Measuring is what makes marketing a science, rather than a superstition. If you’re not measuring key metrics, you’re wasting your marketing efforts. With solid metrics, you can overcome unpredictability and spend your money and time wisely.When running an influence marketing campaign, you need to set goals so you know what metrics to measure and what success looks like. Once the campaign is live, you’ll need to measure your results throughout to focus your current efforts. At the end, you’ll take a look at the final metrics to gather results so you can improve your next campaign.
Get familiar with the following influence marketing metrics to improve your influence marketing strategy:
1. Amount of Content Generated
One of the main goals of an influence marketing campaign is to have users share content with their friends. Starting at the top of the funnel, this means counting up the branded pieces of content generated by users.
Before you begin, set the desired number of user-generated content you wish to collect. Then, tally user-generated content throughout the campaign to get a general idea of how well your campaign is going compared to your goal. When it’s over, gather the final results.
In order to find the amount of content generated, search for a certain hashtag or count how many pieces of content were uploaded to the prompt on your website. Based on the number, you’ll know whether you met or surpassed the goal for your campaign.
If you don’t meet your desired number of content, you have the opportunity to improve your metrics the next time you run a campaign. Take a closer look, maybe you didn’t reach enough people on the right social network, offer enough value, or provide enough direction to your influencers.
Example
O’neill is currently holding a photo contest contest (only open to the European Union) asking influencers to submit a photo or video of themselves in the backcountry and tag the photo with #GOHIGHER. People can submit their photos on Instagram or Twitter, or by uploading it on www.oneill.com/gohigher. If O’neill wants to see how well their influence marketing campaign is going, they can do a hashtag search on social media or check how many photo have been uploaded to their website.
So far, there are about 4,000 posts hashtagged #GoHigher on Instagram and the contest doesn’t end until January 15, 2015.
2. Engagement
Your engagement count doesn’t mean your follower or fan count, it means the number of times people interact with your brand on each social media platform. Engagement is a great metric to measure because it can drive increased traffic, grow brand awareness, and create a two-way dialogue with you and your customers.
Although somewhat similar, depending on the platform the engagement measure varies:
Facebook: likes, comments, shares
Twitter: favorites, replies, retweets
Pinterest: pins, comments, repins
Google+: +1, comments, shares
Instagram: likes, comments
Measuring engagement is important because it tells you how well your audience is reacting to your content. It can help guide your content strategy by helping you understand what types of content gets attention and what types don’t. Make sure to track this metric to measure growth and performance on certain social networks and to track your engagement rate over time.
You can measure engagement by observing and counting up instances of engagement or you can use a variety of available tools. For social listening you can use tools like Hootsuite and Social Mention. If you want to try social-sharing widgets use tools AddThis or ShareThis, and social media stats like Facebook Insights.
Example
Chipotle did a Halloween promotion this year with the hashtag #boorito. Users were prompted to take photos wearing their Halloween costumes inside a Chipotle location on either Twitter or Instagram in order to get a $3 burrito.
If Chipotle wanted to see how well their campaign did for driving engagement, they could look at the amount of posts influencers generated and see if influencers’ friends interacted with them. Take a look at the tweet below, it’s a little scary but it received a high level of engagement on Twitter with 21 retweets and 135 favorites.
After completing an Instagram and Twitter hashtag search, it was easy to see that with Chipotle’s direction, influencer’s posts drove a great deal of engagement.
This means Chipotle inspired influencers to take action and influencers’ followers and friends engaged with their posts because they were interesting pieces of content.
3. Number of Clicks
To learn what type of content works best, measure how many clicks your links receive. Use a third-party link generator like Bitly or ClickMeter to shorten links to share on Facebook and Twitter or to give to influencers to share on their own personal networks.
Example
Urban Outfitters includes a short link in many of their tweets so they can see how many people click on the link to visit their website. Depending on what links get the most clicks, Urban Outfitters will know what type of tweets work the best for driving traffic.
In addition to tracking a hashtag you can also track links. This works well when you incentivize influencers to tweet or post a link on Facebook and you want to track how much traffic they drive individually.
4. Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate shows you how many people are actually driven to take action. This measures the real business-building impact of your influence marketing campaign. A conversion means someone has taken the next step and is now in your marketing database. These people have registered for content downloads, completed webinar registrations, filled out forms, subscribed to your newsletter, or completed a sale.
There are two types of conversions, converting to a lead or converting to a sale. To track your lead generation conversion rate take the number of leads collected and divide it by the total traffic to the site and multiply by 100. To find the ROI from your influence marketing campaign measure the number of sales divided by the number of unique visitors to see how well your campaign did for driving your bottom line.
Example
Like many marketing savvy companies, KISSmetrics creates free guides and ebooks. In order to get the free download, you have to fill out a form with your information so they can add you as a lead to their data base. Once you convert on this form, you’ll move further down the funnel to making a purchase. This is an example of converting users to leads. In order to find out this conversion rate, KISSmetrics would take the number of leads generated and divide it by the total number of people who visited their site or a particular landing page.
The Wrap-Up
