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Six Easy Metrics to Measure an Influence Marketing Campaign

Measurement is one of social media?s key advantages over traditional marketing and advertising.

Prior to social media?s rise as an essential business solution, marketing campaigns were primarily through print, media including TV and radio, and direct mail. The use of flyers, posters, billboards and print editorials were the staple method of promotion, often complemented with radio spots or television ads.

The main problem with these methods is that it was difficult to pinpoint which ones were working and driving foot traffic to a brick and mortar store.

If a business sent 10,000 flyers out, how could they guarantee their intended recipients saw all 10,000?

Or if a radio spot played during a certain time of day based on that radio station?s demographics, how could the brand be sure a certain percentage of that audience heard and acted on that ad?

The answer to both questions is simple ? they couldn?t. If there was increased foot traffic to a location or more calls to a call center for a company?s information pack, more often than not the source of that referral was virtually impossible to identify.

Social media changed that.

The ability to create extremely targeted campaigns, combined with platforms that measure which networks and content create the most return on investment, has made social media a key part of every smart business owner?s toolset.

This ability to measure business results is easily transferrable to measuring influencer results ? the difference is in what, and who, you measure.

Measuring the Brand Metric

There are two core metrics that brands need to measure in any influence marketing campaign. The first is the Brand Metric.

Investment

The investment metric is the pre-campaign cost of researching which influencers are right for you by identifying Micro and Macro Influencers; how much it costs to set the program up; and using that as a barometer against how much return (financial or awareness) you experienced.

Resources

The financial investment of an influencer campaign involves more than pure monetary costs. Resources like manpower (how many employees are needed and how many hours they need to allocate to the campaign) and education (how much time you need to allocate to train each influencer on your product and company culture) also need to be measured and added to the bigger financial investment.

Product

To encourage an influencer?s audience to connect with your brand from a lead generation or purchase decision angle, free samples of your product need to be made available to the audience as well as the influencer. Test or demo areas may also need to be set up for more technical-led products or software.

The cost to your company for the amount of products sent out, coupled with the hosting costs of the demo area online, need to be factored into the overall financial investment of the campaign.

Measuring the Influencer Metric

In addition to measuring the Brand Metric, the second key metric to track is the Influencer Metric, which can be broken down into three key areas.

Ratio

The biggest problem many brands have when it comes to results from social scoring platforms is the ?influencer? targeted is simply another number in a database with a large following and an amplified voice online. This lack of differentiation is guaranteed to provide poor returns.

Instead, the ratio of community to followers is key ? a thriving, interactive community that reacts to an influencer is far more important than higher follower numbers. It?s these qualitative reactions that provide a higher propensity of actions taken by the influencer?s community.

Measure how many reactions an influencer is receiving when sharing your message as a percentage of their overall following to extract a more exact return on that specific influencer.

Sentiment

Every marketing campaign, whether online or offline, succeeds primarily for one main reason ? the perception of that campaign and the buy-in of the audience.

Using the same metrics to measure your influencer campaign will allow you to understand the sentiment around the brand message, and how the target audience perceives both your brand and the campaign itself. It also allows you to quickly identify areas that upset a certain demographic and amend the message accordingly, or instigate a crisis communication response if needed.

Additionally, you can see which influencer receives a favorable reaction and adoption, allowing you to increase awareness around him or her and helping improve the perception of a less well-received influencer.

Effect

The most valuable barometer to showing whether an influencer campaign has worked or not is the effect it has on your brand.

From a brand awareness point of view, measurement needs to include:

traffic generated to a website, microsite or landing page;
how many times your brand or product is mentioned online and how many people recognize your name when mentioned;
how many new fans or followers you accrue on the social networks your brand is on;
how many white papers or fact sheets were downloaded from your website;
and how many new subscribers you receive to your company blog or newsletter.

From a more dedicated business angle, it?s much more straightforward:

how many new inquiries did your inbound sales team receive;
how many referrals did your direct sales team receive;
and how many sales were directly attributed to your influencer?s work with their community.

Depending on your product or service, the purchase cycle of your customer may be a longer one than the duration of your campaign ? include a plan to continue measuring the effect of the initial influence campaign on this purchase path.

Moving Beyond the Metrics

While by no means exhaustive, both the Brand Metric and the Influencer Metric measurement examples are key parts of any kind of influencer campaign your brand partakes in. Each metric is a guideline to the core information that needs to be tracked in each example ? your own brand?s definition of additional metrics will be determined by the results you?re looking to achieve.

You may only be interested in awareness, in which case you?d place more emphasis on what platforms will show most return; what new platforms you can take advantage of; where your competitors are interacting online and how you can insert your brand into these conversations via your influencers.

If you?re more geared towards pure sales and lead generation, your outreach and subsequent measurement needs to be focused more on potential ecommerce partnerships with peers and colleagues of your influence; affiliate sales programs for your influencer?s community; strategic partnerships with other businesses in your industry who can benefit from increased exposure through your influencer while introducing you to their audience.

Either way, determining the end goal allows you to chart a path back from there and identify the milestones and metrics that matter for each one. Get this part right, and your influence campaign will move from being a nice to have to becoming an essential part of the puzzle.

image: antony_mayfield

Six Simple Ways to Measure Owned, Earned and Paid Social Media ROI

There’s a popular misconception that it’s difficult to use targeted metrics to measure your social media ROI. Not true.

Nor is social media only good for measuring an increase in brand awareness, although that’s definitely a measurement gauge.

The fact is, social media can offer some of the best metrics for measuring your ROI. All you need to do is set your success guides?what you want to achieve and how long you want to spend achieving it?then measure your results against that.

Here are six simple metrics for the main networks ?to measure your social media ROI – financial and brand – across earned, owned and paid media.

Blogger Outreach

A key component of many (if not most) social media campaigns,?blogger outreach programs?can offer some of the best mileage and results of any marketing tactic. Measuring your success isn?t too difficult, either. All you have to do is determine the answers to the following questions:

How many bloggers wrote about you?
How many comments did these posts receive?
How many social shares did the post get?
What was your traffic pre- and post-outreach?
How much product did you have to provide for bloggers versus how many sales you received?

Twitter

One of the stalwarts for any product launch, service or business, Twitter not only offers instant eyeballs but great returns as well. Again, measuring your impact is relatively simple:

What was your?retweet?value (cost of manpower/resources versus follower who takes action)?
How often was your?hashtag?used?
How many times was your?vanity URL?used?
How many new (genuine) followers did you get while your promotion was on?
If you used something like?Sponsored Tweets, what was the cost versus the click-through and conversion?

Facebook

Although it has its critics (including me), Facebook offers some great built-in tools as well as demographic options to help gauge a campaign:

How many new worthwhile fans did you make versus how many you targeted?
How many times was your promotion message liked/acted on?
If you built a Facebook application, how many times was it installed or shared?
Were you successful in reaching your target demographic? (Facebook Insights?can help you here)?
How much did you spend on a Facebook ad, and how did click-throughs and new sales/customers compare?

Google+

While brand pages are still being judged on their effectiveness on Google+, and in-line Google Ads are complementing Google+ content, there are ways to measure your current activity there:

Has your profile on search, and resulting traffic to your site, been raised because of your use of Google+?
How many Circles have you been added to?
How many Plus Ones are your comments and discussions receiving?
How active is your community?
How many?Ripples?are your discussions creating?
How many attendees are taking part in your?Hangouts?

YouTube and Other Video Sites

More than just a fun place to see kids hurt themselves on bikes, YouTube is a key tool in any marketing campaign now?just ask the companies that?used it to such effect?during this year?s Super Bowl.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g9wXBkdWEg[/youtube]

Here are the questions you should be asking:

How many views did you get?
How many Likes/Upvotes and Favorites did you receive?
How many downloads did you get (on video sites that allow downloads)?
How many embeds has your video seen elsewhere on the Web?
How many subscribers did your channel attract?
If your video had a call to action with a vanity URL, how many times did people click through?
How many social shares did you get across networks your target demographic use?

Mobile

As marketing evolves, the different ways to reach an audience combine to create new outlets. Mobile marketing is the perfect complement to social marketing, and measurement can easily be achieved:

Did you use a?push SMS system?to drive traffic to a mobile-friendly site? If so, how many views did that account for?
Did you use?QR codes, and if so, how many times were they used?
How many downloads did your mobile app receive?
How many check-ins were used on?Gowalla?and?Foursquare?
What was the most popular operating system? (This can tell you a lot about your audience?s demographic and buying options.)

These six metrics offer just some of the immediate ways you can measure how successfully your social media goals were met. There are more still, including monitoring tools and more defined analytics. Which ones you use will? depend on the goals you’ve set and how you define success.

No matter how you collect the information you need, it all comes down to comparing man hours and financial outlay to your return to see how successful you were.

It’s important to remember that a lot of marketing can come down to luck and circumstance as much as brilliant strategy?timing and a welcoming audience are key.

But the one thing you can control is measurement, and with social media and mobile marketing, measuring the metrics has never been easier.

So what’s the excuse?

Influential Mentions Aren’t the Same as Word Of Mouth Returns

Earlier this week, I took a look at why the social influencer – as identified by the likes of Klout, Kred, etc – isn’t anywhere near as valuable as an Instigator.

The post created a great discussion (which is still ongoing) around both sides of the coin, and whether it was just a case of semantics or if an Instigator was the true “influencer”.

I just wanted to expand on that a bit more, especially on why the influencer marketing model (as it currently stands) may be even more worthless (at least as far as real results go).

The Reach Effect

Looking at how Klout sells the “benefits” of its service, it attracts brands by selling them the golden ticket of putting their product or service in front of Klout’s army of influencers.

After all, the social web is built on who’s the most influential, right? The more followers, the more reach – the more reach, the more action. Eh – maybe not.

Reach is one of the most overrated metrics around. While saying “Reach 200,000 consumers” might sound great to a brand, it’s a bullshit metric. It’s assuming all 200,000 followers of a Twitter influencer, for example, are online at a given time, waiting to see that one awesome tweet about a product.

The other issue with reach is that it’s just a calculated number. Twitter user A only has 1,000 followers, but the combined number of all the followers that follow Twitter user A and their followers make up the “200,000 consumers” reach. And half of them might be bots.

So, reach is out of the question.

The Return on Perks

Once Klout (and others) have sold an ad campaign to brands, they turn that into Perks (or Rewards). This allows people with a certain score or above to apply to get free stuff – shower gel, cookies, or even a test drive in a new car.

A recent example is car manufacturer Chevrolet, who offered a loan of the newly-launched Sonic to 130 “influencers” with a Klout score of 45 and above. Looking at the results, you’d say it was a success:

16,000 positive mentions online
Three discount requests
One car sold

As a case in raising awareness, 16,000 mentions isn’t chump change. Or is it?

The cost of a Klout Perk starts at $25,000. Considering Perks can be shampoo giveaways, let’s assume the Chevrolet campaign cost more than $25k. You’ve then got to add gas costs for the loans. And insurance. And sales people’s time for both the test drives and then the follow-up calls. And the discounts offered.

And these are just the basic costs. So, for that one sale that brought around $14k into the Chevrolet coffers, there’s a major negative return sales-wise. And I don’t care what business you’re in, you can’t survive on goodwill mentions alone.

Now, it’s true that a car purchase isn’t an impulse buy – there’s a longer process involved, to compare models, showrooms, offers, and more. So it may be that we’ll see more returns on the Chevrolet campaign. Let’s just hope the 130 people involved actually like the Chevy brand and weren’t just along for the free ride.

The Return on Silence Versus Word of Mouth

Of course, this is all conjecture, since Klout are very quiet when it comes to reporting the financial successes of their Perks programs. Sure, they’ll bleat about having 700,000 Perks across 350 campaigns since launching two years ago, but how many of these resulted in real sales to the brands involved?

If I had 350 campaigns, and even if just 10% of them resulted in positive ROI for the companies involved, I’d be shouting that from the rooftops, to both attract more brands and silence the critics.

Klout’s own silence in this regard is deafening, and can be taken however you wish to view it.

Compare that to true word of mouth campaigns and researched demographics – where the idea of Instigators versus Influencers comes up – and it’s a different story.

Paramount and Super 8

When Paramount was getting ready to launch their big Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams collaboration, Super 8, they created a hashtag on Twitter for the event, #Super8Secret. This was to build buzz and awareness for the movie with secret early showings across the U.S.

The result?

9 million impressions in 24 hours (impressive, even for a flawed metric)
150 tweets per minute
Over $1 million sales for sneak preview tickets
Exceeded Paramount’s expectations for opening weekend sales by more than 50%

Unfortunately, I don’t have the cost of the campaign – but creating a hashtag on Twitter and then letting it run amok is probably less than the instant million dollars it created, never mind the opening weekend sales.

The reason the Paramount effort worked – and offered a profitable financial return as opposed to just mentions and a negative sale – is the audience was eager, targeted, and actual fans of the product (in this case, the joining of Spielberg and Abrams).

They took action from Paramount’s instigation instead of just tweeting about the deal. Compare that to the Klout Chevy Perk, and how that (so far) offered more reactions (loans for free) over actions (one purchase, negative return).

Look Beyond the Numbers

The comparisons and results between Chevy and Paramount shouldn’t come as? surprise, though. Klout puts its partners in front of eyeballs based on their in-house metric, which has shown to be flawed time and time again.

Additionally, Klout creates the profiles on its site – you, as a number, don’t have a say in that unless you opt out. So the numbers they promote to their ad partners is skewed from the start.

A proper marketing campaign, on the other hand – media buy, ad buy, email campaign, social media – integrated and targeted will trump the influencer buzz every time (or pretty much every time).

Because smart marketers look beyond the numbers and look to how their effort contributes to the numbers that matter instead.

Which, at the end of the day, is what really matters, no?

The ROI of Employees

Over at his blog yesterday, Chris Brogan wrote about his admiration for Gary Vaynerchuk. The post sparked quite the discussion in the comments, a lot of it about ROI (return on investment).

This stemmed from a quip Gary had made to an event attendee who was asking a few times about the ROI of social media, to which Gary replied, “What’s the ROI of your mother?”

A throwaway quip, but one I thought was indicative of why so many people are confused (or afraid) when it comes to using social media for business. I said as much in the comments, and Chris Theisen raised an interesting point with his question: “Do companies actually measure whether each employee has a positive ROI on the company?”.

If they don’t, then they should.

What’s the point in running a business and employing the folks you need if you’re not measuring their impact? Questions you should be asking (and measuring) include:

Does John the sales guy bring in enough sales to cover his costs? Great, he may be bringing in $100,000 worth of sales, but if they’re to 100 different customers and I need to hire more customer service advisors to handle their queries, John’s value immediately diminishes.

Does Karen the customer service advisor upset my customers? She may be awesome in the office, but if she’s caused 10 customers to leave in the space of twelve months, and they each spend $5,000 per year, her salary of $30,000 per year is now actually $80,000 per year.

Does Peter the marketing guy piss off fellow team members and lower their morale because he thinks he’s “all that”? If so, does that stop them doing their job properly and cost me sales, or quality service for my customers? Does it make my employees want to leave, costing me more money to train new hires (not to mention losing the team spirit that had been fostered before Peter’s arrival)?

These are just three examples of where you could start looking, and measuring the impact each employee has on your business. There are many more, and some that are unique to individual businesses and industries – but they’re good starter points, and a pointer for a full organizational development analysis. This can then tell you how to make sure your employees feel as valued by you as they are valuable to you.

If you’re not already measuring the ROI of your employees, then are you really measuring the success of your business?

image: TruthOut.org