The Definitive Guide to Influencer Marketing

Influencer Marketing Glossary

If this is your first marketing campaign, we hope this guide makes everything clear and easy to understand. But, we also get that starting out in influencer marketing can also feel like stepping into a tornado of marketing terms and acronyms. So in order to help you out, we’ve created this glossary of terms that appear throughout the guide.

Influencer Marketing Guide > Influencer Marketing Glossary

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

Bot: An automated program designed to mimic some type of human interaction. In influencer marketing, bots are mainly used as fake followers or to leave fake likes or comments.

Brand engagement: The customer experience on social media. While engagement rate is generally used to talk about the engagement on an influencer’s profile, brand engagement is the engagement on the brand’s social media accounts.

Call to action (CTA): A prompt that encourages a user or client to perform a specific action. An example of a call to action could be a “find out more” button that links to your website, or a “order now for 25% off” alert that encourages sales. (see conversion)

Cost of goods sold (COGS): The production cost of a product, as opposed to the market value. Generally it’s the total of materials and labor needed to produce the product.

Comments/likes ratio: A ratio that compares a profile’s number of comments to its number of likes. This metric can be used to evaluate if an influencer has potentially purchased fake likes.

Conversion: Any instance in which your audience responds to your call to action. For example, if your CTA is a “find out more” button that leads to your website, the conversion would be when that button is clicked. (see call to action)

Cost per click (CPC): The price you pay for each click generated by your campaign. Take the total amount paid for the advertising of links, and divide that by the number of clicks generated from those links.

Cost per interactions (CPI): The price you pay for each interaction generated by your campaign. Take the total amount paid to market content that allows interactions, and divide it by the total interactions.

Cost per mille (CPM): The cost for 1,000 impressions (mille means 1,000 in Latin). To get this figure, divide the total cost of the campaign by the total impressions generated, and then multiply that results by 1000. The lower the CPM, the better, as that means your brand spends less money for more advertising.

Cost per acquisition (CPA): A commission-based model that can be used as a form of compensation in influencer marketing campaigns. The acquisition is defined by your campaign, but a few examples are sales, registrations to your site, or newsletter sign-ups. You can offer an influencer a fixed rate or a variable per acquisition.

Direct message (DM): A private message sent from one Instagram user to another. DMs can be used to contact influencers.

Engagement rate: The level of interaction between an influencer and their audience. On Instagram, it’s measured in likes and comments. Engagement demonstrates the level of trust and interest an audience has in an influencer. Generally, engagement rate is higher for influencers with smaller followings; as followers increase, engagement tends to decrease.

Follow/unfollow method: A strategy used to accumulate followers that isn’t based on content. An account follows a bunch of random accounts, waits for them to return the favor, and unfollows them later. This method increases the follower count but not the engagement rate.

Follower growth rate: The increase or decrease of a social media profile’s followers over time. Sudden and dramatic spikes in follower growth can be signs of bought followers.

Handle: A person’s name on social media. On Instagram, what follows the @.

Heepsy: A tool designed to help you search for influencers, analyze their statistics, and organize your outreach. Heepsy can search and analyze over 8 million social media profiles.

Impression: Any time your campaign content is displayed on a screen, whether a user interacts with it or not.

Instagram Insights: Instagram’s built-in analytics tool, available only for business and creator accounts. If you choose to analyze influencers without using Heepsy, you will have to ask each individual influencer for their Insights information.

Interaction: Any time a user interacts with your content in some way. It could be a like, a comment, a click. On Instagram, interactions are likes and comments, and they are not available for stories.

Key performance indicator (KPI): A measurable value used to gauge the success of your campaign. In influencer marketing, some common KPIs are conversions, audience growth, engagement (likes + comments), and web traffic.

Marketing proposal: A document or presentation that proposes a marketing campaign by outlining the objectives, strategies, investment, and estimated results. It’s usually prepared by a marketing agency for a brand, or by an in-house marketing team for upper management.

Monetary compensation: Any incentive or compensation paid in money. In influencer marketing, it would be the fee that an influencer charges in exchange for publications.

Non-monetary compensation: Any incentive or compensation that doesn’t take the form of money. In influencer campaigns, this type of incentive is usually a product, service, or experience provided to the influencer for free.

Quality score: A Heepsy metric that analyzes the overall quality of an influencer's audience and their relationship with their followers.

Reach: In influencer marketing, the number of people who potentially see an influencer’s content. You can get a sense of an influencer’s reach by looking at their follower count, but this is just an estimate; someone who doesn’t follow an influencer might also see their content. You can also evaluate reach by looking at the impressions generated by an influencer’s content.

UTM parameters: Variants of URL parameters that can track the effectiveness of the links used in an influencer marketing campaign. UTM means Urchin Tracking Module, named after Urchin, the predecessor of Google Analytics.