Influencer marketing is known to deliver a higher ROI than other forms of marketing. It also helps you drive better quality traffic and leads, as stated by 71% of marketers.
That’s why brands are now investing more time, money, and effort into influencer marketing.
Do you want to make your next campaign a success? You need to strategize, execute, and optimize your campaign effectively to make influencer marketing work for you.
In this post, I’ll discuss how you can boost the ROI of your influencer marketing campaign.
#1: Define Your Campaign Goals and KPIs
If you want to improve your influencer marketing ROI, you need to draft an effective strategy. And a good strategy begins with defining your expectations from the campaign.
It is critical to identify what you would like to achieve with your campaign. You should take time to define your core campaign goals and associate them with measurable key performance indicators (KPIs).
These KPIs or metrics can help you track and monitor the performance of your campaign. This will help you ensure that your campaign is moving in the right direction.
Let’s take a look at the top influencer marketing goals and the metrics that can help you track them:
- Increase brand awareness: likes, follower count, brand mentions.
- Increase engagement: likes, comments, shares, tags on your content.
- Generate more leads: website visits, newsletter sign ups.
- Drive more sales: purchases/service hires.
- Improve the reputation of your brand: positive reviews, overall positive sentiment about your brand.
You should set S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals for your campaign. It is also important to make sure that your brand’s messaging aligns with those goals.
When working with influencers, you should clearly convey your expectations from the campaign to them. This will help you ensure that both of you are on the same page, and will eventually, help you improve your campaign ROI.
Recommended: How to Do Influencer Marketing for Ecommerce Brands
#2: Understand Your Target Audience
Before you strategize for your next campaign, it is important to identify and understand who your target audience is. This includes identifying:
- Who are your consumers?
- Who is likely to buy your products/hire your services?
- What age groups, locations, or genders do they belong to?
- Which social media channels are they most active on?
- And more!
Once you have a better understanding of your target audience demographics, you can easily find influencers they trust and create content they will love.
#3: Identify and Collaborate with the Right Influencers
Finding the right influencers is crucial to the success of your campaigns. But it remains a struggle for 61% of marketers to identify the right influencers for their campaigns.
When choosing influencers, you need to consider their reach, engagement, audience demographics, and resonance with your brand and campaign goals. It is also important to ensure that they don’t have inflated followings.
You can use influencer discovery platforms such as BuzzSumo and Influence.co to identify the top influencers in your niche. Influence.co also allows you to see the previous collaborations of potential influencers in your niche and location.
Image via Influence.co
You should always prioritize influencers’ relevance over their reach. Don’t fall into the trap of collaborating with influencers who have a high number of followers.
You should evaluate your potential influencers on the following parameters:
- Engagement rate
- Authenticity
- Personality and style
- Previous brand associations
- Audience demographics and interests
Another great practice is to work with influencers who already love your brand and are talking about you without any sponsorship. If you ask them to promote your brand, you will have a better chance of generating a higher campaign ROI.
Airbnb used this tactic effectively to improve their influencer marketing ROI. When a major celebrity, Mariah Carey booked one of their luxurious properties, they capitalized on this collaboration opportunity.
She posted a photo of hers at the Airbnb property and tagged the brand in the photo and caption. The sponsored post received close to 45K likes.
Image via Instagram
Since then, Airbnb has continued to partner with influencers who are already booking stays with them.
You can use tools such as Mention to discover people who are talking about your brand. And then reach out to them for collaboration.
#4: Leverage Micro-Influencers
Micro-influencers have comparatively less number of followers than macro and mega influencers. But these niche-based influencers have highly engaged, active, connected, and loyal audiences.
They can help you generate 7X more engagement than larger influencers. That’s because micro-influencers have loyal audiences who resonate with their content and trust them.
Due to engaged followings, they are likely to influence the buying decisions of a majority of their followers, compelling 82% of consumers to take action. This means that they can help you get more brand follows, traffic, engagement, qualified leads, and conversions.
And the best part is that micro-influencer collaborations are quite cost-effective. Influencers with up to 10K followers charge around $75-$250 per sponsored post, which is way less than what celebrities charge.
When leveraged effectively, micro-influencer collaborations can help you boost your influencer and content marketing campaign ROI.
#5: Track and Measure Your Campaign Results
78% of marketers find it difficult to determine the ROI of their influencer campaigns. But it is not that difficult if you have set your goals and KPIs right.
You should track and monitor every detail of your influencer marketing campaign to analyze what’s working the best for your audience and what isn’t. This includes checking:
- The quality of content.
- Engagement on influencer-created content.
- Number of leads generated.
- The number of sales that each influencer drives.
- Top-performing influencers.
- Top-performing content type.
- Positive/negative sentiment.
- And more!
You should keep track of all of the parameters mentioned above to optimize your campaigns for a better ROI.
You can track and measure the performance of your campaigns by using:
- Trackable links.
- Unique promo codes for each influencer.
- Specific hashtags to see if a campaign is trending.
- Influencer marketing platforms.
- Other campaign tracking tools.
The famous watch brand, Daniel Wellington, provides unique promo codes to track and monitor the performance of individual influencers. Most of these unique discount codes have a defined time limit, which helps the brand add urgency and increase sales.
Image via Instagram
It’s Time for a Successful Campaign!
The points we’ve discussed above can help you unleash the true potential of your influencer campaigns. You should invest time into finding the right influencers for your brand and building long-term relationships with them.
You can leverage the right tools and influencer marketing platforms to save time. This can help you maximize your influencer marketing campaign ROI with less effort.
How do you scale your influencer campaigns? Please share the tactics that help you achieve high ROI from your campaigns.
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is also the founder of Content Solutions. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
