What Influencer Marketing KPIs Make Up a Winning Success Formula?

By Venkatesh C.R8 mins read

Influencer marketing continues to gain ground precisely because it can make a lot of money for businesses and the influencers they partner with. Of course, as any digital marketing agency will tell you, you need to have a solid idea of the direction you need to take from the get-go. That’s when the importance of pinpointing your influencer marketing KPIs comes in.

Learning more about influencer marketing as a whole is one of the first, great steps to take. This post divulges all the basics of influencer marketing, and the best influencer marketing KPIs and explains all the essential factors involved in maximizing campaigns.

Why Companies Are All Too Eager to Launch Influencer Marketing Campaigns Nowadays

No two types of marketing campaigns are ever alike. So what makes an influencer marketing campaign different?

One of the best reasons behind its success is the fact that influencers are often given 100% control over how they promote products or boost brand awareness. Having that much freedom allows them to impart that much-needed authenticity when promoting.

In turn, these capabilities provide the reason why influencer marketing can bring about the following compelling advantages:

Acquire High-Quality Leads and Loyal Customers

This again goes back to the genuine marketing we explained above. What makes it all the more powerful is the fact that influencer marketing and social media marketing often go together.

Users on social media often belong to the top-tier category simply because they’re often more loyal (because influencers can easily engage with them through the platform) and more likely to promote products to their immediate family and friends.

A Bonafide Revenue Generator

We mentioned money as the main motivator for companies to approach influencer marketing services. That wasn’t meant as an understatement. Just consider the fact that some campaigns make as high as $20 for every $1 they invested.

More than 80% are able to 6x their ROI, so we can safely say that most influencer marketing is foolproof, especially if you work with a compatible influencer.

A Perfect Fit for Social Media Campaigns

PR companies for influencers will likely point out how they’ve had numerous success stories using Facebook. That’s no surprise at all since Facebook is pretty much an influencer-friendly platform where engagement rates tower over other social media networks next to blogs.

However, that’s slowly beginning to change as proven by the stats we’ve shared below.

Tends To Grow Quicker Than Organic

Stats in influencer campaign management show that influencer marketing enjoys faster annual growth than SEO and email marketing. Most marketers owe this a lot to the better control provided to the influencer and the authenticity that paves the way to better engagement and retention rates.

Just how effective is influencer marketing? We’ll let these stats tell it all:

Close to 95% of marketers can attest that they’ve given influencer marketing a try.
Instagram occupied the top spot among other social media platforms with more than $2 billion as its projected spending for influencer marketing in the US alone.
Facebook and Instagram marketing campaigns that include influencer ads among regular ads tend to convince 85% more people to add to carts.
An overwhelming majority of influencers (close to 85%) who make sponsored posts are women.

The Four Main Types of Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Giveaways

Hosting giveaways has always been a lingering inclusion in influencer marketing trends. And, come to think of it, why change something so simple yet effective?

You get to boost brand awareness significantly by simply letting the audience post, share his or her email, or answer trivia. Influencers and companies alike love the capability to tag friends so they’ll be able to join in the events.

Social Media Takeover

This is one reason why influencer marketing companies are booming. Basically, companies let the influencer “takeover” their brand in order to drive awareness, usually using their own creativity and resources. This necessitates working with influencers that fully believe in your brand.

Affiliate Marketing

This is simple, really, and doesn’t depart from classic affiliate marketing. The influencer plays the role of the affiliate and receives commissions from you once a sale is made. You get a portion of the revenues, making it a win-win.

What are the differences between influencer KPI, influencer, metric, and influencer objective?

Objective	KPI	Metric
A more broad, generalized goal (e.g. boosting sales or brand awareness).	Indicates whether your goals have been achieved. Number goals tend to be more reliable influencer marketing KPIs because they’re exact and transparent.	These are the numbers that are attributed to every KPI.

The Best Influencer Marketing KPIs to Focus On

High-Level KPIs

Brand Awareness

Involves gaining access to a target audience. Key metrics include impression and reach, which mean the number of times a post was displayed to users and the number of people that viewed a post, respectively.

Referral Traffic

Encompasses traffic that reaches a page from another source, namely a website. It only adds to the total volume of traffic you get from other sources, such as organic traffic provided by SEO Services or ads.

Audience Growth

While connected to reach and impressions, audience growth is more concerned with encouraging loyalty among your target audience.

Social Engagements

Since many an influencer marketing agency is all too eager to highlight the fact that influencers thrive on social media, they should be able to prove their mettle, so to speak, with high engagements on their shares, comments, likes, mentions, and hashtags.

Conversions & Sales

This is one of the must-haves as far as KPIs for influencer marketing is concerned. All the more so if a campaign was launched to boost sales. Higher conversion rates mean users are responding well to influencers’ CTAs.

CPC & CTR

Cost per click in influencer marketing should be as low as possible since it refers to the money you shell out for every click. Click-through rate on the other hand reveals overall engagement, via the rate at which they click on links shared by the influencer.

ROI

Measures the return you get relative to the money you spent on a campaign.

Low-Level KPIs

Influencer Engagement by Channel

Performance-based influencer marketing underlines the importance of zeroing in on channels that give you the most engagement.

Influencer Engagement by Post Type

Better engagement needs to extend to every post since knowing which posts your influencer excels in will lead to lowering unnecessary costs and better opportunities to improve campaigns.

User-Generated Content

Tracking how your audience responds to every post by your influencer only gives you more insight into brand awareness and engagement.

Average Engagement Rate

Often pinpointed by dividing the total number of shares, likes, and comments by cumulative reach.

Qualified Leads/Prospect

This is a vital KPI for companies that focus on nurturing their leads or building email lists because you’ll be able to narrow down the most qualified ones.

Post Link Clicks

This is a great traffic-related KPI, which you can freely and conveniently segment into either post type or channel to determine how each one is performing.

Conclusion

While not a cure-all to all marketing ills, we can’t deny that influencer marketing in digital marketing shows immense potential in helping companies achieve short-term and long-term goals.

The fact that there are specific key influencer marketing KPIs that can bring about unprecedented success and opportunities for growth only underscores it. It’s best to keep track of them by yourself or ask an influencer marketing agency for small business to guide you.