Influencer marketing is a powerful way for brands to create fantastic ROI, especially when coupled with data-intensive creator marketing technology.
However, a common mistake brands make is that they start thinking about the ROI once the campaign has run its course, and then they expect to obtain profitable outcomes. ROI is the first thing you should plan for to achieve outstanding results. This way, ROI can be regulated at each step of the campaign – from influencer discovery to performance measurement.
Data from creator marketing platforms plays a significant role in helping you achieve your desired ROI. Brands can view insights of a particular influencer, including estimated reach, engagement rate, estimated cost per post, audience distribution, and more, to get a clear picture of their performance before hiring. Plus, with creator technology, brands can A/B test the outreach process to onboard high-performing creators, pay them handsome incentives, and establish direct sales attribution.
Let's dive deeper into how to use a creator marketing platform to build better ROI.
Table Of Content:
- Move away from low-performing influencers by vetting KPIs
- Win collaborations through systematic influencer management
- Maximize influencer efforts with performance-based incentives
- Define clear sales attribution using discount codes or links
- Turn well-performing influencer content into paid media
1. Move away from low-performing influencers by vetting KPIs
Experienced influencers are the foundation of a successful campaign. Without their influential power, you won't be able to build an authentic social media presence and boost your sales, which is crucial for a good ROI.
Move away from low-performing influencers and get closer to high-performing ones who understand your brand and product well. Such influencers can be from your own customer base who have a significant follower base and can engage the audience.
"Work with creators in your own customer base because these influencers are cheaper and more authentic as they understand your brand message and the product. They can generate genuine content based on their experience with the product. Plus, you have better chances of getting them onboard as they'll more likely be willing to work with you," says Vivien Garnès, Co-CEO at Upfluence, an influencer marketing platform at IMH connect.
A creator marketing platform enables brands to look through performance KPIs like engagement rate, target audience, audience sentiments, brand affinities, branded content ratio, fake followers, for picking suitable creators. Brands can come across influential creators and key opinion leaders on social media with the help of data-rich metrics.
"The power of data is that it removes human biases and makes influencer discovery much more efficient. When marketers choose influencers, there could be bias in terms of their network or the influencers they deem fit, but data shows you who is the top performing influencer, who has the right hold of your target audience without any bias," says Nisarg Shah, Co-Founder and CEO at affable.ai, an end-to-end influencer management platform, in the Power of the Creator Economy masterclass.
"A lot of times, brands work with influencers who are famous but may not have the right audience. As a brand, you would want to work with influencers who have your target audience as followers because when you work with the right creators, the conversion you get is 60-70% more than with influencers who do not have the right audience demographic you want to target," adds Shah.
Adding new names to your existing roster of high-performing influencers is another way to ensure you never run out of top-notch content for your campaigns. Brands can add new influencers every month with the help of a creator platform and simultaneously use existing and new creators for their campaigns, enhancing their reach.
2. Win collaborations through systematic influencer management
In the competitive influencer marketing industry, brands face a major challenge in getting influencers to collaborate for the campaign. The brand's proposals may get ignored, end up in spam, or not interest the influencer. Either way, it is challenging to reach out and onboard high-performing influencers.
To avoid such cases, brands can employ data to choose the best communication channels and tweak the influencer proposals to onboard experienced social media creators.
"Influencer outreach is like a sales funnel. You need to constantly improve the conversion rate from influencer outreach and optimize for the messaging that works," explained Sirikarn Sakulrattanasangmanee, Affiliate Manager, affable.ai, at the HOOK 2022 Conference.
"With an influencer marketing platform, you have the opportunity to A/B test the influencer selection process. You can create a marginally step-by-step process at every stage of your campaign," says Garnès.
The data derived from creator marketing technology helps marketers understand how many new influencers they reach every month, what is the open message rate, click rate, and how many positive replies they receive from the influencers. The insights help optimize each step of the outreach process and send better proposals to creators, increasing the chances of onboarding more influencers.
Read in detail: Data-Driven Influencer Marketing: How Brands Can Get It Right
3. Maximize influencer efforts with performance-based incentives
The influencer marketing industry is witnessing growth in using influencers as affiliates. More and more D2C and e-commerce brands are bringing the affiliate model into influencer marketing by providing incentives for the sales creators drive.
By the end of 2023, online shopping will reach $1.3 trillion, which means there will be competition among brands to boost online sales through influencers. According to our 2023 influencer marketing predictions report, brands are already doubling down on their efforts to find the right creators and use them as affiliates for better visibility.
Seeing how different influencers charge differently based on their conversational skills, the number of followers and engagement rates, the performance-based model allows brands to weigh only one aspect when making the payment – conversion. It makes influencer payments free of biases, as you can review each influencer based on their conversions.
The affiliate influencer marketing model also encourages influencers to create better content and drive more sales to earn handsome incentives, resulting in increased campaign ROI.
The influencer campaign from Pura Vida Bracelets, a California-based hand-craft jewelry company, is a perfect example of maximizing results using performance-based influencer incentives. Griffin Thall, the Co-founder and CEO of Pura Vida Bracelets, discovered that even after working with top-performing influencers and gifting them free products, the influencer campaign wasn't making any sales. After measuring the overall campaign sales, he found out that almost 75% of his influencers didn't make a single sale.
The company switched its influencer incentives to tiered affiliate payments instead. The influencers could unlock levels of incentives or rewards based on the sales they drove, which excited and motivated the creators to flesh out compelling content. The strategy boosted their sales by 300% year over year as the influencers started creating thumb-stopping content for the audience.
Creator marketing technology can be a golden solution to manage affiliate influencer campaigns at scale. With data-driven technology, you can keep tabs on every sale brought in by the influencers and set automatic payments to creators based on the same.
4. Define clear sales attribution using discount codes or links
As we move into affiliate influencer marketing, brands need clear sales attribution to know which influencer drives more sales and compensate them accordingly.
"We're seeing a massive boost in e-commerce companies leveraging influencers because of the accessibility provided for easier tracking. Once you're able to measure sales and attribute it back to the influencer, that becomes a very powerful weapon in your hands as a marketer," Shah told the audience at the IMH Connect.
Creator marketing technology creates unique codes for each influencer which link back to the brand's product page on the website. Influencers can include codes and links in their content to encourage the audience to buy products directly through the link. The codes and affiliate links help brands filter out the top-performing influencers and collaborate with them to double the ROI.
"At affable.ai, we're working with many e-commerce companies; one such is a fashion merchandise store selling superhero t-shirts and accessories, which made sales close to 51 thousand dollars in one of their Black Friday influencer campaigns. With direct sales attribution, the brand or a marketer is able to pinpoint and say hey, this influencer drove 20k sales for us in a matter of 10 days. That is the value influencers can provide if done correctly," added Shah.
"Having such visibility into every step of an influencer marketing campaign, highlighting advantages, and trying to identify the weaknesses is what many companies need to take advantage of. Whether it's driving e-commerce, comparing influencers who drove most sales, using them as proxies for pushing a brand narrative in front of the audience, or checking the saturation of those posts, creator marketing technology enables building better and more attractive campaigns," explained Brian Spellman, Director of Sales at Meltwater, an online media monitoring company.
Bonus Tip: Direct purchases from social media will also help you simplify customer's shopping journey as we step into the social commerce era. The links and codes will help social media users buy the product from the platform without switching apps. Plus, with Google's ban on third-party cookies, the codes and links will come in handy in driving consumers to the website and asking for first-party data. So it's a win-win!
5. Turn well-performing influencer content into paid media
Boosting high-performing influencer content with paid media is a strategy that has worked well for many brands. Pouring in some extra dollars to magnify the reach of influencer content is an effective strategy every brand should follow.
Creator marketing platforms enable sales attribution and performance-based incentives, which help brands filter out the best-performing influencer content for paid boosting.
Besides paid ads, brands can repurpose influencer content across social platforms and other marketing fronts.
GoPro, Nike, and Gymshark are the best examples of brands using this strategy. They use influencer content to add social proof and authenticity to other promotional efforts like emails, newsletters, social feeds, product pages, and more.
Drive successful campaigns at scale
Planning the ROI from influencer campaigns from the very beginning can help you get a bigger bang for your buck, provided you use data at each step to make profitable decisions. This way, you can double your ROI by the time you approach the end of your influencer campaign.
Creator marketing platforms like affable.ai provide data-rich metrics and automation capability to help brands and agencies manage influencer campaigns at scale. With all the information only a few clicks away, it becomes easier for marketers to manage multiple influencers and campaigns simultaneously, resulting in more returns.
Connect with our experts by booking a free trial to learn about extending ROI from influencer campaigns.
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