By Sam Fellows, Global New Growth Officer, and Matthew Chappell, Global Client Success Officer at Gain Theory
The significant financial commitment that brands are making in influencers continue to generate headlines, but many marketers are still searching for a robust way to quantify their impact.
The market is set to hit $32.5b this year, growing 35% annually, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. Yet measuring and proving effectiveness remains one of the biggest challenges facing marketers in the US and UK, according to Billion Dollar Boy.
Brands we work with are increasing influencer investments with varying degrees of measurement success. Some are getting it right and reaping the benefits, while others need assistance.
Here are four key challenges and practical solutions that we’ve identified alongside Noah Eisemann, Global Managing Director of Social & Influencer at creative agency VML.
Challenge 1: Unclear Partnership Objectives
As the influencer market grows and matures, brands need to ensure they’re not stuck in the past. “Today, you can connect influencers to every stage of the marketing funnel,” says Eisemann. “They can drive top of funnel awareness, they’re a great consideration driver, and they drive sales too.”
The problem is that some marketers only think influencers affect one of those areas – often brand awareness – which means they’re potentially losing out on other significant benefits that influencers offer. Often, this is because responsibilities and budgets are siloed and split between different teams.
What’s more, marketers aren’t always clear on which area of the business influencers are meant to influence.
Solution: Set clear objectives that specify what you want to achieve and when. Are you looking to increase brand awareness over three years, cultivate a community in 12 months, or boost sales next quarter? A structured approach to objective setting can help to overcome siloes and ensure budgets are allocated in the most effective way. It will also help you when it comes to selecting the most appropriate influencer for your brand and campaign needs, creating a brief, and showing how it integrates with your other investments.
Challenge 2: Inappropriate Metrics
Influencer marketing’s varied nature makes performance measurement daunting. Many marketers resort to what Eisemann calls “Band-Aid metrics” borrowed from other disciplines, like earned media value, or vanity metrics like impressions from celebrities without genuine brand connections.
Even with clear objectives, metric confusion persists. While most marketers invest in influencer campaigns for brand awareness or reaching new audiences, 60% measure success based on ROI, according to Billion Dollar Boy. As well as not understanding what metrics should be used for specific objectives, this disconnect often stems from post-rationalization, where marketers default to familiar metrics when reporting to leadership.
Solution: Setting clear objectives informs and narrows down the KPIs and metrics you should be tracking to measure performance. If the objective is growing brand awareness, for example, then you should be tracking metrics such as unaided brand awareness, branded search volume, and share of voice. It’s important that you can link your objective to a business objective (e.g. incremental sales growth) and to metrics tracked by your insights and analytics teams. This hierarchy of metrics is crucial for data and measurement purposes but also helps to create a shared language between marketing, finance and other areas of the organization.
Challenge 3: Fragmented Data
While we’ve come a long way in the last few years, obstacles remain when it comes to collecting and connecting influencer data from disparate platforms. Even for major brands, collecting all relevant data is challenging, and sometimes the ideal data simply doesn’t exist.
There isn’t a panacea to connecting different data points, Eisemann says: “It’s a complex jigsaw. There isn’t one tool out there that that enables you to connect the dots from sales to consideration to awareness.”
Solution: Having clear objectives and knowing the KPIs and metrics you need to track will enable you to narrow down the data you need. But if you don’t have access to all the data you require, proxy data can be a good substitute. For example, if you can’t track sales directly from an influencer campaign, monitor branded search volume increases during the campaign period. To improve your ability to connect the dots between different data, partnering with measurement companies is a good option. But it’s important to ensure they have access to the tools and platforms you need, are transparent about the methodologies they use, and have experience with similar brands in your industry.
Challenge 4: Limited Measurement Techniques
Selecting the most appropriate measurement technique can be challenging for digital-first marketers used to working with influencers on social platforms. The complexity increases when campaigns span multiple platforms, formats, and audiences, each with their own metrics and reporting capabilities.
Many often default to flawed techniques such as multi-touch attribution. As well as failing to capture broader effects like offline sales impact or brand awareness lift, these techniques also miss halo effects across product lines and long-term impacts on customer loyalty.
Solution: Embrace advanced techniques like incrementality testing and marketing mix modelling (MMM). Incrementality testing enables you to compare how ‘exposed’ and ‘unexposed’ audience cohorts react to influencer activity. This helps you to understand whether influencer activity has driven sales or awareness in isolation. MMM can isolate influencers as a distinct variable as standard but can also enable you to identify the attributes of influencers and their activities and activations that determine their success for a brand.
Unlock the full potential of influencer marketingDespite measurement challenges, influencer marketing continues growing because it works. As research by the IPA has shown, it delivers long-term impact. By setting clear objectives, aligning metrics to business goals, leveraging appropriate data, and embracing advanced measurement techniques, brands can overcome obstacles and prove the effectiveness of their influencer investments.
