Are you measuring it at all?
Okay, I bet you are. After all, budgets are tight, and you need to prove that the money you do spend brings results. But which results should you measure for your influencer marketing campaigns? How can you show progress?
Well, never fear. This guide will help you.
But before we get into it, I need to clear up some common misconceptions about influencer marketing and measuring results.
First of all, influencer marketing is a long-term game. The best results compound from the results of your previous campaigns, just like ads. While you run many different paid ad campaigns, these ads are all part of a broader paid acquisition strategy, which feeds into your overall marketing strategy.
Influencer marketing is no different. In fact, I argue that it's more important to think of influencer marketing as a long-term effort rather than a short-term one.
Why? Influencer marketing thrives on building trust with your audience. You speed up the trust-building by leveraging the trust of the influencers you collab with, but you still need to build it up.
So while influencer marketing can bring you great results, it will take time to prove the true impact of it. If you need quick wins now, influencer marketing is not the silver bullet you might think it is. However, it will definitely build great results in the long term, so you there's no reason not to start! As they say, the best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago; the next best time is now.
So while influencer marketing can bring some quick wins, it's true power lies in the long-term trust it builds with audiences new and old, and the credibility it provides your brand by leveraging the networks of other influencers. It can become a key part of your marketing strategy, but first you need to prove the results.
And that's exactly what this guide is here for. So let's get started!
Here's what we'll cover:
Photo by @emmasofiacake
Define your influencer marketing goals first
Let's not put the cart before the horse - you need to decide what you want to achieve with your influencer marketing collaborations. And while I know you want to do everything with influencer marketing, you'll get better results by focusing your efforts towards a specific goal.
Your goals for influencer marketing depend on your strategy, but most influencer marketing collaborations focus on the following goals.
This is a common goal we hear in discussions with top brands across Finland and Germany. However, we're going to tell you something, and it might be difficult to hear.
If you focus your influencer marketing campaign purely on sales, you're gonna have a bad time.
We're not saying that influencer marketing can't drive sales - it certainly can! However, by focusing solely on sales, you are skipping the long-term benefits of influencer marketing, and risk alienating your audience. Worst of all, you also risk alienating other influencers, which can ruin your future successes with influencer marketing.
Working with influencers means tapping into the influence and network that a certain individual has worked hard for. These followers follow the influencer for different reasons, but most likely these reasons have something to do with the influencer's authenticity and the way they live their life. If your brand doesn't "fit" the influencer, or if they simply promote your product once and then never again, that may drive sales briefly in the short term, but in the long-term it will negatively impact your brand and sales.
And the game has changed. Influencers are more wise than ever and more wary about the types of products they promote for their audience. They know they risk breaking hard-earned trust by pushing sales for products that they don't use daily or really believe in.
Sales from influencer marketing come from the long term, when the influencer can honestly promote your product over a longer period, and can really show their audience how it fits into their life. Not by a brief mention and then never again, but by continuous mentions, casually throughout their content.
So when you want to push sales from influencer marketing, ask yourself these two questions:
If either of these questions are no, you'll get better results by focusing on other goals until you can answer yes to both of these questions.
Another popular goal of influencer marketing is brand awareness. By tapping into the network created by an influencer, you can boost your reach and gain more authentic connections than by reaching a totally cold audience with paid ads.
However, in this age of increased budget scrutiny, and the dire need to report real numbers and prove ROI, how can you report accurate results that drive your business forward?
Despite all the amazing benefits that influencer marketing can bring, it's not a be-all, end-all solution. Influencer marketing brings the best results when you have a dedicated strategy and coordinated campaigns over the long-term.
Naturally, measuring and proving results will take time, but there are great KPIs you can measure and track over your collaborations.
Engagement. Tracking engagement beyond sales will give you an idea of how your influencer campaigns inspire viewers to take action, even if it is simply liking or commenting on the post.
Impressions. Measuring your impressions and views on each influencer post gives you an idea of how many people you reached.
Earned media value. To measure this, you compare your influencer content reach and views, and then compare that to what you would get from ads.
We cover how to calculate the ROI for all of these (and more!) later in this guide.
Did you know that you can also meet your content goals with influencer marketing?
What do I mean by content goals? Well, social media strategies demand a lot of high-quality content for use in organic social, but also ads. Producing this content yourself takes a lot of time. Or money. Most often, it's both.
But when working with influencers, you can repurpose the best performing content from them with tools like Boksi to both feed your content pipeline, and generate more sales or brand awareness!
Boksi really makes this simple - when working with influencers, they can choose whether they want to add their content for sale. You can purchase the full rights to that content after the campaign and use it wherever you wish.
This works wonders for ad creative, as you can see how the content performs during the campaign, and then use it later in ads.
Contact us for a demo of our platform and we'll show you how easy sourcing high-quality content from influencers really can be!
Photo by @janniamanda
So how can you measure the impact from your influencer marketing efforts?
Well, there are a few different ways, but your goals will dictate how you measure results.
Before I cover how to calculate ROI, I must stress that you need to properly attribute any desired result to your influencer campaigns. Whether it's sales, web traffic, or new followers, you need to make sure that those numbers going up are actually coming from the influencers you chose. We'll cover that soon.
First, let's cover how to find ROI for each goal!
Well, this one is easy - if your goal is sales, then you should measure... sales! The formula is simple - calculate the sales generated by your campaign and divide it by how much you spent, then times it by 100 (to get the percentage).
Let's say you run a campaign with 5 creators, each with a unique discount code and link. Over two weeks, those links generate 200 purchases worth €14,000 in total revenue. Your total campaign cost, including fees and product costs, is €5,000.
ROI = Revenue / Cost * 100
ROI = €14,000 / €5,000 * 100 = 280
You can also think of this as for every euro spent, you made €2.80. (Just leave out the * 100.)
However, you can also consider the lifetime value to customer acquisition cost (LTV:CAC). So say your average customer spends €500 in one year, and your campaign brings in 50 first-time buyers. The complete picture looks different.
Total LTV = 50 x €500 = €25,000
LTV-based ROI = €25,000 / €5,000 = 5
This can help give a longer term picture of the value generated by your influencer marketing collabs.
As I mentioned earlier, though, sales-focused campaigns with new influencers won't always bring instant results like these. When you hear about companies getting mad sales ROI from influencer campaigns, you'll almost always see that they have a) a strong strategy around influencer marketing, and b) multiple collaborations under their belt.
Just like most other marketing strategies, you need to start at the top of the funnel and work your way down. Strong sales come from strong brand awareness, and influencer marketing is a powerful way to put your product top-of-mind.
Can you calculate ROI from top-of-funnel brand metrics like impressions and reach? It's not as clear cut as sales, but you definitely can.
Let's say you run a campaign with 5 creators and it drives 1.2 million impressions across Instagram and TikTok. If your average paid CPM is €10, then the equivalent media value is €12,000.
The formula is: (impressions/1000) x CPM
So if your campaign cost was €5,000, then you can argue:
ROI = €12,000 / €5,000 = 1.4 (140%)
These impressions do not convert directly to revenue, but they do give you an idea of what you would have to pay to get similar results from other forms of marketing.
However, the best results come from measuring this over time and also monitoring your site's direct traffic or branded search volume after the campaign. This can suggest brand recall and intent were created, which can translate into conversions down the line.
You can also argue that word-of-mouth from influencers is a far more engaging and empowering marketing strategy in the long-term than seeing paid advertisements on the internet, even if the cost of paid advertising is lower.
(And it doesn't have to be one or the other - why not do both?)
Influencer content doesn't just live on the feed. After your campaign, you can repurpose it for paid social, emails, landing pages, product pages, and more. If an influencer provides you with a full suite of photo and video assets, you're saving on creative production and potentially increasing performance across all your channels.
While it can be hard to calculate the cost internally, the easiest way is to consider the time it would take you and your team to produce the same amount of content.
Let's say you run a campaign with 5 influencers. Each influencer produces a feed post, a reel, and three stories. So in total you have:
Consider your team and their resources. How much time would you need to create these assets, especially considering the variety you get from 5 different influencers. How much extra effort would it take from your team to get...
And the real kicker - how are you going to get that content in front of 5 different audiences?
These costs are harder to quantify, it's true. But time is money, after all. And time you spend creating this content is time you're not spending on other tasks.
If you are struggling to prove the value of using influencer-generated content, or outsourcing content production in general, you can always showcase what you have done with the time you would have previously used for content production, which is a concrete, if indirect, way to show ROI.
"We achieved X because our influencers produced content for us to use in Y" is a powerful way to convey the ROI of influencer marketing without tying a euro amount to it.
If your goal is to build trust and spark conversation, measuring ROI from engagement metrics could show promising results. This can work well with micro or nano influencers who often have smaller, but more engaged and dedicated follower bases.
So if you use many smaller influencers in your campaign, measuring engagement could provide a more realistic ROI than impressions. As well, engagement is one step better than impressions, as the viewer is actually taking an action.
Unfortunately it's difficult to calculate a hard number, but you can estimate it and compare it to your cost per click, for example. It's not the best, but it gives you an idea of what you pay per action.
There are also different actions that users can make on social platforms, such as:
You should also note that depending on your product and campaign goals, a click may be more or less valuable than one of these factors.
Finally, we come to how to calculate ROI from going viral. While this too is difficult to put a definite number on, you can estimate it by calculating your earned media ROI, or how much it would cost you to get the same results from paid campaigns.
For example, you can consider:
Let's say you spend €2,000 on a campaign and that leads to 5 other creators posting about your brand or product organically. Those posts generated around 250,000 impressions. If you know that those same results would have taken €2,000 to sponsor yourself, then you've already broken even on your earned media - and that's not considering the other ROI generated from the campaign in the first place.
However, this is strictly from any mentions you haven't paid for. So be careful not to include influencer campaigns you have run in this equation.
Photo by @rihlahunting
Still with us? We've thrown a lot of numbers and formulas at you, I know. But now let's get into how you can get the numbers to actually measure this stuff!
The most important thing is considering attribution. You need to make sure you are properly attributing results to your campaign to make sure that you aren't finding results that aren't there - or worse, thinking your campaign didn't succeed when it did!
So let's cover how you can get the metrics to calculate this stuff.
The most common method to track sales is via discount codes or affiliate links. You either measure uses of the code, or purchases from the affiliate link, and voila! Easy measuring. That's the easiest way to measure, and many ecommerce CRMs or management tools allow you to set this up.
You can also use Google Analytics and UTMs to track goal conversions - we have a great guide on how to use UTMs here.
For sales, you really need to track the action right to the end. If you simply track link clicks, well, you're going to lose some clicks to friction during the process, and then your numbers won't be accurate.
Discount codes are the safest option, as it's easy to attribute to the influencer, and because there is a discount attached to it, it's safe to bet that the buyer won't forget to add it. Bonus if you can add a direct link that takes them to a checkout site with the code prefilled to remove as much friction as possible.
Measuring brand requires you to measure results from social media, so any sort of social media analytics tool can do.
However, you can also use influencer marketing platforms to measure brand results like engagement, impressions, views, and more.
Platforms like Boksi allow you to see data directly from Instagram and TikTok, so you know you're getting data straight from the source. You can break the data down per influencer and per content piece so you really understand which influencer performed best, and which content brought the best results.
Plus, Boksi also provides you with a detailed campaign dashboard that shows you what sort of audience you reached, and in which countries and cities. This lets you know that your marketing efforts found the right people.
This one is more challenging, and there aren't specific tools to measure content effectiveness.
The easiest way is to document how many hours your team spends on creating content, then comparing that to the time you spend on other aspects of your work.
You should also evaluate creator marketing platforms to see how much time they can save you. For example, some platforms require you to do everything yourself, which can add to your time spent instead of saving you time.
However, some platforms (like Boksi) also take the admin work off your plate, like managing the campaign, finding creators, and much more. So you can spend time on the necessary bits and focus on other projects while your campaigns run in the background.
We mentioned using influencer-generated content to help solve content goals - let's talk about that in more detail.
If you're like most of our customers, the need for social media content is only going up (and up, and up...). But you need more than just content, you need something that stands out as we scroll through our favourite social media channels. You need content that's trendy, entertaining, yet still feels like your brand.
But... doesn't that sound exactly like influencer content?
Brands often contact influencers to negotiate usage rights of high-performing content after campaigns. However, those negotiations take time and can reduce your overall ROI.
Modern influencer marketing platforms like Boksi simplifies this entire process. For example, Boksi allows creators to list their content for sale after the campaign so you can purchase it with one click, with full usage rights. That means no negotiations for you and a fair price for the creators. And when we say full usage rights, we really mean full - you can use the content where ever you please!
Plus, after evaluating the results of the camaign, you can really see what content worked the best, and double down on the value generated from it!
Request your demo today and see how Boksi helps you both improve your influencer marketing processes, as well as feed your content pipeline.
Photo by @muitaihania
I'm biased, but Boksi is the best influencer marketing platform available to help you measure the results from your collaborations. But even better, it's also the best tool to empower your creator marketing initiatives!
Why is that? Well, let me tell you.
A deep network of vetted, professional creators. Whether you need creators for UGC campaigns, influencers for collaborations, or you want to partner with some of the most well-known names in Germany and Finland, Boksi gives you easy access to the creator economy.
AI-powered tools and robust technology to supercharge your workflows. We've built our platform to automate the admin work away so you can focus on the bigger strategic picture. From AI-powered brief creation to a powerful Creator Discovery Tool, you can spend more time on the creative work while moving faster.
A team behind the platform that helps you build a strategy to achieve your business goals. We know that you need more than just a platform - you need a partner to support you. We sit down with you and help you build out an influencer marketing strategy that achieves the goals you want, and then manage the campaign day-to-day for you. So that's even more peace of mind and more time on your hands.
If that sounds like something you would need, contact us today and we'll show you how easy influencer marketing can really be!
Still with us? Amazing! We're going to finish up with some final tips and things to remember.
Remember to set clear goals. The more specific and clear you are, the better idea you'll have of your results. Don't try to measure everything, either - remember, influencer marketing is a marathon.
Be an early adopter. Influencer marketing moves at the speed of trends, so you need to be ready to move fast too. Don't be afraid to adopt things early and try - by setting clear goals and being ready to measure accurately, you'll be ready.
Reuse and repurpose your influencer content. Influencer content can be reused in so many ways, like as webshop content or ads. When you find something that's performing well, make the most of it and reuse it on different channels.
Choose the right influencers. The right influencers can make or break your campaign, so spend extra time to choose the right ones. Focus on finding influencers who reach the right audiences you want, have a content style that resonates with your audience, and most importantly, embody the same values your brand does.
Develop long-term relationships with influencers. By becoming a brand that the influencer trusts, you'll also build more trust with their audience. And by becoming a fixture in that influencer's life, you'll create more dedicated customers who will stay with your brand.
Consider how influencer marketing can influence the entire customer journey. Influencer marketing is not just to generate sales - it can have huge impact before the customer ever visits your store or website. Consider how your campaigns can affect the entire customer journey.
Think of influencer marketing as a balance between brand and performance marketing. Influencer marketing taps into the influence that they hold to convince their audience to take a specific action, like performance marketing. But your association with an influencer also affects your brand, as well as theirs.
Attribution is key to success. Once you've decided what your goal is, make sure you know how you're going to measure it before you contact any influencers. Don't let your time go to waste!
Measure according to the objectives of your campaign. If you're generating awareness, then measuring sales or engagement is a poor metric, and your ROI will look poor because of it. Make sure you measure a metric that makes sense for what you're trying to achieve.