02.14.2023
The impact of influencer marketing is notoriously tricky to track. When beauty brands first teamed up with creators, linking the customer journey from social post to point of purchase often came down to guesswork. But, in recent years, technology has advanced to help beauty brands understand their ROI (return on investment) – and, at last, you can see the true performance of your carefully planned campaigns.
This same technology can even be used not just to track your ROI, but to also improve it, with tangible insights making way for more informed, data-backed decision-making. After all, influencer marketing analytics aren’t just there to help you review your successes; they keep your beauty brand ahead of the competition, always growing and evolving.
So how do you use that data effectively? Here are four ways to improve your campaigns’ ROI by harnessing key influencer marketing insights…
1. Agree On Objectives
Every campaign should be kicked off with clear objectives in place, and the best way to make sure they’re both aspirational and achievable is by looking at your last campaign reports. Before you set your goals, review the following insights from at least three previous campaigns:
- Budget used
- Audience demographics for each influencer
- Performance stats for each influencer (following, average engagement rate)
- Reach achieved
- Engagement rate achieved
- Earned media value for individual content
- Sales generated (where trackable)
- Overall ROI
When layering the data above, you can start to see what’s achievable, as well as the variables that may have added up to your most successful figures. Channel these insights into your new objectives, with an aim to improve on your last campaign. The goals you set will then help you make more proactive decisions in the next step.
2. Find the Right Influencers
With the right influencer marketing platform, you can identify high-performing content creators who align with the campaign objectives you set in phase one. The ideal tool will allow you to filter influencers by:
- Audience size
- Audience demographics
- Creator demographics
- Engagement rate
- Interests
- Social media platform
Analysing an influencer’s audience is particularly crucial, as the age and location of their following may not always align with their own demographics – meaning their content may not be reaching who you think it’s reaching. Your influencer platform should also help you filter out creators who may not have reliable follower counts; a hard-to-spot detail that skews campaign performance when it’s not managed effectively.
Ultimately, using data to identify influencers is the most effective (and efficient) way of making sure your campaign will precisely target your objectives. Where manually sourcing talent can be time-consuming, and the figures not always reliable, a tool helps you filter talent fast based on your beauty brand’s unique goals.
3. Live Track Campaigns
Optimising a campaign doesn’t stop when the influencer hits ‘post’. Beauty’s digital disruptors understand the importance of monitoring campaigns in the days, and even weeks, after the go-live date. Whether or not your campaign consists of a series of posts, it’s important to use an influencer marketing platform that allows you to live track content, so you can watch it perform. From there, you can make improvements.
For example, if engagement figures aren’t as you had hoped, you could rework the next post (or broaden the scope) to ensure the content and/or its caption has a bolder call to action. Or, if you’re seeing a lot of the same question about your brand’s beauty product under an influencer post, you could join the conversation or commission follow-up posts to clarify key points. Introducing discount codes or giveaways is also a great way of giving your campaigns a boost. The trick is to plan well but leave room for agility with every influencer partnership.
4. Create Comprehensive Reports
Post-campaign reports should give a comprehensive view of who you worked with, their demographics, their audience, and the results from each piece of content they posted. With an advanced influencer marketing platform, this report can be built for you in just a few clicks, going as granular as needed to inspire your next campaigns.
The most valuable insights a beauty brand can harness is their historical campaign data. You can learn from both failures and successes to ensure you’re always improving upon your influencer partnerships.
