5 Engagement Metrics to Review Before Launching a Campaign

Influencer marketing campaigns can elevate a brand and its products. To do so, you need the right influencer. You need an influencer who aligns with your brand’s values, shares a similar audience, and has the engagement metrics necessary for success.

Metrics are important. When you find an influencer you’d like to work with, engagement metrics should be part of your discovery call. The influencer can share important metrics with you, provide them in a media kit, or direct you to a profile on an influencer marketplace like The Creator Marketplace® to review analytics along with their profile.

What metrics should you inquire about? You’ll find a list below, but first, let’s talk about a metric everyone is curious about when it comes to influencer marketing: audience size.

How important is an influencer’s audience size?

There’s a lot of emphasis on the size of an influencer’s audience or their number of followers. While you might assume that working with an influencer with a large audience is your brand’s best shot at success, you’re putting quantity above quality.

It’s better to have an influencer who’s well-matched with your brand and has strong engagement than it is to have an influencer with millions of followers.

As you’re looking for the right influencer to work with, don’t focus much on audience size, focus more on the metrics below.

Metrics to review before launching an influencer campaign

Here are the metrics you should look into, listed in their order of importance:

Engagement

One of the first metrics to check is an influencer’s engagement metric.

Engagement measures the number of likes, shares, and comments that influencers get on average. As you suspect, you want an influencer with high engagement. When your brand is endorsed by the influencer, you want his or her audience to generate buzz and spread the word about your brand.

What kind of engagement rate should an influencer have? It varies widely by niche, audience size, and industry.

However, according to Statista, nano-influencers, with a following of 1,000-5,000, had the highest engagement rate in 2021 at 4.8%. All other influencers hovered around 1-2% engagement.

Audience demographics

Working with an influencer gives you access to a unique, curated audience. For the best success, you should pick an influencer whose following matches your target audience.

Before you reach out to an influencer, know who you want to target. Get as specific as possible. For instance, you might want to target American women age 65-plus who are interested in high-end fashion.

Talk with the influencer about his or her audience demographics and try to find an influencer with a matching audience.

Post frequency

How often is a potential influencer posting on social? Brands need active influencers who regularly engage their audience. How many posts per week accomplishes that? Good question. Again, it will vary.

Influencers can post as often as they want as long as they post high-quality content, but it has to be sustainable too. Most influencers post somewhere between three times a week to once a day. The key is being consistent.

Comb through an influencer’s feed and check the dates to see how often the influencer interacts with his or her audience.

The number of people or brands the influencer is following

Take a look at the number of people the influencer is following. A serious influencer will take the time to follow people in the industry and brands that are important to him or her. You want an influencer to see social media as a two-way flow of communication.

Take a peek at who the influencer is following too. It can show the brands and people the influencer supports.

Is there a particular number you should look for under “following?” No, but the number he or she follows shouldn’t be higher than his or her following. If the number of following is higher than the number of followers, it likely means the influencer is just starting and is following a bunch of different accounts in hopes of building their audience.

Number of previous influencer marketing campaigns

How many brands has the influencer worked with? An influencer should be able to give you a number and provide some examples.

If an influencer has no experience, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it likely means you’ll need to provide more direction than you would to an experienced influencer.

Ideally, even an inexperienced influencer should share content that interests your brand. It might not be a sponsored product endorsement, but the influencer should have product reviews or demos in their feed that can serve as brand-minded content.

Researching an influencer’s metrics is part of finding the right content creator to support your brand. If you’re conducting this kind of research manually by looking up influencers, sifting through posts, and scheduling discovery calls, there’s an easier way. You can use influencer marketing software like IZEA Flex to find influencers, track payments and insights, visualize concepts and collaborate throughout the campaign.