How To Leverage Influencer Marketing Platforms To Achieve ROI

Introduction

Influencer marketing involves collaborating with influencers in your niche to promote your service or product. Influencers generally have large followings that they’ve built over time and trust. 

So, when you collaborate with an influencer to promote your brand, you can expect to increase brand awareness and credibility, channel warm traffic to your page (as opposed to cold traffic through traditional marketing methods), and ultimately increase sales while saving time and money. 

In this article, we shall discuss leveraging the power of influencer marketing to increase your ROI. 

Potential Influencer Marketing ROI

Before we get into how to use influencer marketing to your advantage, it is vital to understand the influencer marketing ROI to begin with. The ROI of influencer marketing does not start and end with sales. Since there are generally multiple touch points before you make a sale, you need influencer marketing to help you every step of the way: 

• Increasing Brand Awareness: Increasing brand awareness involves directing more traffic towards your website, gaining more social media followers, and so forth. In the awareness stage (the top of the funnel), you can use influencer marketing to inform and entertain your audience and trigger their interest in your brand.
  
  You can collaborate with an influencer and post value posts, unboxing videos, contests, giveaways, and similar forms of content to boost your brand awareness and credibility in the awareness stage. 

• Positioning Your Brand As Their Best Option: Once you get more and more people to check out your brand, you are at a stage where you need to provide your followers information – answering questions and concerns. You can get a credible influencer in your niche to educate your audience and address their concerns, thereby positioning your brand as your audience’s best option. 

• Increasing Conversions: It all comes down to sales at the end of the day. You can get your influencer to post a detailed testimonial, where they talk about how they enjoyed your product or service, what they liked best, and so forth. You can also get them to promote discounts and coupons to get your audience to make a purchase. 

Identifying The Right Influencers

The first step to maximizing your influencer marketing ROI is to find the right influencers. 

How To Identify Influencers Who Align With Your Brand And Target Audience

You can use several methods to identify the influencers who align with your brand and target audience. Here are some of them:

• Use an influencer marketing platform: Influencer marketing platforms are specially designed to help you find the right influencers. You can filter influencers by location, demographic ,engagement rate, and so forth. 

• Social listening: Social listening is the practice of monitoring social media conversations around a certain brand, topic, or niche. So, if you use a social listening tool like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, etc., you can enter certain keywords and monitor the conversations around those keywords. Monitoring these conversations will help you find influencers. Once you analyze the data you get, you can filter your influencers to see who fits your brand the best. 

• Look out for events: Attending events in your niche or industry is an effective way to meet the kind of influencers that align with your brand and target audience. 

How To Measure The Effectiveness Of An Influencer

If you want to measure the effectiveness of an influencer, you need to first set goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). For example, you may want 2,000 followers in the next three months. Now that you have an end goal, you can track your progress accordingly.

KPIs are metrics that you track to gauge how effective the influencer is. To measure their effectiveness, consider tracking the following:

• Impressions: This refers to the number of people who have viewed a piece of your content. 

• Engagement: Engagement encompasses likes, comments, shares, etc.

• Website traffic: This refers to the number of visitors your website sees and how they got there. 
• Brand mentions: As mentioned earlier, you can use a social media listening tool to track the number of times your brand has been mentioned. Compare the numbers before and after working with your influencer. 

How To Analyze The Cost Of An Influencer

One of your primary concerns is probably your budget. Influencer marketing can be expensive or reasonable depending on the caliber of influencer, your goals, and so forth. You could end up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions on influencers who have millions of followers.

However, we shall give you a formula to help you estimate how much you might end up spending on an influencer. 

If you are working with an influencer, you’re either looking for:

• More conversions
• More brand awareness

You will most probably end up paying for Instagram posts, videos, and stories. Here are the formulae you can use to calculate the cost for all three: 

Cost Per Engagement = {(Add all likes, comments, shares) / Follower Count} X 100

Average Price Per Instagram Post = Recent Average Engagement X $.14

Average Price Per Instagram Video = Recent Average Engagement X $.16

Average Price Per Story = Recent Average View X $0.06

Planning And Executing A Campaign

Now that you’ve probably found an influencer to work with, you ought to know how to plan and execute a campaign effectively. 

How To Create a Campaign That Aligns With Your Brand’s Goals

Creating a campaign that aligns with your brand’s goals involves the following steps:

• Set specific goals: Without specific goals, you will not know what to look for and how to check for progress while running your campaign.
  
• Find the right influencers: As mentioned in the previous section, you can use a variety of sources to find the right influencers. Identify your target audience, use an influencer platform, and shortlist the right influencers to work with. 

• Set KPIs: Once you have goals in place, you need to know what metrics to track to measure your progress. We’ve already discussed KPIs in the previous section. 

• Create a brief: Come up with a brief that outlines your goals, objectives, target audience, the right Call-To-Action (CTA), and the expected deliverables from your influencer. 

• Collaborate with your influencer: Collaborate with your influencer, leverage their expertise and do your best to optimize your campaigns. You may have to monitor your campaign and make adjustments as and when necessary. 

How To Work With Influencers To Create Content That Resonates With Your Target Audience

As is the case with all your influencer marketing endeavors, you need to start by first setting your goals. Your content will change depending on whether you want conversions or brand awareness. 

• You can study your competitors and keep track of the types of content they’re producing that are performing well. 

• Once you identify the influencer you want to work with, take some time to understand their style and voice so that you know what kind of content aligns with their audience. 

• Feel free to collaborate on different ideas. While you want to trust in their knowledge and expertise, you can also do your own research and pitch them some suggestions to come up with the best content possible. 

• Monitor your campaign. As you put out content you think will work, you need to continually track and monitor your progress to understand which posts are doing well and others that aren’t. 

How To Measure The Success Of A Campaign

Measuring your campaign’s success is crucial to understand how effective your influencer is, and in turn, use this information for future campaigns.

• Set goals and KPIs. Do you want more traffic? More engagement? More conversions? Identify which metrics you want to track accordingly. 

• Use an analytics tool like Google Analytics tool to track and analyze your data. You can track impressions, bounce rates, conversion rates, etc. 

• Meanwhile, you also want to track your influencer’s metrics. Keep tabs on their follower count, recent engagement rate, reach, etc. 

• Calculate your influencer marketing ROI. Calculate how much you spent on the campaign and compare it to your goals and metrics to determine the ROI of the campaign. 

• Based on this information, identify strengths and areas of improvement and proceed accordingly. For example, you may want to improve your content, or find a better influencer, and so on. 

Utilizing Influencer Platforms

Influencer marketing platforms are one of the easiest ways to identify and work with the right influencers. 

How To Use Influencer Platforms To Identify And Connect With Influencers

Here are a few steps you can follow to find the right influencer the easy way:

• Look at different influencer platforms. This means social media – Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, etc. We’re also referring to influencer marketing platforms and agencies, which are specifically designed to help you find the right influencers to work with. 

• Create a profile and start looking at influencers’ profiles on these platforms. You can search for them based on their location, niche, and a myriad of other important parameters. 

•  Once you shortlist a few influencers, start evaluating them based on follower count, engagement rate, content quality and how much they align with your brand and target audience.

• Reach out to them. You could reach out to them manually. However, we suggest you use an influencer marketing platform or agency to reach out to them to improve your chances of getting a response. 

• Negotiate and collaborate with them: You can negotiate the terms of the campaign like deliverables, compensation, and so forth. Once both parties agree upon the stipulated terms, you can kick start the campaign. 

How To Use Influencer Platforms To Manage And Track Campaigns

You can go about tracking your campaigns in two ways – using UTM tracking or an influencer platform’s tracking feature. 

If you’re using an influencer platform, 

• Set up tracking links for your posts before you launch your campaign. Tracking links will allow you to track your web traffic and conversions. 

• Monitor your KPIs – engagement, traffic, conversions, etc. 

• Analyze your data and compare your results to the goals and objectives that you set before starting the campaign. 

• Once you do this, evaluate your campaign and identify areas of improvement to optimize your future campaigns. 

Examples Of Successful Influencer Marketing Campaigns

If you still aren’t sure about influencer marketing ROI, here are a couple of case studies we’d like to point you to to help you understand the value of influencer marketing: 

Madison World

Madison World, one of India’s leading media agencies, faced a couple of setbacks. The agencies they had approached for influencer marketing did not give them the clarity they needed to make an informed decision.

Secondly, they had trouble onboarding the right influencers.

We helped them with:

• Influencer discovery: Madison World used our 21+ filters to seamlessly identify their ideal influencer.

• Our real-time campaign reporting features helped Madison World track their published content, performance metrics, etc., allowing them to evaluate their campaigns with ease. 
• Finally, we gave them insights into individual influencer data, allowing them to identify the best influencers to work with. 

Country Delight

Country Delight, one of India’s best known D2C brands, were looking to streamline their process of finding the right influencer – with ease and transparency. They had trouble finding the right influencers for different campaigns and keeping track of them. 

We helped them with three things:

• Influencer Insights: We were able to evaluate content quality and give Country Delight a comparison of the performance metrics and costs of all their campaigns. 

• Real-time tracking: We were able to detail influencer statistics across all their platforms, allowing them to make an informed choice about which influencer to go with for each campaign. 

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is here to stay and its ROI is immense if you do it correctly. In this article, we took a look at how you can use influencer marketing to your advantage, its potential ROI, how to identify the right influencers, how to plan and execute your campaign, and finally how to use influencer platforms to simplify the entire process.