Customer Success

3 Sets of Influencer Marketing Metrics

January 28, 2011

 

Editor’s note: This post is a part of a series that was created to help you define and build the practice of influencer marketing into your company. This series will walk you through the process, necessary roles, and best practices to get started with influencer marketing quickly and effectively.
You can also download a the complete series in the form of our free eBook, The Value of Influence: The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing.

Metrics are extremely helpful for keeping track of progress and impact. Metrics will help you gain insights into your strategy, allowing you to better plan as time goes on.

The metrics for influencer marketing fall under three broad categories:

1.  Program goals and an approved target list of influencers.
2. Activity metrics, which measure the inputs to your influencer marketing efforts, such as:

  • The number of activities taking place (e-mails, calls, meetings, demos, etc.)
  • The number of daily and weekly conversations your influencer relations specialist is having with your target influencers
  • The coverage level of your target influencers

3.  Result metrics, which measure the impact the practice is having, such as:

  • Number of opportunities (e.g., interviews, speaking engagements) the influencer relations specialist has set up
  • Number of mentions in blogs, feature articles, etc.
  • Increased awareness and clearer perception in the market (if you are doing perception research)
  • Website traffic generated from the mentions
  • Sales leads/sales generated from the mentions
  • Closed sales generated from the mentions.

Based on your goals for the practice, you may want to track traffic (number of unique visitors to your blog or website), audience engagement (number of pageviews and time on site), conversion metrics (number of click-throughs, webinar participation, newsletter signups, etc.), or various social media metrics (number of followers, fans, etc.).

For example, an effort with increased web traffic but low conversions may be considered a success if your goal is to increase awareness. On the other hand, if you’re looking to increase your number of short-term leads, you’ll want to work to achieve a higher conversation rate.

To be clear, many of the essential metrics of the practice depend heavily on the goals you set for the program. It’s up to you to determine the appropriate measures of success.

Next week, I’ll share the common influencer marketing challenges and solutions to help you succeed.

Content Marketing Director

<strong>Amanda Maksymiw</strong> worked at OpenView from 2008 until 2012, where she focused on developing marketing and PR strategies for both OpenView and its portfolio companies. Today she is the Content Marketing Director at <a href="https://www.fuze.com/">Fuze</a>.