Influencer Marketing is reported to be the #1 fastest growing customer acquisition method. But new technology allows brands to go beyond tracking acquisition to understand how influencers are driving actual sales.
Influencer Marketing as an industry has matured considerably over the past few years in particular with regards to measurement and standardisation, making it much easier to make informed decisions backed up by data. We’re starting to see brands putting more dollars towards the industry because you can now measure the impact and ROI of Influencer Marketing efforts the same way you measure your other media campaigns.
Influencer Marketing’s Growth Spurt
Five years ago the central idea of Influencer Marketing was simply ‘promotion’ with an emphasis on surface-level metrics like views, likes, comments, shares. For a long time, this data simply wasn’t enough to make big investment decisions. It’s understandably difficult to convince a CMO to allocate 25% of the marketing budget to social media influencers when the metrics you’re sharing are just vanity metrics. For a long time, there was no standardisation across the industry and it was hard to measure and understand attribution.
But now, with considerable advancements in technology and the industry-wide standardisation of measurement and metrics, the goal of influencer marketing has expanded to include trackable revenue growth and sales. Now, we’re looking at attribution modelling where we can pull back sales data from eCommerce sites generated by influencer campaigns. We’re also investigating offline sales metrics to understand brand lift studies that use influencer marketing strategies.
There’s no question about it: Attribution is levelling up the game.
Driving ‘Sales’, not just ‘Likes’
Much of the maturity and growth of influencer marketing as an industry has to do with the standardisation of metrics across digital assets. Whereas before it was difficult to know which channels were driving a better ROI, we can now compare ‘apples to apples’, so to speak.
As time goes on and technology advances, we continue to hone in on a new, better understanding of attribution. With advancements made in how we track the customer journey, we can see exactly how much return a brand generates from a certain campaign. We can now venture beyond CPMs and more specifically determine the true ROI of an influencer’s post by reporting the sales attributed to that post.
With advancements made in how we track the customer journey, we can see exactly how much return a brand generates from a certain campaign, thereby giving brands access to the true ROI of their influencer efforts.
Influencers guiding consumers through the funnel
If the main goal of influencer marketing used to be bringing consumers to the top of the funnel, now it’s understanding how we lead them towards the ‘last click’, aka, hitting that “buy” button.
Influencers are, in effect, becoming their own eCommerce platforms for brands and products where you can sell and track sales direct from posts. By investing in new and exciting attribution technology, brands can better track and understand how to use a combination of influencer marketing and a re-targeting strategy to shepherd followers through the sales funnel for a better ROI.
Want to see how Allegiant Media can help you discover and connect with the perfect influencers for your campaigns? Get in touch & we’ll walk you through the platform.
This article was originally published on TaggerMedia.com on October 12, 2020.