On Measuring Influencer ROI

"The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." - Brian Eno

Measuring Influencer Marketing ROI

Influencer marketing campaigns can trigger a wide array of benefits, one of which is immediate sales. But when you measure success through the lens of a longer time horizon, the benefits compound.

To truly measure ROI, it's important to factor in word-of-mouth referrals, access to high converting content, and the impact these have on your brand’s reach, awareness and authenticity.

With the exception of unique codes and affiliate links, it’s not always a straight line between influencer activation and conversion.

While this does happen, the ROI from influencer marketing is much more complex than a conditional statement (“if influencer posts, sales spike”). Instead, consider that the ROI may also present itself in a totally unexpected way.

Let’s look at an example:

A skincare brand we know recently partnered with an influencer who has 30,000 followers.

The brand sent her free product, she posted about the skincare on Instagram, and wrote up a full blog post. And then...crickets. The brand declared the partnership a failure.

But then, a couple months later, a new customer with a micro-influencer following published a raving review about this skincare brand on her Instagram Story. She mentioned that she discovered this brand through the original influencer's post a few months earlier.

Not only did this new customer tag the brand and showcase it to her 2,000 followers, she also shared her skincare results from using the product. A lovely testimonial.

This completely unexpected, organic, “partnership” came from the initial influencer activation. And who knows how many of the new customers' followers checked out that product out after seeing her results.

This is the true beauty of influencer marketing – it extends beyond the initial parameters of the partnership, often leading to word-of-mouth marketing that’s authentic, real, and influential in the most literal sense of the word.

While the brand may not have seen an immediate sales spike, they unknowingly created a web of viral marketing, the gift that keeps on giving. Not only that, they were able to repurpose the UGC content for their own social media channels in the form of a truly authentic testimonial.

In Conclusion

So next time you’re launching an influencer campaign, keep in mind that the results can extend way beyond the immediate sales figures, taking unexpected twists and turns with multi-faceted benefits.