Most brands know that data-driven influencer marketing can help them measure their ROI. Whereas some of them also know it is equally helpful in finding the right influencers to reach target audiences. 

But not many realise taking as much guesswork out while managing campaigns and using data at every step can give maximum results.

"Data is often used to find influencers and calculate ROI, but it is also required in the implementation of the campaign. It streamlines the influencer management process and helps brands reach a sweet spot where you know what's working and what's not," said Sirikarn Sakulrattanasangmanee, Business Development Manager, affable.ai, while addressing the HOOK 2022 conference.

An international meetup for Southeast Asian companies in Thailand, held June 23-24, had marketers from multiple sectors discuss performance marketing.  

Sirikarn spoke about how influencer marketing has the potential to give the maximum revenue, similar to performance marketing, in terms of sales, leads or impressions. If only the data is centric to every stage of the campaign. 

According to her, since brands and marketers are entering a new era of data intelligence, it challenges them to re-evaluate their decisions. A strong possibility, therefore, exists for brands to achieve the desired results through data-driven influencer marketing. With the advent of influencer marketing platforms like affable.ai, brands can especially churn out end-to-end data without any hassle.

These AI platforms collect data from influencer profiles, help establish better communication and relations with them, and optimise the overall campaign during implementation. 
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Data streamlines influencer management and impacts ROI

Regarding influencer management, data comes into play in choosing the best communication channel, sending products, and testing the messaging and collaboration acceptance rate. 

All data, when clubbed, makes campaign optimisation easier for brands as they can make tweaks and enhance the campaign during implementation. 

"Influencer outreach is like a sales funnel. You need to constantly improve the conversion rate from influencer outreach and optimise for the messaging that works," explained Sirikarn during her session. 

It starts with smooth communication to reach many influencers in one go. So far, emails are the widely used channel to strengthen the brand-influencer relationship. But finding the best channel with the highest response rate can help decipher the best communication route, she said.

It can be complicated when handled manually. Manual execution doesn't answer pressing questions like the number of emails opened, why creators rejected the proposals, how can the messaging be optimised, and so on. 

Whereas data-driven influencer marketing gives insights like message-open rate, message delivery rate, and click rate. It enables brands to answer the above questions and understand what changes they can make to improvise their influencer outreach tactics. 

According to her, it also allows for A/B test messages and proposals to determine what works best and how they can improve them. The constant tweaks and changes in messaging increase the chances of influencers accepting collaboration requests. 

This data can be steered in the right direction when going ahead with a product gifting or deciding the mode of payment, said Sirikarn.

Brands often send products to a large number of influencers but lack the tools to track how many created posts around the product regularly. It becomes challenging when following Instagram stories, which disappear after 24 hours.

Many data-driven influencer marketing platforms offer real-time monitoring of ongoing campaigns by tracking content. The tool keeps a content record, letting brands eliminate numerous spreadsheets and screenshots.  

Also, this extracted data helps identify influencers who can convert to brand ambassadors. For example, if you send products to 100 influencers, but only ten can drive the desired engagement, you know how to manage your campaign further. 

Sirikarn, however, clarified that marketers could achieve all this by selecting the best influencers to get the message across to the target audience. 

"Picking the right influencer requires more than just choosing anyone from the best influencers list. Data is needed to define the right influencer for a brand", she said. Data from performance metrics like branded content distribution, number of followers, engagement rate, authenticity score, and more paints a clear picture of how fitting the influencer will be for a brand. 
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Performance Measurement

Monitoring the campaign from time to time has an overall impact on the ROI. Elaborating on this, Sirikarn said, "Insights such as page views, unique daily visitors, likes, shares, and comments on social media posts give an idea about the impact created by the influencers". 

Such information may help in planning future campaigns while saving overhead costs. 

Data-driven influencer marketing platforms like affable.ai also allow brands to integrate their campaign with eCommerce stores, like Shopify, to create custom discount codes and share them with creators to track the conversion rate. 
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To wrap up 

Using data only while calculating the ROI cannot determine a campaign's success. Brands must incorporate data at every campaign stage – influencer discovery and campaign management. 

"The goal is to customise the campaigns at every step to connect the flow of data to the implementation process," opined Sirikarn.

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