Importance of Setting Goals for Influencer Marketing

Long before you can determine if your influencer marketing campaign was a success, you’ll need to define your goals to know if you’ve hit your benchmarks. But how do you know which goals to prioritize? It might be helpful to know how other marketers set goals for influencer marketing.

When asked about their primary goals when working with creators, social media marketers said: generate more engagement (62%); reach new audiences (60%); strengthen our community on social (53%); drive revenues (42%) and promote our brand’s values (41%). 

If your brand is just getting started with influencer marketing, consider taking a cue from these survey results when setting your goals. They’ll not only guide your influencer marketing strategies but also inform your choice of influencer marketing metrics. After all, how else will you know your campaign was a success? 

Read on to learn more about the benefits of goal-setting before you plan your next influencer marketing campaign. If you’re wondering how to measure influencer marketing success, we’ve included a few key performance indicators for each goal.

Benefit #1: Build brand awareness

A good influencer marketing strategy can spread the word about your brand identity and company values. It can also separate your brand, products, and services from the competition. 

Look for opportunities to connect with your audience through social engagement, including answering questions, sharing relative information, and simply thanking commenters during the campaign. Be sure to clearly explain your brand’s unique selling proposition to the influencer so they can incorporate your stand-out feature or benefit in the content they create. 

Key Performance Indicators: Measure reach, engagement (comments, likes, shares), social mentions, and hashtag use.

Benefit #2: Generate leads

When it comes to measuring the impact of influencer marketing, calculating lead generation can demonstrate the value of your team’s efforts toward driving revenue. Even click-throughs to websites and e-commerce stores that don’t result in an immediate sale can be attributed to marketing. Tools like IZEA Flex make this possible through the power of associations. You can associate a campaign and creator with a tracking link and integrate Shopify and Google Analytics.

Ensure that your content management system is integrated with your customer relationship management software to obtain actionable insights from analytics. 

If you go the Managed Services route, you can get data about foot traffic and sales lift, for example, via our Solution Partners.

Key Performance Indicators: Measure click-throughs, promo codes used, traffic to websites and e-commerce stores, sales and more. 

Benefit #3: Improve customer loyalty

Previous and potential customers may feel more brand allegiance when the products or services being promoted come from an influencer rather than the brand. In addition, seeing positive reviews and comments on a post will show prospects — not tell them — that your brand can be trusted and your products and services can be relied on. 

Key Performance Indicators: Count the number of positive reviews and comments you received linked to the campaign, as well as positive mentions.

Benefit #4: Better-targeted content

If your content is seen by thousands of people, but you’re barely getting any engagement on your call to action, it may be an indicator that you need to better target your content for your influencers’ audiences. 

Review not only the content but also the type, be it tutorial video, images, or text, and call to action. Consider doing some A/B testing to collect data on the results. What you learn from comparing performance on two versions of content from the same influencer can help improve your sales funnel, reduce your acquisition costs, and optimize content for future campaigns.

Key Performance Indicators: Measure reach vs. engagement, as well as click-throughs vs. conversions.

Benefit #5: Earn more influencer and user-generated content

Influencers — especially nano, micro, and mid-tier — tend to be more trusted by their followers than brands. Your influencer marketing strategy should include goals to capture more influencer and user-generated content, which can not only reduce the amount of content your team needs to produce but also be used to increase clicks and boost conversion rates. 

Did you capture some positive reviews from customers who converted to your campaign? Repurpose them on your website or the product page of your e-commerce store to boost clicks and conversions. Both IGC (influencer-generated content) and UGC (user-generated content) can also be reused on social ads, in print collateral, and in email marketing. 

Key Performance Indicators: Calculate the number of unique pieces of content you’ve received from influencers or users that can be repurposed for marketing and put a value on each by determining how much it would have cost a member of your marketing team to produce or solicit the material. Tools like ContentMine in Flex serve as a place to store content for purposes such as this.

These are just some benefits of setting goals for your next influencer marketing campaign. With the right KPIs, you’ll continue to learn from your efforts, improve results, and demonstrate the value of your marketing team’s work. Don’t skimp on effort just to get your first influencer marketing campaign under your belt. You’re laying the foundation for an ever-evolving strategy that could benefit your brand for years.

Influencers:

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Marketers:

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