We are in the midst of a big influencer campaign for one of our clients, which involves various influencers, each creating original content, and each associated with a different hashtag. After months of planning the campaign is starting to roll out and all the parts are starting to come together. While we are only a few weeks into the campaign, a colleague raised the question this week of how will we report on this campaign when it is over. How will we communicate what we have achieved? There are various parts this report will have to cover.
- Reach, impressions and engagement
The whole point of using influencers is to increase the reach of your content. So, the first metric would be the following of your influencers to determine the potential audience your campaign reached. Next would be determining the number of people that saw the content, by looking at views and impressions of social media content. The value of digital content, however, lies in the engagement it evoked from followers. How many likes, shares, comments or clicks did the posts get. Each of the above could be calculated for each influencer individually and the campaign as a whole. Focus could be placed on specific top posts that performed well, or a comparison could be drawn between the engagement the influencer posts got compared to an average post.
- Cost per engagement
By determining the total investment in the campaign, from the hours spent researching influencers and conceptualising the campaign to the cost of reporting; a cost per engagement could be calculated.
- Brand awareness
Another facet to consider is the impact the campaign had on the brand’s own follower growth, impressions and engagement, compared to trends before the campaign started. Did the campaign increase awareness of the brand?
- Quality content
The quality of the content created throughout the campaign is another soft-value that could be included in the campaign. Is it something tangible that could be used in other ways by the brand? Did it create PR opportunities that could be leveraged?
These are all parts of our normal reporting system, but there are a few parts of big influencer campaigns that are hard to determine without the right analytical tools. One example would be sentiment analysis. From the engagement, you got throughout the campaign, what can you gather about how people felt about the brand and its message. A further consideration would be hashtag tracking, as it is becoming an important aspect of campaigns. While it is feasible for a person to track these metrics for a few posts, the volume of content created throughout a multi- influencer campaign will necessitate the use of data analysis software.
This is just a summary, please leave a comment if there are aspects that we have not thought of.