Influencer Marketing: measuring the success of your campaign

It's essential to identify the quantitative and qualitative indicators that confirm that Influencer Marketing Food is achieving its profitability targets.

In 2016, 81% of brands that launched an Influencer Marketing campaign concluded that the operation was effective (1). But what criteria are used to evaluate the success of an Influencer Marketing campaign?

1) Size and quality of audience reached

The number of people exposed to the content is the first indicator to follow if you want to have a real impact on sales. Thanks to a 6-month campaign with Food Influencers, the Italian food brand Mezzetta, for example, managed to reach 149 million Americans. The more precisely the target audience is qualified (gender, age, sociological profile, consumption habits, interests, location, etc.), the more receptive they will be to the campaign message, and therefore more likely to be converted into consumers. Audience qualification has a direct impact on the second criterion:

2) Engagement generated on publications

By engagement, we mean all forms of interaction that web users have shown with content published by influencers: likes, comments, shares, clicks, as well as mentions on social media. Not all of these have the same value: sharing a publication, for example, demonstrates a higher level of engagement than a simple like. Three parameters influence engagement:

• The number of influencers mobilized
• The size of their respective audiences
• Average commitments on their own accounts

So the higher the engagement, the better the campaign hit the mark. During the #ForeverYoung campaign carried out for Chupa Chups in January 2017, for example, influencer publications generated a record engagement rate of 27% in Russia.The engagement rate is then measured by dividing the sum of interactions on a publication, by the number of people who follow the account. For a more accurate calculation, each type of interaction can be weighted by a coefficient (maximum for shares, minimum for likes). Average engagement rates (2) vary according to audience size and social media :

Engagement thus varies considerably from one social network to another; according to a study by the Forrester institute, it's even 58 times (3) higher for publications on Instagram than on Facebook.

3) Traffic generated on brand pages

The increase in the number of visitors to a brand's website provides information about its effectiveness. In 2015, for example, after running an Influencer Marketing campaign with female food bloggers, Reblochon de Savoie recorded +60% traffic to its website.Brands can also set up landing pages dedicated to the program. Tracking the traffic they attract then becomes a strategic indicator of the campaign's success. To boost its end-of-year sales, Stella Cheese set up a landing page dedicated to its Influencer Marketing Food campaign: it generated almost 30,000 visits.

4) Building files of qualified prospects

Influencer marketing campaigns enable us to collect a great deal of consumer data. In the context of a competition, a coupon offer, or a subscription to receive specific content (newsletter, e-book, recipes, etc.), brands can build up a file of prospects. The main objective of Mezzetta's campaign, for example, was to gain market share: influencers invited web users to fill in a questionnaire to download a discount voucher, enabling the brand to generate a file of 70,000 qualified prospects.

5) Increased sales

Influencers make it possible to act directly on the purchase intentions of their audiences. A study (4) conducted by Twitter and Annalect in 2016, in fact, reveals that 40% of users have already purchased an item online following the recommendation of an influencer. The impact of an Influencer Marketing campaign on sales can be evaluated in different ways:

• If the brand owns or collaborates with an online distribution network, sales can be tracked by setting up promotional codes.
• In June 2015, two weeks after the launch of Chobani's #BreakYouMake campaign on social media, sales of the Chobani Flip at the heart of the campaign doubled at major retailers.

Defining and then measuring key performance indicators are therefore major challenges when it comes to validating the effectiveness of a campaign. A study carried out by the Nielsen Institute on a food brand showed that Influencer Marketing offered a return on investment 11 times higher than other digital tools. Sources: (1) eMarketer,(2) InfluencerMarketingHub and Michael Leander 3) Forrester, (4) Twitter and Annalect, (5) Nielsen