How to Measure Influencer Marketing

How do you prove influencer marketing success?

It’s the #1 challenge marketers face, as revealed in our latest State of Influencer Marketing Report. That’s why we’ve got you covered with five fundamental inputs for effective influencer measurement, so you can measure your next campaigns seamlessly:

1. Social Conversation: These are the metrics that come to mind first when talking about influencer marketing, including impressions, engagements and clicks. Some call these vanity metrics, which in a way they are, but they are still important indicators of how content performs on social. The big addition to this list is social listening, to understand how creators impact a brands share of voice amongst the competitive set.

2. Media Effectiveness: This is the performance of creator content when brought into paid media buys. Typically brands are only spending a small fraction of their total media spend on influencer marketing, so how that content impacts the larger media spend is a key piece of the puzzle, on and off social media. It’s worth noting that we see creator content in paid ads (from the creators handle via allowlisting) consistently outperform BAU content from the brand handle by upwards of 2.7x.

3. Content Efficiency: Brands need boatloads of content these days, and that is not easy to afford in traditional production. Creators provide major cost efficiencies in that regard, and calculating that cost savings should be part of the ROI analysis.

4. Lift in primary KPI: I like to say that you can have several goals, but only one north star. It’s important to run a third party study on that north star, whether it’s a brand lift study to measure impact on awareness/perception or a sales lift study to measure impact on sales. Getting third party validation is important.

5. Learnings & Insights: If you are not collecting data on how different messages are resonating with your core audiences you are missing the boat. Influencer marketing unlocks a treasure trove of data that up-levels all of your other communication. We used to have to pay a lot of money to sit behind one way glass to listen to consumer interviews. Now much of that insight can be garnered from segmenting creator messaging and looking how each performs with different audiences. And don’t forget about surveying the creators themselves!

That’s the skinny on effective measurement. If you want to watch an amazing keynote on this topic, check out this one from Linqia’s Keith Bendes that was delivered at Creator Economy Live in 2023.