These days, most businesses invest in influencer marketing. By paying influencers or collaborating with them, they make an effort to propel the growth of their business forward. Even newly established businesses find it important to set aside a certain amount of money to get some influencer marketing done.
Sometimes, businesses invest a large amount of money in influencer marketing and do not get the desired results. While influencer marketing is important in today’s day and age, it is equally important to track marketing activities and find out if they are making an impact. Gauging the impact of influencer marketing activities is important to know whether investing in them proved to be worthwhile or not.
If you invested in a particular influencer marketing activity, you need to figure out how well it is doing. If it does not bring the desired results, you might want to opt for some other type of influencer marketing activity. Similarly, if collaborating with an influencer is not helping your brand grow, you need to look for some other influencer who can prove to be a better fit.
Here are 7 ways in which you can measure the success of your influencer marketing efforts for small businesses:
Reach
The biggest driving factor behind businesses investing in influencer marketing is to increase their reach. They want the posts to reach out to a wide audience and hope that their business benefits from it. Since an influencer has a certain number of followers, businesses believe collaborating with them would prove to be beneficial for them.
In simpler terms, the more the number of people who view your influencer marketing content, the higher or wider its reach. If you collaborate with a mega influencer who has more than 1 million followers, you can expect the posts to get a good reach. Reach can be measured with the help of tracking metrics like views, impressions, and unique visitors. If you are wondering how to find micro influencers in your niche with good reach, you can reach out to a digital agency.
Leads
If a post related to your company reaches out to a large number of people but does not show any conversion, it would be safe to assume that your investment went down the drain. Leads refer to the people or consumers who show an interest in the brand’s products or services after having a look at the influencer marketing content.
When influencer marketing activities generate leads for a company, the brand can be sure about the fact that the efforts put in by them and the influencers have been successful. To measure leads, the brand has to track different types of metrics like phone calls, email sign-ups, and form submissions. If a particular influencer manages to bring in a lot of leads, the brand likes to work or collaborate with them frequently.
Brand Awareness
One of the reasons why many brands collaborate with or hire the services of influencers is to create higher awareness around their business. In the past, one has seen many newly established businesses becoming brands driven by the push they received from influencers. While influencers can play an integral role in brand awareness, they do not succeed in their endeavors.
An influencer can do several different things to create more awareness around a brand. By mentioning a brand repeatedly in their posts, they can ensure that more people get to know about it. They can also get their followers to check out the brand’s social media pages. By checking brand mentions, website traffic, and social media followers, companies can check whether influencer marketing is contributing to brand awareness.
Consumer Satisfaction
As a business, whatever you do, you do for your consumers. If your consumers feel satisfied with the products or services you are offering them, they will keep coming back to you. Even while putting together influencer marketing strategies and implementing them, you have to think about your consumers.
To know how well your target consumers are responding to all the marketing material you are putting up out there, you should track the feedback you are receiving from your consumers. Metrics like customer surveys and feedback help you tremendously in figuring out whether your influencer marketing activities are having a positive impact on your consumers.
Return on Investment
Return on investment or ROI is important for every brand. When you are running a small business, profitability matters a lot. Apart from checking the ROI while selling your products and services, you also have to take into account the ROI while going about your influencer marketing campaign. Your marketing activities, too, need to drive you towards making healthier profits.
To know whether your influencer marketing activities have brought in some profits or not, you have to use a little bit of mathematics. By dividing the revenue from a campaign by the campaign’s cost, you can figure out whether the influencer marketing campaign launched by you was profitable or not. If it is profitable, you can replicate it and use it a couple of times more.
Brand Sentiment
Brand sentiment has taken center stage in today’s times. Because of this reason, brands are extremely conscious about the perception around them. If a great product can change the perception around a brand for the better, a poorly designed service could dampen it significantly. Influencer marketing can help in managing the sentiments towards a brand.
In today’s times, most people are on social media. This has helped in gauging the sentiments of the consumers of a product or customers of a business quite easily. Apart from having a look at comments posted by users on social media, brands can also check how consumers are reacting to content revolving around the brand that is shared by influencers.
Engagement
In the age of the internet and digital media, one buzzword we come across quite regularly is engagement. From celebrities to brands, everybody is looking for more engagement. The rules and criteria for engagement are the same for everybody. The more people engage with your posts, the more you grow on social media.
If an influencer has shared two posts on behalf of a brand and one of them has a thousand likes and another post has ten thousand likes, it means the second post has received much more engagement than the first one. You should analyze both posts and dig deeper into the reasons behind the success of the second post and the underwhelming performance of the first post. By doing this, you will find ways to engage your audience better.