How to stop wasting your influencer marketing budget

Influencer marketing is like the cool kid in school. No one doubts their popularity and everyone wants to be them. The channel’s success is even measured with “likes,” a vanity metric brands have paid millions for. However, is being the new popular marketing channel on the block still enough?

The State of Influencer Marketing 2019 reports that 55.8% of marketers don’t know how to set goals for influencer marketing and therefore understand how it might fit into their overall marketing strategy. This seems to suggest that there are plenty of disappointed marketers out there spending budgets but not quite sure how much benefit the campaign has brought them.

Is the glamor of influencer marketing fading?

This confusion over purpose and measurement, along with the constant stream of compliance issues seem to show that the glamor of influencer marketing is fading.

Much of what you read or hear about influencer marketing is full of promise. Performance, ROI, and all the other buzzwords marketers want to hear. However, these often fall flat and you’re left with nothing more than tidbits about reach and engagement. Engagement, unfortunately, doesn’t make your FD sleep well at night.

take it seriously

So how do we help influencer marketing become a channel we can take seriously?

First, we need to understand what business results it can drive so we can set our goals accordingly. The most obvious objective is that of brand awareness. We follow influencers because they are the innovators and early adopters. They bring us new and exciting information, restaurants, services, bars, products that we have never heard of before. According to the report, 41% of 18-29 year olds use an ad blocker and 86% of people disable or skip TV commercials. Therefore, for many, organic social media is the primary way to discover brands.

A powerful and quite unique goal that influencer marketing can solve is to change perception. There is some disagreement about how much consumers trust influencers; one report will tell you that confidence is high and another that confidence is low. I’m on the former side, but I’d say you don’t necessarily need trust to change someone’s perception. For example, if you want consumers to see you as more fashionable and trendy, working with influencers with a lot of style will help change the perception. If you start seeing several fashionable influencers over weeks or even months wearing a brand, then before you know it, you’ve probably changed your mind about that brand.

Driving Response

Another goal influencer marketing can achieve is response. The effectiveness of influencers in generating ROI depends on your product, product margin, AOV, and target CPA. If you’re only focused on performance and have small margins on products, influencer marketing may not be for you. However, you also need to consider that you are getting content created and distributed within your budget. This doesn’t happen with other channels, so you may be able to offset your marketing budget with a budget from your social or creative team.

Response campaigns should be planned differently than brand awareness campaigns, but you still get additional brand benefits even when you focus on response. After all, you’re targeting an audience that’s averse to brand ads but consumes a lot of influencer content.

We’ve found, however, that even with low-cost articles, influencer marketing can outperform paid social media when done right.

Develop a strategy that matches your goal

Getting “done right,” or effective planning and measuring, is the second area that needs improvement. This includes developing a strategy that aligns with your goal, using data to properly select influencers, and tracking the right thing for your goal. These three areas alone could warrant three separate articles, so we’ll focus on the last one.

Trackable links aren’t rocket science and are used constantly in other types of online media, but seem to be forgotten in influencer marketing. By using pixelated links, we can measure clicks, sales, revenue, AOV, abandoned carts and more. The only unfortunate thing with influencer marketing compared to other online channels is that we can’t track impression. This means we can’t see all of the sales from people who see the ad but come to your website directly from Google. There are several ways around this. Promo codes can suck up some of these responses, but we also recommend setting a baseline where possible. By doing this, we can see the increase in the influencer campaign and apply this % to future campaigns.

There are also technology solutions that help track in-store sales by opening a card in the consumer’s mobile wallet. This will include a QR code that the store clerk can scan to attribute the sale to your campaign.

If you want to track changes in brand awareness or perception, you will need to use a solution based on surveys and/or social listening. By using social listening, you can see the increase in people talking about your brand as well as brand sentiment. Without these solutions, you will only be able to view social metrics such as reach and impressions.

Industry references

Once you know your goal and how you will track it, you can use your target KPIs as benchmarks to help you achieve effective rates. Industry references are also crucial, because if you offer too little payout, you won’t get much response. However, influence rates are very high and low, so having a target CPV or CPC in mind will help you negotiate and filter out overpriced ones.

Popularity is no longer enough because influencer marketing needs to mature. Let’s put vanity metrics aside and start taking influencer marketing seriously. By setting the right goal, planning effectively, and measuring correctly, you can have a campaign focused on business results and get the most out of your budget.

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