Influencer marketing is about creativity… fun… passion…
And cold hard data.
You have to be creative and you also have to be a data nerd. There’s no way around it: Data is essential to your influencer campaigns.
Where a lot of people go wrong is that they only have a partial view of their data. They’re not going as deep as they could with data analysis because they don’t have the right tools.
The result? They miss out on red flags that would have hinted at problems with their campaigns. They also miss green flags that would have helped them create a higher ROI if only they had known about them.
If you don’t want to miss out, keep reading to learn how to use data better so you can dramatically improve your influencer campaigns.
Why data is critical to influencer marketing
Influencer campaigns are investments. And those investments can be quite big. You’re putting a lot of money into these campaigns, and making big investments feels risky.
The way you lower that risk is with data. Diving deep into data with influencer campaigns will make it easier to create strategies that actually work. That means more brand exposure, better social media stats, and higher sales numbers.
If your data analysis isn’t strong enough, you’ll miss things. For example, you may decide to keep spending money on an influencer who ends up not giving you an ROI – and the warning signs were hidden in the data all along.
Data can’t always predict everything. But it can go a long way to help you have more control of your results. That’s why it’s worth it to find new ways to examine your data.
How to use data in influencer marketing campaigns
Planning campaigns
The planning stage of an influencer campaign is absolutely critical. If your plan isn’t specific enough, your campaign can run into problems like falling behind schedule, needing extensive revisions, not getting enough views, or not reaching the right type of audience.
Having a solid plan involves asking questions such as: What product(s) do you want to promote? What’s the timeline for the campaign? What platforms will you use? What content formats do you want influencers to create in? After answering these questions, you can get down into the details and flesh out the plan.
Your plan needs to clearly define the goals the campaign is trying to achieve. This involves determining your key performance indicators. KPIs are the numerical goals you have for your campaigns, such as follower count or views on a webpage. An example of a KPI is increasing your follower count by a certain percentage. Another example is getting a certain number of email subscribers.
Not sure how to come up with KPI numbers? Look at metrics from your past campaigns and come up with reasonable goals based on those. You can also compare your metrics with those of brands selling similar products.
Don’t forget to include deadlines with your KPIs so you’ll know how fast you’re achieving your goals. If you want to increase your follower count in a three-month period, compare that to the number of followers you gained in the previous three-month period to see your improvement. After all, as they say, you can’t improve something without measuring it.
Discovering influencers
Finding new influencers is an exciting part of the influencer marketing process… or maybe it’s just frustrating and nerve-wracking. You may be worried about choosing people who seem great on the surface but end up giving you lackluster results.
The way to avoid this and find the best influencers is by using data. With the right data tools, you can analyze influencers in depth to know which ones are worth investing into and which ones aren’t.
Use data analysis to discover things like:
- How many followers the influencer is gaining and losing each month
- How many of their followers are real vs. bots
- What the reach and impressions of their content are like
- What their engagement rate is and what types of engagement they’re getting
- What gender, age, and location the majority of their followers are
- How regularly they’re posting, and which types of content perform best
- How much of their content is sponsored vs. content they created by themselves
- What hashtags they use most
Chances are when you analyze several influencers, some of them will have great metrics in some areas and others will do better in other areas. That means there probably won’t be one “best” influencer who’s better for your campaign than everyone else. Choose your influencers based on which ones are best for the particular KPIs you’re trying to reach.
Adjusting campaigns in real time
Why wait until after your campaign is over to analyze the results? That’s no fun. Instead, go ahead and look at results while your campaign is running. This helps you adjust your campaign before it’s over so you can improve your results.
The insights you can get mid-campaign are powerful because you have the chance to react in real time. You can change something, see how that change performs, then change something else and see what happens. It’s a virtuous cycle of real-time improvement. And the more you do this in more campaigns, the better at it you’ll become.
When looking at campaign results, remember that there are three categories to measure: social media metrics, ecommerce metrics, and web metrics. You’ll need to see real-time stats in all three categories to know how to adjust your campaigns on the fly.
One example of these adjustments is changing your spending levels mid-campaign. If you have multiple creators putting out your sponsored content and one creator’s content is performing better than others, it’s smart to pay more to boost their content. Or you can work with them to quickly make more content.
Another way to adjust your campaigns is to notice engagement spikes in real time. If you see your likes or website hits spiking all of a sudden, double down on whatever caused it. Maybe a creator posted a certain type of reel or story that resonated with the audience. Figure out what caused the sudden increase and then figure out how to do more of it.
Getting these real-time data insights isn’t hard at all. No need to spend time tediously typing data into a spreadsheet. With GRIN’s automated data collection feature, you can get all the metrics you need right when you need them so you can make use of them.
Analyzing ROI and creating reports
When the campaign is over, data plays an even more critical role than before. This is the time to look at your results and see what worked and what didn’t, and create a report to show stakeholders. You’ll use these results as a reference point to plan your next campaign.
When you’re making your report, remember that it needs to balance being thorough with being easy to understand. Your report can use written explanations, charts, and graphs to give stakeholders a view of the campaign from all angles, but it also needs short summaries and bullet points to make things simple.
A good report answers these questions:
- How many of your KPIs were reached?
- Which influencer helped you reach those KPIs the most?
- What platform did your campaign do best on? (Consider investing more into that platform next time.)
- How do your views compare to your conversions? Did people just look at the content, or did they take action?
- What type of content performed best with various metrics such as views, likes, comments, etc?
- How much money was spent on boosting content? How many conversions did that boosted content generate?
Answers to these questions and more can help you calculate the campaign’s ROI. Influencer marketing is an investment, and data helps you protect that investment so you’ll have a greater return.
Identifying top performers and building relationships
Long-term relationships with influencers are the ultimate win. Working with influencers repeatedly over time is better than one-off campaigns, because long-term relationships mean influencers will promote you to their audience repeatedly. This helps the audience know, like, trust, and buy from your brand.
But that doesn’t mean every long-term influencer will be a success. You have to identify which influencers are most likely to boost your sales over time, and that involves data. Study your campaign stats and find the influencers who played the biggest role in helping you reach your KPIs.
It’s nice to have good relationships with every influencer you work with, but it’s especially important for influencers you want to work with long-term. Be sure to build rapport, show how much you appreciate them, and plan with them for the future. Use your campaign data to show these influencers just how much they helped you – they’ll be happy to use those numbers in their media kits.
Key takeaway: Diving deeper into data helps you see things you’re missing.
You may think you’re already paying attention to your data. But ask yourself if there are things you haven’t tried yet, or questions about your data that your current tools aren’t able to answer.
Think of a doctor. You wouldn’t want your doctor to only have a surface-level understanding of what’s going on in your body. They’d miss important things and wouldn’t know how to treat you! You want a doctor who thoroughly understands all the details so they’ll make the right diagnosis.
It’s the same with influencer campaigns. You want to know all the aspects of your data so you can get the best bang for your buck on your campaigns. It’s hard to do this with bare-minimum data tools.
The GRIN platform helps you go deeper with automated data collection, wide-ranging insights, and advanced reporting tools. So whatever you’re doing with data now, you could be doing it better.
Numbers don’t lie… and that’s why data is so easy to trust.
