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When you want to use influencer marketing to get more traffic to your website, there are two main considerations: setting campaign goals and measuring results. If you're only focused on one of them, you might be missing out on important ways to grow your audience. Once you set your goals and find an influencer, though, your work isn't done. Instead, it's time to track how well the influencer is doing when it comes to meeting your goals and make any needed adjustments accordingly.
Defining your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for any influencer campaign is the starting point when you want to see success. That includes setting specific, measurable objectives as well as understanding which KPIs you want to track. There are a lot of different areas you could consider, but they might not all provide you with value when tracking what you need to know.
That's why looking into which aspects of the campaign you need to track and what kind of results you're expecting to see are both vitally important. When you have that starting point you have something to compare to the results you're getting as the campaign moves forward. If you need to make adjustments, it's much better to do that as quickly as possible to reduce any unnecessary spending on a campaign that isn't working well.
Once the campaign is up and running, it's time to monitor the influencer-generated content that's being produced. Look at what the influencer is putting out into the world and make sure it's aligning with what you expected and what you need. If you're confident it's the right kind of campaign, then you'll want to start looking at the data. However, make sure you know which data matters, or you can end up mired in a lot of numbers that don't really tell you anything.
Analyzing engagement metrics like shares, likes, and comments can give you a lot of good information, but so can assessing the reach of the influencer and the demographics of their audience, too. Both of those matters when determining how well the campaign is performing. If your influencer has a big audience but you aren't seeing much engagement with your campaign's posts, something is missing the mark. Finding out what that is can improve your campaign quickly.
Don't worry too much if you don't see amazing numbers on the very first post, though, because a campaign is about more than just one post from an influencer. If the campaign is working well overall, that's what matters. Then, you can feel more confident that you and your influencer are on the same page and can talk to one another about anything that might not be working as well as you'd hoped.
Along with looking into whether your influencer's audience is engaging with their posts and whether the influencer is giving you what you expect from your marketing agreement, you also need to evaluate the impact of the campaign itself. After all, all the likes and comments in the world aren't going to matter if people don't come to your website and buy your book. That's why you need to track both your website traffic and the conversions from visitors to customers.
You also want to look for any changes in brand awareness and sentiment. In other words, you need to see if more people are learning about your brand. Maybe they didn't even know you existed before, and now they do. Or they might have been aware of you but didn't know you offered something specific they would be interested in. The sentiment matters, as well, since this is a measure of how people feel about your brand.
This can include whether they like your company or whether they feel like you're trustworthy. Even if they don't know that much about you, they can form an impression from social media and your website that can be tough to change. That's why you want that impression to be a good one. If they have an initial good impression from the influencer campaign, that probably won't change much without a significant event or experience.
The ROI (return on investment) you get from the influencer marketing campaign is another area that's extremely important because you need to know whether what you're doing is cost-effective for your brand. If you're spending a lot of money and not getting much of a result, it's time to make some adjustments or choose a different type of campaign. You may want to consider other influencers, for example, or change up your marketing message.
Over time, your campaign will need to continually change and adapt to anything that's not working well. The first part of that is identifying successful strategies and tactics so you can keep using them or add them to your marketing arsenal. If something is working, you'll want to keep using it because it's a valuable part of the campaign. Just make sure it's not the only thing you're doing, as that can get too repetitive and turn off customers that don't see anything else from you.
There can also be areas for improvement in any influencer marketing campaign, and the goal of finding those is to make changes that will improve the quality of your campaign and help increase your ROI. If you're not getting the engagement numbers you expected or the conversion rate you were looking for, for example, it's important to discover what's causing the disconnect between where you are and where you'd hoped to be so adjustments can be made.
With an iterative approach to campaign optimization, you can repeat what works and let it help your business grow. Along with that, though, make sure you adjust anything that's not working well for your company or its bottom line so you can make the most of the time and money spent on any influencer campaign.
