Key Attributes of Winning Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Burst Media, a provider of integrated advertising programs, released the results from its first Influencer Marketing Benchmarks Report, which looked at the performance of dozens of influencer marketing programs across 15 key advertising verticals last year.

The company found that advertisers who implemented influencer marketing programs received an average $6.85 in earned media value (EMV) for every $1 of paid media spent. Consumer packaged goods (CPG) food brands achieved $11.33 in EMV for every $1 spent and a 3.9% social engagement rate. Grocers and supermarkets attained a $4.80 earned media value and a 6.7 percent engagement rate.

Mothers, the packaged-food industry’s key audience, are highly connected on social media, a fact that helped the sector’s influencer marketing. Campaign performance varied across the seven industry categories. For instance, home and garden campaigns had an earned media value of $0.64, and tourist destinations and travel had a 0.67 percent engagement rate.

“Influencer marketing is all about leveraging the power of community and like-minded people,” the Burst Media report concludes. “To that end, the tighter an audience is defined and the more focused the influencers are, the better the results will likely be. Influencer marketing is not for reaching the masses. It’s for reaching your brand advocates and then getting consumer-generated content to do the work for you.”

Katie Paulsen, Burst Media senior director of brand sales, credits successful influencer marketing campaigns to a tight focus on specific audiences, cooperation with partners to develop engaging content, campaign-specific hashtags, frequent opportunities to refresh content, and appealing imagery that was shared across Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook.

What Successful Influencer Marketers Do

The research shows that marketers who follow these practices are more likely to achieve success.

• Offer sweepstakes and giveaways. Such activities saw higher earned media value and greater social engagement rates

• Target socially connected audience segments that are most likely to distribute content within their social platforms and co-create content that advocates a brand’s offerings.

• Schedule multiple blog posts to run for fixed time periods with no overlap to achieve higher social engagement rates.

• Increase reach with rich media content distribution units and social syndication programs.

The Four M’s of Influencer Marketing

Danny Brown, chief technologist at ArCompany and co-author of the book “Influence Marketing” advocates “the four M’s” of influencer marketing: make, manage, monitor and measure. That strategy can replace public influencer scores and amplification metrics that have provided little benefit to ROI, he writes in a blog for Convince & Convert.

Make influencers. Determine the customers’ stage in the purchase life cycle — research, awareness or purchase. That enables you to seek influencers who will move customers to the next phase in the purchase cycle.

Manage. Identify phrases influencers use that prompt an action in your customer. Actions can include improving customer perception of a product, moving the customer to the next purchase cycle phase, or enhancing the brand’s message.

Monitor. Monitor the relationships within a small group of target customers and influencers. Monitor social media to determine customers’ needs and identify which influencers to “make.” Monitoring also reveals other factors, such as competitors, cost concerns, peer pressures and other issues that may be barriers to sales. For these purposes, social media monitoring services offer high value.

Measure. Measure to learn who and what was most important in impacting ROI. Through social media measurement, marketers can gauge the success of individual influencers and messages as well as the overall campaign.

Bottom Line: Some brands are achieving significant success through influencer marketing campaigns. Successful influencer campaigns require social media monitoring and measurement programs to identify influencers that match target audiences and ongoing monitoring to track the success of influencers and messages.