Influencer Marketing is Moving into Measurable Outcomes

Tim Cross 23 November, 2020 

Influencer MarketingWhile influencer marketing has grown significantly over the years, some marketers have remained sceptical about how effective it really is. In our ‘Buy-Side View’ series of interviews with marketers, we’ve often heard doubts about influencer marketing’s transparency, measurability, and overall impact.

Despite these concerns, budgets for influencer marketing are continuing to grow. Influencer analytics company Influencer Marketing Hub says the industry’s value has grown from $1.7 billion in 2016 to $6.5 billion last year.

But in exchange for these budgets, advertisers are increasingly looking for hard evidence of campaign performance. And the industry is adapting to accommodate this, increasingly bearing the hallmarks of a media channel that is every bit as serious as more established digital advertising channels. Both influencer tech companies and agencies are now offering more sophisticated measurement, performance guarantees, and combinations with paid media.

From performance predictions to guarantees

Many influencer agencies have been offering tools to forecast performance for influencer campaigns, based on the chosen influencers’ past work.

Influencer marketplace Captiv8 for example shows engagement predictions across platforms for all its influencers, giving a basic guide to how a post might be expected to perform. And Influencity’s platform predicts ROI based on the attributes of a brand’s chosen influencer platforms.

But recently, we’ve seen a few companies move beyond performance predictions to solid guarantees, by combining influencer marketing with paid media. Influencer marketing solution Influencer is one of the first to do this, recently taking on Maya Jundi, a specialist in performance marketing, as head of paid media to drive the effort.

Jundi says Influencer has found paid media is an effective way to top up influencer campaigns, helping to reach a chosen influencer’s followers who might have missed a sponsored post, as well as audiences who don’t follow the chosen influencer but who might still be interested in their content.

Jundi says the creative assets for these paid media extensions are usually readily available. “When a creator shoots for a campaign, they will usually send us quite a few different versions of the content for us to choose from,” she said. “And it might be that some versions of that content are best suited for an organic setting, whereas others might be better suited for a paid media setting, just through the different messaging or imagery that they’re using”.

And using the boost provided by paid media, Influencer is able to offer performance guarantees to its clients. These might be guarantees on reach and number of impressions, or on bottom of the funnel metrics like app installs, email registrations or sales.

“As the influencer marketing industry evolves, people are understandably asking more and more from it,” said Jundi. “And now we’re seeing more clients looking for hard outcomes. It’s been harder to provide these guarantees with just influencer marketing. But with paid media, and all of the different metrics and measuring tools that are available to us through that, we feel a lot more comfortable giving guarantees.”

It’s still relatively early days for combining paid media with influencer marketing, but we’re seeing others experimenting in the space too. CreatorIQ for example overlays paid media performance data from the social platforms on its influencer platform, to help optimise influencer campaigns.

Evolving beyond the influencer networks

Even where paid media isn’t involved, we’re seeing influencer platforms evolve their tool sets to meet marketers’ higher demands.

The first companies which sprouted up to help advertisers navigate the influencer space were basic influencer networks. The businesses, which are still common today, sign up influencers both big and small, learn about their audiences and the types of content they created, and then help link up brands and advertisers with the right partners.

Now, in the same way that the early display ad networks layered in tech and various complementary products over time, influencer agencies are doing the same.

Partly, this comes down to automating manual processes where possible. This can be as basic as automating communications and payments between the brand and the influencer during the campaign, which companies like Impact and Influo specialise in.

And many will automate the discovery process too. Nikita Baklanov, marketing specialist at influencer tech company HypeAuditor, said products like his own analyse influencers’ social accounts and automatically categorise them into segments like sports or fashion. It also layers in data on countries where the influencer is popular, the age and gender of their audience, and the level of engagement their content typically receives.

Some of these products will use image and speech recognition tools too, to give a deeper understanding of the type of content each influencer creates.

There are limits to how much this process can be automated. Influencer marketplace Takumi, uses tech to link up influencers with creators, but also emphasises the importance of human input in the process. Its Takumi X product, which involves influencers at the early stage of creative development for an influencer campaign, hand picks influencers to get a better brand fit.

For micro influencer campaigns however, where brands work with a host of smaller social media creators whose audiences are in the thousands rather than the millions, this kind of approach wouldn’t work, and automation can handle most of the heavy lifting. And HypeAuditor’s Baklanov said recent research run by his company found that mid-tier influencers, with audiences between 20,000 and 100,000 are the most popular with its clients.

More robust measurement

And pretty much all of these platforms are evolving their measurement capabilities in response to changing expectations, while still mostly stopping short of offering performance guarantees.

In one sense, there’s always been an inherent base level of transparency with influencer marketing, given the public nature of some of the key metrics. View, likes, and comment counts for posts on most of the big social platforms are publicly viewable, meaning brands and agencies can easily get a basic sense of how a campaign has performed.

But in recent years, influencer platforms have been working to give more robust insights into campaign performance.

HypeAuditor’s Baklanov said platforms like his own will break out more detailed audience measurement using integrations with the social platforms. These include identifying the demographic makeup of the audience reached by a particular social post, and filtering out likely fraud.

But Baklaonv added it’s increasingly common to measure outcomes through UTM links (which show when a user has clicked from a post onto another site), promo codes and affiliate links. These can give a measure of how effectively influencer campaigns are directly driving results like downloads and sales.

Baklanov said these bottom-of-the-funnel metrics being used more commonly, given this shift of expectations towards hard results.

“Influencer marketing is becoming more like performance marketing,” said Baklanov, “so it’s becoming more and more important to be able to help brands understand those direct outcomes”.

2020-12-22T13:09:11+01:00

About the Author:

Tim Cross is Assistant Editor at VideoWeek.
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