PULSE: Chapter 3: Areas of Measurement

The areas of measurement will be very dependent on your goals. There is no point trying to calculate all of these statistics. Many will be irrelevant to your particular influencer marketing campaign. #influencermarketing #roistrategies #measuringsuccess #digitalamarketing #digitalmarketingmadesimple

AUDIENCE REACH

Audience reach will be important if your target is to position your content in front of as many people as possible. Audience reach has been a traditional measure for many other types of marketing. In this situation, you will be looking to work with influencers with huge followings. The idea behind using Audience Reach as a metric is that the more people who see content promoting your brand, the more people are likely to interact with it, e.g. buy your products, sign up for your subscription, or download your eBooks. In this situation, it is not overly easy to measure your return on investment. About the best you could calculate would be the total number of followers of the particular influencers who share your content per dollar spent on the campaign. However as there is no exact connection between followers and impressions of people who actually see your content, it is not a particularly meaningful statistic. Indeed, audience reach is a very rough measure of a person’s influence. Simply having a huge number of followers does not make somebody influential. Some people, for instance, gain followers by buying them. These followers have no true interest in these person’s social media statuses, and indeed probably never see them. Also, many of the best known social media accounts are pure broadcasters. They create and share their own content for their supporters, but do not share others. There is little point hoping somebody with a million Twitter followers will share your content if they have a tiny retweet ration. Audience reach may be a better measure if you are in a highly targeted industry, working with influencers who share with people interested in that industry. It also depends on the particular social media channel. A beauty company probably could leverage benefit from focusing their influencer marketing on a small number of beauty channels on YouTube, each of which has high views on their videos.

IMPRESSIONS

In most situations, Impressions are a better measure of visibility for social media statuses or posts, than Audience Reach. The reality is that only a small proportion of your followers on most social media channels get to see your posts. This has become even more evident in recent times as channels like FaceBook have tinkered with their formulae for deciding who sees which post. It is much harder now to transmit an unpaid FaceBook marketing status than it was previously. Instagram has also recently followed this practice. Impressions are the number of times people view an influencer’s post. This is an important statistic to calculate as it gives you information about the true reach of an influencer. It tells you how many people genuinely see the post, not just how many could potentially see it. The number of impressions generated by a post is a valuable statistic when you are comparing the reach of multiple influencers. You can compare the impressions on a particular post shared by an influencer to the number of impressions you normally receive on posts you make through your own social media channels. Of course, not all impressions are of equal value to you. You will gain higher value from an impression on some social media channels than others, depending on where your target market spend their time. You can use a product like Buzzsumo to sort influencers on a topic by the number of impressions on the various channels. So, for instance, you could concentrate on targeting people with high impressions on Twitter but a lower count on Pinterest, if that favored your market.

ENGAGEMENT (Comments, Likes, Shares)

It is all very well having people look at your marketing. It is another thing completely for them to take notice of it. Some social media participants have a huge audience of followers, leading to a large number of impressions. However, it is doubtful if you can consider these people influencers if their followers do not interact with them in any way. There is a pecking order regarding engagement, too. Traditionally engagement was measured simply in terms of Likes. However, this is a very broad measurement. People regularly like a post without taking all that much notice of it; sometimes they like it without even reading it. You are unlikely to gain great traction because somebody simply liked a post about your brand. Nowadays there is a wider look at the total engagement of social media followers. You look at a mix of shares, comments, and likes, probably weighted in that order. A like is fine, but it is in many ways a throwaway gesture.

Comments are worth more, but they are essentially somebody simply wanting to give their view about something. Some comments, such as a bare “Nice post” comment lack much thought at all and are of little value to you. A Share, on the other hand, is considerably more valuable. If somebody shares a post on social media, she is effectively saying that she believes the content is so valuable that all of her friends should see it too. Shares are the pinnacle of engagement.

If you are trying to determine your influencer marketing ROI, it is common to look at your total engagement. Somebody who regularly engages with their followers will be far more influential to your brand, than somebody who simply broadcasts, even if the broadcaster has a huge following.

SENTIMENT

One way you can use both engagement and impressions statistics is to look at your audience’s sentiment behind particular posts. Which posts attract the greatest attention? What topics do people like the most, comment on the most, and ultimately share the most. While you can not easily determine a numerical ROI simply on sentiment, it helps you decide upon the best types of content to use with influencers, if you want to end up with the best outcome. For influencers to remain popular, they need to obtain buy-in from their audience. By observing which of your brand’s posts resonate with your influencers’ followers, and which they ignore, you can better target your future messages.

HIGH QUALITY CONTENT

There is a common saying, “Content is King.” This adage is very true. The internet is awash with content. If you want people to take notice of what you share, you need to create exceptional high-quality content. Whether you share in-house content with your influencers, or whether they create original material about your brand, you need to ensure that it always gives value to your readers. Creating high-quality content undoubtedly costs more than producing “cheap and cheerful” material, paying writers $1 per piece from a content mill. However, you are likely to end up with a higher ROI from a more expensive quality piece. If nobody bothers to read your $1 cheap article, it is a total waste of that $1.

If you produce high-quality content, you have options for stretching it across different platforms. You can promote a quality blog piece on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You could create a video for those who prefer not to read and place it on YouTube. You could share pictures from it on Pinterest or Instagram. You could repurpose it is an infographic and then use your influencers to promote that. You could convert it to slides and then place them.

Of course, high-quality content is a somewhat intangible return, so the value of it is not easily measurable in dollar terms.

CONVERSION

In marketing, a conversion is when you manage to get somebody to respond to a Call to Action. People think of conversions as being increased sales, but in reality, there are many more types of conversion. Your conversions relate to the goal you set at the start of the influencer marketing process. The more you move towards meeting your goal, the more conversions you have. If your goal was to drive an extra $3,000 sales per week, then every extra sale you generate is indeed a conversion for you. On the other hand, if your goal were to add an extra 30 email addresses to your database each week, then you would consider adding an email address to your database to be a conversion. There are quite a few possible different types of conversion which you could use to measure your Influencer Marketing ROI, depending on your marketing goals. To be able to determine an actual Return On Investment, you will need to assign a monetary value to each additional conversion. This is clear-cut in the case of something like sales made (a sale of a $20 book is clearly worth $20 to you) but is more intangible for quite a few other types of conversion. You will need to decide how much each extra “item of conversion” is worth to you, for example, what is the financial worth of that additional email address you obtain?