HOW TO MEASURE

INFLUENCER MARKETING ROI

The Complete Brand Marketer’s Guide
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Contents
1. Introduction 3

2. Areas of Measurement 5
2.1 Audience Reach
2.2 Impressions
2.3 Engagement
2.4 Sentiment
2.5 High-Quality Content
2.6 Conversions
2.6.1 Growth In Your Followers
2.6.2 Brand Mentioning
2.6.3 Traffic To Specific Landing Page / Website
2.6.4 Form Completions
2.6.5 Signup To A Newsletter / Subscription
2.6.6 Growth In Users of Your Product / Service
2.6.7 Increased Sales

3. Tips for Measurement of Conversions 12

3.1 Tracking Some Form of Correlation
3.2 Using Trackable Links
3.3 Using Conversion Pixels
3.4 Providing Promo Codes
3.5 Create a Hashtag Campaign and Tie That to Revenue

4. Conclusion 14
Introduction 3

01 Introduction
As social media has grown to become part of everyday life for most
people, businesses have recognized its potential for marketing. The
problem is that it is now too big. How do you make your brand stand
out from the millions of other posts, statuses, pictures, videos and
other types of social media content? How can you use social media
practically to market your goods and services, and how do you know
whether your target audience is hearing your messages?

The solution to the problem of being seen online

is to engage in what is now called Influencer
Marketing.

Wikipedia defines Influencer Marketing as being “a form of marketing in

which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individual)
rather than the target market as a whole. It identifies the individuals that
have influence over potential buyers, and orients marketing activities
around these influencers”.

What does this mean in practice? It means that you hunt out people
who are seen as influencers in social media and work with them
What does
to share this mean
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are seen as influencers in social media and work with them
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gain a whole new audience who will set eyes on your marketing.

This sounds excellent in theory. However, you cannot afford to

engage in “hope” marketing, where you produce content and hope
that somebody will read or look at it. Influencer Marketing is no
different from any other type of marketing - it is only of value if you
can demonstrate that it produces an acceptable return on investment
(ROI).

Unfortunately, the returns are more nebulous than many other types
of marketing. It is usually not clear straight away what the return on any
particular influencer marketing campaign is. You often cannot easily
say that a particular item of influencer marketing leads to a particular
increase in sales, as you can with many traditional marketing campaigns.
However it is still measurable, and if done well, influencer marketing
can lead to very pleasing returns on your marketing investment.

In 2015, influencer marketplace Tomoson undertook a survey of 125

Introduction 4

marketers. One of the questions they asked was what the survey participants’ average ROI
from their influencer marketing was. On average they were receiving a staggering $6.50 return
for every $1 invested. The best respondents were receiving an ROI of $20 or more, and 70% of
the respondents had an ROI of $2 or better. At that stage the survey respondents considered
influencer marketing to be their fastest-growing marketing channel.

So how can you measure your ROI from influencer marketing?

What Are Your Goals?

There are multiple reasons that brands undertake an influencer marketing campaign. Therefore
the optimal way to measure your ROI will depend on what goal you set yourself for any particular
influencer marketing campaign.

If you have no goal for your influencer marketing, you are truly engaging in “hope”-marketing.

Are you trying to increase sales of a particular product or service? Do you want to increase sign-
ups to your email list? Are you trying to sell subscriptions? Are you actively trying to establish
partner relationships? Are you simply wanting your brand to be more visible?

These are all valid reasons for influencer marketing. However, the ROI for each of these campaigns
will be different. Indeed, the units used for the return will even differ. In some cases, you will
want a return expressed in the traditional dollars. In others, it may be expressed in followers,
sign-ups, subscriptions, audience reach, or numerous other ways.

A firm may set the following types of goals for an influencer marketing campaign:
• To drive an extra $3,000 sales per week
• To add an extra 30 email addresses to its database each week
• To add an extra 20 premium subscribers and 50 basic subscribers each week
• To increase their followers by 200 per week
• To double their engagement on Twitter

What is the Total Investment in Your Influencer Marketing Campaign?

To calculate any return on investment you first need to define what your investment is. Influencer
marketing has less defined campaigns than traditional marketing, or even other types of online
marketing, such as email or PPC marketing.

What would you include in your “Cost of Influencer Marketing”?

You would include any labor costs for the time you (or a member of your team) researches
influencers, sets up the campaign, creates any content that you want to be shared, or participates
on social media interacting with influencers. You would include the costs of any free product
samples you may send to influencers and any demos you set up.
Depending on the type of content you wish to share you may have some content creation
costs, for instance, the cost of filming and editing a YouTube video.

Overall these costs are likely to be less than most other types of marketing because you are not
paying for the placement of your marketing.
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02 Area 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.

Audience Reach
1 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.
 6

Impressions
2 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.
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Engagement (Comments, Likes, Shares)

3 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 engage-

ment 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 fol-
lowers. 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 want-
ing 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 sim-
ply broadcasts, even if the broadcaster has a huge following.

Sentiment
4 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 au-
dience. By observing which of your brand’s posts resonate with your influ-
encers’ followers, and which they ignore, you can better target your future
messages.
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High-Quality Content
5 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 expen-
sive quality piece. If nobody bothers to read your $1 cheap article, it is a total
waste of that $1.

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Of course, high-quality content is a somewhat intangible return, so the value

of it is not easily measurable in dollar terms.

Conversion
6 In marketing, a conversion is when you manage to get somebody to re-
spond 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 mar-
keting 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 as-
sign 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 exam-
ple, what is the financial worth of that additional email address you obtain?
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Growth in Your Followers Brand Mentioning

You would set a target of growing your fol- Some firms simply use influencer marketing
lowers by a certain number or percentage to bring their brand to the public’s attention.
if you have set a goal of amplifying your They are not, at this stage, using it to gain ex-
reach. You could also choose this as your tra income, just awareness. Word of mouth
target if you are building up your followers advertising is often considered the most
for future online marketing campaigns. In effective form of marketing, and influencer
this situation, you will be using the content marketing, particularly if it involves high en-
shared by your influencers to drive people gagement, can help with this. Every market-
back to your own social media accounts, er hopes that their post will turn viral.
with these people in turn following you.
You can increase the odds of one of your
A variation of this is where you set up some posts going viral, splashing your brand in
form of online fanbase - often in the form front of a huge number of people, if you let
of a Facebook Group, although it is also influencers help you with your content dis-
common for these to operate via Google tribution. They already have sizeable follow-
Hangouts. The members of these groups ings, which increases your post’s chance of
may not directly pay for your services, but being seen and becoming popular.
they add buzz and conversation to your
group activity. Metrics that you can use to determine the
effectiveness of your influencer marketing
In turns of calculating an ROI, you need to on your brand includes the additional traffic
determine how much an additional follow- to a particular web page or landing page,
er is worth to you. You could base this on the number of new online subscribers, the
the saving in additional advertising it would growth in your followers and the number of
otherwise have cost you to generate a fol- times your brand is mentioned online, as a
lower, or if you have sufficient data, you result of these posts.
may be able to determine what the lifetime
value of a follower would be. Compare this Of course, if you truly want to know how
with your investment in the influencer mar- your brand is faring as a result of a campaign,
keting campaign. you can look at some of the more subjec-
tive data. For instance, read any online com-
ments referencing your brand. How positive
is the sentiment? Do they demonstrate a
positive digital image for your brand?
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Traffic to a Specific Landing Page / Form Completions

Website
There are times when your ultimate goal is to
Quite often a company sets a goal to in- receive information from visitors to a specif-
crease traffic to a particular landing page ic landing page or website. You want peo-
or website. This is often a page promoting ple to do more than just look at the website
an event, or another form of offline activi- for a few seconds. You want them to fill in a
ty, hence the conversion is simply visiting form and enter some data.
a page, rather than requiring visitors to do
something while they are there. A common example of this is when you
are holding a survey, and you want to in-
This is also quite common when your aim crease the number of people providing you
is to educate your visitors, rather than to sell with responses. Another situation could be
anything to them. where you are holding a competition, and
you want people to fill in their competition
Again, if you want to determine a numerical entries online.
result for your return on investment, you will
have to come up with a notional value of To determine your ROI you will need to de-
the worth of a visitor to the particular page cide how much the completion of the form
you wish to funnel them.ing campaign. is worth to you, and you will also need to
clearly distinguish which visitors to this page
(who in turn fill in the form) arrive as a result
of a particular influencer marketing cam-
paign.

Growth in Users of Your Product /

Service

If your product or service operates on a sub-

scription model, for instance, many of the Signups to a Newsletter /
SaaS offerings now available, you are like- Subscription
ly to set an aim of building up an ongoing
relationship with new users. You are not af- One specialist type of form that online visi-
ter one-time sales. In this situation, the main tors to your site regularly fill in is the signup
goal of your influencer marketing is proba- form for your newsletter or some subscrip-
bly some form of user growth. tion. Many people believe that their email list
is gold. People willing to sign up to your list
If your influencer marketing leads to in- have demonstrated that they are interested
creased paying subscribers for your prod- enough in your product or service to willing
uct or service, it is very easy to work out to provide their email address to learn more
the worth of a customer, and in turn the re- about your brand. These people will have
turn on your marketing investment.tinguish more brand affinity with you than your so-
which visitors to this page (who in turn fill cial media followers. Hence each new sub-
in the form) arrive as a result of a particular scriber probably has a higher lifetime value
influencer marketing campaign. to you than a new social media follower.
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Increased sales
Obviously, an increase in sales has to be the holy grail of influencer marketing. You do need to
recognize that there may be a time lag between you starting your influencer marketing cam-
paign and new people buying your products. Social media usually helps build relationships,
rather than instantly leading to sales. The purchasing cycle can be quite lengthy for some types
of products or services, and it will usually extend until well after you perform the influencer
marketing. You need to ensure you keep on measuring results even after the campaign itself
finishes.

This is the easiest form of conversion to determine an ROI, as you know the precise figure that a
sale is worth. You do need to be able to clearly distinguish which specific sales occur as a result
of a particular campaign of influencer marketing.

In this case, your calculation will simply be: (Sales price per item x Number of extra items sold)
- Cost of your campaign / Cost of Your Campaign
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03 Tips for
measurement of
conversion
While influencer marketing may sometimes generate
clear and obvious results, particularly with easily-seen
statistics like the number of followers or engagements
connected to a post, some of the other types of
conversions are not so clear-cut. This is particularly so
when you need to distinguish between multiple channels
and influencer campaigns. Without careful planning, you
will not, for instance, be able to tell for certain whether
a particular campaign generated increased sales, or
whether they came about for some other reason.

What methods are used by online marketers to give you a clear

pathway between their marketing efforts and the end results they
hope for?

Tracking Some Form of Correlation

1 This is the simplest way to measure conversion and is often all you
need. You simply connect some event, such as the publishing of a
post, with the next stage of conversion. For instance, you may consider
that that all subscriptions taken up on your website within a week of a
new post will have come about as a result of that post.

Using Trackable Links

2 One way you can keep track of traffic coming from your influencers’
efforts is by the use of trackable links. You can easily provide a different
trackable link for each post of content you share with a different
influencer. This way you can easily tell where any traffic comes from.
These are regularly used in Facebook, Twitter and on blogs.

Using Conversion Pixels

3 You can position a conversion pixel on your website, which will allow
you to pick up people who may visit your site due to what an influencer
has shared with them, but who have not followed the influencer’s link.
Some sites see up to 40 percent of their influencer traffic come this
way, and this would otherwise be missed if you relied on trackable
links alone.
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Providing Promo Codes

4 You can easily customize promo codes for different users and campaigns.
This makes it particularly easy for you to track the effects of a campaign. For
instance, you may provide a promo card offering a 10% discount for one
influencer to share with his followers. You will know every time you make a
sale to people who enter that promo code, that their custom is a result of that
particular influencer campaign.

Consumers love a bargain. If they are considering a purchase, then a promo

code may be enough incentive to encourage them to finalize the transaction.
This works particularly well then you give an expiry date for the promo code,
as it creates a sense of urgency.

Create a Hashtag Campaign and Tie That to Revenue

5 You could tailor your social media campaign to use a specific hashtag and
encourage influencers to use your hashtag with their followers. You can then
tally uses of the hashtag, considering its use to be part of your influencer
marketing campaign.
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04 Conclusion
Influencer marketing is an important tactic for the
modern business that recognizes the importance of
social media. With Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and
newer channels like SnapChat, there is a whole new
breed of influencers. A marketer’s ultimate aim is for
a post or video about their brand to go viral.

Influencer marketing is like every other business expense, however.

You need to be able to justify that it is worthwhile. Hence you need
to be able to prove that your influencer marketing is providing a
positive rate of return on your investment.

There are many methods to determine a return on investment.

However, the best method for you depends on your goals. What
are you hoping to achieve from influencer marketing?

Once you have determined your goal, you should then be able to
see if your marketing is best for you. Just remember to allow for
the time delays between your campaign and when you start to
see conversions.
Be prepared to experiment. If one campaign fails to inspire interest,
try a different campaign, with a different influencer. Always be
willing to adapt. Social media is a fast moving phenomenon, and
you need to be ready to move with it.

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