, or the automated process of filtering social media feeds to find any and all references to your campaign.

When boosting notoriety: Reach (measured by millions of impressions) and engagements (likes, shares, comments etc.) are metrics that show how many people actually see your campaign. Take into account the reach and engagement of:

• the posts published by your brand (owned media)
• the influencers you are working with (paid media value if you paid them, earned otherwise)
• the people sharing the content published by these influencers (earned media value – see POEM model)

These metrics allow you to compute global media value to see how much additional reach your campaign brought to your brand, CTR or the ratio of clicks divided by impressions, and global engagement rate to show how Influencers performed on average.

The Golden Rule: Don’t wait until the end to start calculating ROI

The general idea is to follow these metrics throughout the campaign, not just at the end. This way you can fix the most common issues in real time, such as a blog article which is not shared by an influencer, a link that is not clickable, etc.

Takeaway: The first step to boosting your ROI is understanding it. With the ambiguous nature of viral content, marketers have to evolve how they track attribution by employing strategies such as social listening, coupons, and engagement/ reach analytics.