The Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing

Chapter 5: Campaign Analysis

You’ve made it this far, and you’re nearly at the end of your influencer marketing campaign! There’s just one more step, and it just so happens that it’s the one that will be most interesting to your client or manager. Marketing campaigns are worthless if you don’t measure and analyze their results. You need tangible data in order to evaluate if the campaign was successful.

Influencer Marketing Guide > Campaign Analysis > 5.2. Expectations vs. reality: the report

GUIDE NAVIGATOR

0. Introduction
1. Campaign Definition
2. Campaign Setup
3. Campaign Launch
4. Campaign Monitoring
- 4.1. Detecting & collecting published media
- 4.2. Tips & tricks for following up
5. Campaign Analysis
- 5.1. Analyzing a campaign's results
- 5.2. Expectations vs. reality: the report
Glossary

5.2. Expectations vs. reality: the report

Now you get to see if the reality of your campaign lived up to your expectations. Once you measure and analyze your results, it’s time to reflect them in a report that you can deliver to your client or manager.

Nowadays, just like the proposal, most campaign reports take the form of a visual presentation. Here’s a breakdown of what to include.

Basic campaign details

Start off with the identifying information of the campaign:

Name of the campaign

Number of influencers contracted

Geographical target (country, region, city)

Categories or industry targeted

Campaign start and finish, and any other important dates

Investment

Next, summarize your investment, pulling from the spreadsheet you created when analyzing input/output. Depending on the brand, you may want to simply include the total investment, or you may want to include a slightly more detailed breakdown of the different categories of investment. And if you’re an agency, you may not need to do this step, as it's something the brand will probably do on their end.

Results

Here, you’ll want to gather the basic information about the influencers you used, your output data, and some campaign media.

Include the results that are relevant to your campaign, which may include:

Influencers - influencers that were selected

Followers - the average followers the influencers had during the campaign

Posts - posts published by the influencers

Stories - stories published by the influencers

URLs - the links you used in the campaign

Impressions - when the campaign content was seen or displayed

Interactions - when people interacted in some way with the campaign

Clicks - how many times campaign links were clicked

CPM - cost per thousand views/clicks

CPI - cost per impression

CPC - cost per click

Other benefits - Anything else you've achieved that has some value, like press coverage, or an influencer photoshoot of your space/products

Depending on the brand’s preferences and how big the campaign was, you could choose to report on just a summary of this data, or break the results down per influencer.

Compare your results with your original estimates to see how well your campaign achieved your expectations. Did you exceed your estimated impressions or interactions? Was your CPI lower than what you thought it would be?

Also, include some visual examples. This makes your report more interesting, and can also connect with highlights from the campaign. You could choose to show, for example, the top 3 posts with the most likes and the top 3 with the most comments.

Measure your success

So, how did you do? When analyzing your success in influencer marketing campaigns, remember this: success is always relative. Your success relates back to your original campaign goals, as well as the investment you put into the campaign.

Basically, when the benefit of the campaign outweighs the investment, you can consider yourself successful. Or, if you've exceeded your original goals, you can also consider yourself successful.

For example, imagine your brand is an online personal shopping service that charges $200 for a personalized box of fashion. You pay an influencer $1,000 to collaborate on your spring campaign. So, to recuperate their investment, your brand needs the influencer to sell 5 boxes. But the influencer actually ends up selling 20! That’s a great success, both for sales and for branding.

Also, take into account all the benefits of the campaign, even if they're not hard marketing metrics. For instance, if you've just opened a new restaurant and an influencer shoots photos you can reuse in other promotional materials, you may have saved a few hundred dollars.

So if you exceeded your expectations, great! And if not, don’t get down. Identify the areas where you missed the mark, and analyze what you can do better next time.

Finally, look closely at your campaign results to see if maybe you can reveal new insight. For example, maybe you didn’t hit your target audience as well as expected, but maybe another audience group reacted more positively than planned? They could be a good target audience for the future.