Analytics is the efficient use of numbers and statistics to monitor the success of your marketing strategy. After putting your strategy to the test, you need to see how well it is working; if the numbers say something different from your expectation, and then you can re-strategize or identify what you are doing wrong and improve on it.

For proper analytics, it is important to know what you are measuring, and this cannot be achieved without properly defining the goals for your marketing campaign. Generally, the main goals for influencer marketing are to increase engagements, increase reach, improve brand reputation, hence, boosting revenue. Still, for more detailed analysis, you need to properly define your business’ objectives so that you can appropriately judge success. Some examples of these objectives are traffic driven to the website, reaching a new audience, engaging an existing audience, and increasing your brand awareness.

There are different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to track your goals, and each KPI says something different about your campaign. A few of these Indicators are:

Engagement rate

One of the most important metrics that says a lot about your campaign’s various aspects is your engagement rate. The amount of engagements your influencer gets has a great influence on brand awareness. The more engaged it is, the more people can see it. Social platforms, in fact, have an algorithm that frequently displays highly engaging content on the timeline of users – even beyond your target audience.

Engagements can be monitored through social media tools like BuzzSumo, HootSuite, and a few other tools that will track the engagements of your choice and give you a detailed summary of how well your campaign is engaged by your audience. However, you can manually check specific engagement numbers to see how well your campaign is performing.

Metrics for judging engagements include Likes, Reactions, Retweets, Shares, Comments, Clicks, and Views for a video, traffic, etc.

Likes

Likes are on almost every social platform. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and almost anything you can think of. They are the most common form of engagement. More likes will increase the visibility of your influencer’s posts about your brand, especially for people who haven’t seen the post, enabling further engagements for such posts, hence reaching a wider audience. Retweets and Reactions also have the same effect as likes. Retweets are specific to Twitter, and Reactions are specific to Facebook, where you can give a different reaction other than “like” to a post. It usually gives the same effect as a like.

Comments

Typically, social media engagements will involve fewer comments than likes or retweets because many people would rather observe than contribute, despite enjoying the content. It, however, doesn’t speak less about the importance of comments. Though they are less common than likes or retweets, they are a clear indication of how well the audience accepts your content because comments can be inquisitive, positive, or negative. Comments will indicate whether your product or service is acceptable or not, or people don’t know enough to give an opinion. Either way, it creates a string of discussions, and your campaign attracts attention.  

Clicks

If you have a CTA in your influencer’s posts, it is important to measure clicks; this will indicate how many people found the posts special enough to see what extra thing you have to offer. This indicates a willingness to purchase. If your offer is compelling enough, they may just be your next customer. 

Shares

When your content is widely shared, then it is an indication that people found value in your content and feel it will be useful for their audiences, even on other platforms. This is a good indication that you should enjoin your influencer to publish similar content as it is highly valuable. 

Reach

Your Influencer’s reach tells you how well your content was circulated on social media. This is an important metric to note if you are a new or relatively unknown brand to increase your popularity. This can be analyzed by the amount of impressions your influencer’s posts have (most social platforms provide this information as only visible to the account owner). You can request this data from the influencers you are in partnership with. Whether a person likes, comments, share your post or not, as long as it appeared on the person’s screen – indicating that he or she saw it. Your followers are also a good determinant of how far your reach will be. If you have 1,000 followers and they all share your post, it will still have fewer shares than a person with 10,000 followers and 30% shares from its audience. So for a good reach, it is optimal that you have a sizable amount of followers. You can also measure impressions on your website through Google Analytics, which enables you to track the new visitors, returning visitors, time spent on the website, more especially when you are actively running the campaign. If awareness is your main goal, then reach is the most important metric for you. 

Conversion Rate

Conversion simply means the rate at which people will buy your product or use your service due to your campaign. You want to appropriately convert advertisements into sales. One of the primary reasons for influencer marketing and other digital marketing efforts is to increase sales. It is important to track how well your sales have improved during this period, the conversion rate indicator is the right one for measuring that. To know-how, it is important to take accurate data of your sales before, during, and after the campaign, and observe the how well you have converted traffic into an engagement. You can get more accurate data on your conversions by using affiliate links for your influencers. This will help you perfectly know the exact amount of sales you have gotten through each link. By observing the difference in sales per visit, you can only observe a general change, but these links will give you specific numbers. This can also be beneficial as it allows you to identify your most productive influencers if you are working with more than one, making you decide who to engage for future campaigns. 

You can also measure other things with the conversion rate metric. If you have a Call to action that can be traced from the influencer campaign, then you can calculate conversion for that particular action, ranging from signing up on your website, subscribing to be on your email list or newsletter, or probably streaming or downloading a particular content. These are called non-sales conversion metrics. 

Referral Rates

Like conversion rates, referral rates let you know how many people have patronized your business due to the campaign. Conversion rates may not give an accurate representation of your campaign success because it will only tell you how many people patronized. Still, referral rates will give you a figure of the total number of visits to your website due to the campaign, whether or not they patronized you. A prospective customer may love your content and really get attracted to it on social media but not purchase for many reasons. Like the inability to ship to that location or the prospective customer not getting a color or size variant they want. To monitor why people visit your website but end up not buying items from you, you really should have an on-site survey to ensure you set things right to get better conversions from subsequent campaigns.  To monitor your referrals, you can use the same affiliate links and coupons to track them whether you are using one influencer or work with a team of influencers.

Audience Growth

Audience growth – like reach, will let you know how well your content circulated. It is similar to reach and awareness, but reach only tells you how well your content is circulated. Audience growth gives you extra insight into how many more people you have been drawn to your brand due to your campaign. The amount of new fans you gain is important to your campaign’s success. Even if they don’t buy at that moment, they can always return in subsequent campaigns, some don’t even need a new campaign to patronize you. To monitor your audience growth, you can monitor the rate of increase in followers via social media analytics only available to you. You should also check for that of your influencers as they are the main people publishing your content. Check your sign-ups, subscriptions during the period of your campaign, and you will get an insight into how well your audience has grown. 

Using your analytics, you could get even more detailed statistics about your expenditure, income, and Returns on Investment from influencer marketing. A few common ones are;

Cost per Engagement

Your estimated cost per engagement is the number of charges you have incurred for every engagement you have. If you have paid 5 influencers $100 each for a campaign, and you eventually get 50,000 engagements from the campaign, then you have incurred a cost of $0.002 or $2 per 1,000 engagements.

Return on Investment (ROI)

Your return on investment is the percentage increase from your total campaign cost to your total campaign revenue. If your total campaign cost is $1,000 and you get a revenue of $3,000, then you have an ROI of 300 percent.

Read Next: Influencer Marketing, SEO, Email Marketing, E-Commerce.

Read More:

• Business Models
• Business Strategy
• Marketing Strategy
• Business Model Innovation
• Platform Business Models
• Network Effects In A Nutshell
• Digital Business Models

The post Social Media Marketing And How To Measure Its Success appeared first on FourWeekMBA.