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It’s not enough just to launch an influencer marketing campaign and work with influencers. You also need to show that your influencer efforts are effective and paying off.

One way to do that is to look at various influencer marketing metrics, such as engagement rate, traffic and bounce rate, and link tracking. The trouble with examining various metrics is that you might not have any way of knowing what they mean. What is a “good” engagement rate, for example? How can you tell whether or not influencer marketing is delivering what you expected?

Metrics and measurements are just part of the solution when it comes to evaluating the performance of an influencer marketing campaign. Also important is benchmarking. Benchmarks are “standards or a set of standards, used as a point of reference for evaluating performance or level of quality.”

The process of benchmarking involves comparing the performance of an influencer marketing campaign to the performance of a top-performing campaign or to a pre-determined industry standard. It’s a way to see if your campaign is stacking up to the competition and a way to see how others in the industry are doing things.

What Are Influencer Marketing Benchmarks?

Influencer marketing benchmarks can fall into multiple categories — it all depends on what you want to measure. What matters is that the benchmarks are comparing like to like or apples to apples rather than apples to oranges.

Two common categories for influencer marketing benchmarks include engagement rate and view rate. Engagement rate benchmarks can include shares, comments, and likes. View rates refer to how many times a particular post (especially a blog post) has been viewed and how long the average person views the post.

When it comes to choosing what metrics you’ll use for benchmarking, it’s important to think about your goals for a particular influencer marketing campaign. A few common goals include:

  • Increasing conversions
  • Raising brand awareness
  • Increasing traffic/getting more (new) website visitors
  • Increasing subscribers
  • Getting people to spend more time on your website
  • Getting people to purchase your products

Why Should Your Brand Pay Attention to Influencer Marketing Benchmarks?

There are a few reasons why influencer marketing benchmarks are worth paying attention to. First, metrics shouldn’t exist in a vacuum.

Knowing that an influencer has an engagement rate of 10 percent doesn’t exactly tell you much. With a 10 percent engagement rate, about 10 percent of the number of followers an influencer has are likely to like or comment or take some other action on a post.

But is 10 percent a high engagement rate or a low one? It’s hard to say unless you know what type of engagement rates other influencers or other influencer marketing campaigns are experiencing.

If you’re working with a beauty influencer and that person has a 10 percent engagement rate, but the average beauty influencer enjoys a 20 percent engagement rate. Then your influencer is performing below average. But if the average engagement rate is 5 percent for other beauty influencers. Than your influencer is performing better than average.

Another reason to pay attention to influencer marketing benchmarks is that they can show you where you can stand to improve. Your beauty influencer might have an above-average engagement rate on one platform (such as YouTube or Instagram) but might not get much traction on another platform (such as Facebook).

You can look at the benchmarks to see how other beauty influencers perform on Facebook. It might be that your influencer just doesn’t do well on that platform, or it could be that beauty influencers as a whole have less success on Facebook. If that’s the case, then it might make more sense for you to focus your efforts on the platforms where your influencer does best (YouTube and Instagram) and leave Facebook alone.

Examples of Influencer Marketing Benchmarks

One common example of an influencer marketing benchmark is engagement rate. In fact, engagement rate is often used to make the argument that certain types of influencers (micro-influencers) are more cost effective than celebrity or macro-influencers.

For example, the average engagement rate of an influencer on Instagram with under 1,000 followers is 8 percent. Meanwhile, the average engagement rate of an Instagram influencer with more than 100,000 followers is 1.7 percent.

If your company is working with an influencer  with 250,000 followers. Additionally, the Instagram posts that influencer creates for your brand have an engagement rate of 2.5 percent. Then your influencer is performing above average.

Using Past Campaigns as Your Benchmark

In some cases, it can be particularly useful for the brand to use influencer marketing campaigns as benchmarks. You can use data from your top-performing campaign as the benchmark against which you measure the campaigns to follow.

For example, let’s say your best-performing influencer marketing campaign led to a jump in sales of 10 percent. Over the course of a month. You can use that metric to evaluate how your next campaigns perform.

Remember to compare apples to apples when you use your brand’s own stats and details as a benchmark. Compare your current campaign at the one-month mark to a past, top-performing campaign at the one-month mark. That way, you’ll be able to see if the two campaigns are enjoying similar performance. Additionally, you can see if one is significantly better than the other.

When it comes to influencer marketing, it’s worth having an answer to the question “how is your campaign doing?” Using influencer marketing benchmarks gives you a quick and clear way to see just how your campaign measures up.