Influencer Marketing: Tips for Measuring ROI Like a Pro

by ​Jafar Sadhik, Guest Contributor

​When you scroll through your Instagram or Twitter feed, it becomes immensely clear that Influencer marketing has become a popular field of interest among digital marketing professionals. Brands have now started promoting their products and services through major online influencers so that it reaches the target audience through someone they trust. Latest reports suggest that 86% of the marketers have been using influencer marketing as a key content marketing strategy in 2018.

Here's how marketers can improve their influencer marketing ROI measurement.

​Though influencer marketing has become a more reliable strategy for marketers, many questions are still being asked about how to measure the Return on Investment.

Below we have listed points on how marketers can improve their influencer marketing ROI measurement:

Understand the industry, influencers and the target audience
You can use a social insight tool like Buzz Sumo, while choosing the right influencer and also to learn about your target audience. Thorough research can help you in creating a baseline that consists of the audience’s interests and the way your influencer engages with the followers.

Setting the baseline can provide you with valuable insights about who are the best influencers in your particular niche.  While monitoring the chosen influencer, you can keep a tab on the hashtags used by the influencer, check how many of his followers are talking about your brand and product, and much more.

Data Collection – the first step to a successful influencer campaign
The assets that you create while generating an Influencer Marketing campaign must be able to lead the operation all through the sales cycle. These assets include landing pages, custom URLs, domains, and call tracking. By setting short-term and long-term objectives you can streamline your revenues and adjust the ROI accordingly for your clients.

Redefining your ROI:
In order to measure the direct ROI, you must plan live events that can go along with the influencer Marketing campaign. You can also track coupon codes and links that persuade followers with a call to action.  It doesn’t matter if your influencer has over ten thousand followers, if he/she has only minimal engagement with users, the whole campaign will fall flat. Make sure that the engagement level of your influencer is high. Good interaction leads to better ROI!

Deliver Deep and Measure Wide:
Good content and precise tracking skills make an influencer campaign successful. Partnering with influencers who can be key brand advocates and creating quality content that he can share with conviction will automatically set the ball rolling towards success.

Setting Clear Goals:
Basically, the success of Influencer Marketing, like any other marketing initiative such as blogger outreach, can be determined only if you have set clear goals to measure ROI. Different influencers can bring different KPIs (Key Performance Indication); a celebrity can bring about brand awareness; whereas a social media influencer can rake in actual sales for your product/service.

Use Analytics to remove any uncertainty:
You can  tackle the challenge of measuring the ROI by paying attention to referral traffic through your Analytics tool. It is ideal to monitor the referral traffic flow from the moment the influencer shares your content. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Alerts can help you in tracking mentions from the targeted influencer.

Author Bio:

Jafar Sadhik is a passionate logophile turned creative content specialist pursuing a dream in ever inflating digital market. Currently employed as a technical blogger at Stan Ventures, a digital marketing company.