Tracking engagement: How to analyze the impact of influencer content

How do you measure your influencer marketing engagement?

Engagement is a crucial aspect of influencer marketing that goes far beyond the number of likes and comments on a post. Understanding how your audience interacts with influencer content is essential for assessing the effectiveness of your campaigns. This blog post will guide you through the process of tracking and analyzing engagement metrics, offering insights into how influencer content impacts your brand and audience.

We’ll cover:

1. Why engagement metrics are vital
2. What engagement metrics you should measure
3. Tools to measure engagement
4. How to improve engagement through collaboration

Let’s get started!

The significance of engagement metrics

Why should you prioritize engagement with your influencer marketing? Well, the simple answer is - because you can measure it! Influencer marketing has a huge leg up over other marketing methods because of this. Social media is great for reach, brand awareness, and much more, but the most exciting opportunity is the potential to drive cost-effective results. Influencer marketing still boasts an incredibly high ROI for your average campaign, especially if you use niche influencers with a strong relationship with their audience.

Engagement metrics give you feedback on how well the content resonated with your target audience. It puts it to the real test - did it convince them enough to take the desired action? Whether it’s signing up to your service, downloading your app, buying your product, influencer marketing can bring you results (even more important in a time of tight budgets!)

Influencer marketing platforms like Boksi can help immensely with this, as they provide a detailed breakdown of your campaign performance to help you measure both your reach, and your audience engagement.

Types of Engagement Metrics

There are tons of potential ways to measure engagement. But which one is right for you? That depends on your business goals and campaign, but here are a few of the most common engagement metrics to track.

• Likes - Likes may not signal too much in today’s era, but it’s still useful for getting a general idea of what content resonated with which audience.
• Comments - Taking the time to comment on a post signals that the content resonated on some frequency, but you still need to evaluate the comment, and whether posts with more comments also translate to more engagement further on.
• Shares - DMs and private channels are becoming more popular with users, and while you can’t see what they discuss about your content, you can see how often your influencer content gets shared. This can be particularly useful when you want sign ups, but make sure to evaluate that with your sign up rate as well.
• Saves - Users can save your content for later viewing, which can be positive if people want to engage with you but can’t at that moment.
• Total engaged - this can give you a raw number of the engagement actions that people took. It’s best to compare this to your overall reach to get a better understanding of the actual engagement. Commonly, this takes into consideration all of the engagement actions listed above, so it’s not a perfect metric. However, it is super useful for giving you an idea of your impact.
• Cost per engagement (CPE) - like your CPM and CPC, this is how much you spent for one engagement action.

You can also further the impact of these metrics by using UTM links in your influencer marketing campaign! We have a blog post that expands on it, but for those you don’t know, the basic premise is that you provide a slightly different URL to each influencer in your campaign, for example to a sign up or download page. Then you can measure the traffic to each URL, and the actions that those visitors took. You’ll have a greater idea of which content drove the most traffic, and then which influencer was persuasive enough to convince users to take the action you want.

Monitoring and measurement tools

So how can you measure your influencer engagement data? Doing all this manually is a ton of time - asking influencers for their stats, compiling them, reporting on them…

Luckily, there are a few services that, combined, will give you the best reporting possible (and bang for your buck).

Influencer management platforms. Boksi helps you manage the entire influencer marketing process in one place, from campaign creation to reporting and even payments. You can see a detailed breakdown of your results post-campaign, detailing the engagement stats, reach, and best performing content.

Analytics software. Your website analytics software is the next stop for measuring desired actions. When combined with UTMs and promo codes, you’ll get detailed info on sign ups, website actions, sales, and more.

Social mentions and/or reviews. Measuring how people feel and talk about your brand before and after a campaign can be a good measure of its impact as well. There are multiple tools to help you tie in your brand.

As with most marketing stacks, the best stack comes from one you build yourself that suits your needs. Even though some tools report to be the “all-in-one”, these often come with unused features, and your resources could be better spent in using multiple, focused tools that do exactly what you need, and compiling the results together.

If you’d like to chat about adding influencer marketing campaigns to your marketing mix, we’d be happy to help you evaluate whether Boksi would save you time and money in managing your campaign and reporting on results - schedule a call with us here!

Improving engagement through collaboration

Once you have a baseline of your engagement stats, the next question is: how can you improve it?

Well, when planning a new campaign, a great brief is your best bet. When creating your brief, make sure to consider these tips!

Include clear call-to-actions. You know what the end goal should be, but the influencer might be left guessing if you fail to include it in your brief. So be explicit with what you want to achieve, and what you want the influencer to convey to their audience. Boksi can help with this - we offer a full section in our brief creation tool about Do’s and Don’t, as well as script options.

Examples of preferred content. Influencers always love to see what has worked for you in the past, so help them speed up their creative process by sharing examples of your best performing content. For example, if you are looking for a certain type of TikTok video, share an example. Or if you have a particular style of photo you want, that will help the influencer understand what you want, and wow you with their content!

Plan posting dates close to one another. Boksi makes this simple - you choose the range of dates you want influencers to post, and influencers choose the best dates for them. Posting within a tight range of dates will reinforce your message with your chosen audience, increasing the likelihood of action.

It also helps to chat one to one with your chosen influencers to help coach them on what you’re looking for, in order to maximize their creativity and align their content with your business goals. Boksi provides an excellent platform for managing the entire influencer marketing process, as we not only help you find the best influencers through our network of 20,000 creators, but we also allow you to chat with them directly within the platform. There they can share drafts of their content for your approval, ask questions, and refine their pitch until it’s as engaging as it can be.

Ready for your next campaign?

Embracing engagement data in your next campaign will help you both now and in the future. But you need the right tools to measure it effectively.

Boksi provides detailed insights for all your influencer marketing needs, whether on instagram or TikTok, and whether you want to measure Reel, Story, or Post engagement - or all three!

We’d be happy to help you with your influencer marketing - book a meeting with us here and let’s chat.