How do you track and measure influencer marketing campaigns?

When promoting your brand on social media, collaborating with micro influencers is a good way to reach a new audience. Here’s some advice to manage and track your next influencer campaigns.

• Campaigns that take place over a long period of time, like 60 or 90 days, typically perform better. 
• You need to find influencers who are not just hawking products to their audience. They must sound like they are actual advocates of the brand or the product that they are helping promote. 
• Make sure that when you create your briefs for the influencer, it spans over 60 to 90 days, multiple posts, Instagram Stories, etc. in addition to the other platforms that they are using as well for added benefit.
• Offer complete swag bundles: create a branded box, add some swag and make sure that there is something unique for every influencer. They are putting their brand on the line for yours, keep that in mind.

Now, let’s move onto what you came here for: how to manage and track micro influencer marketing campaigns!

Provide an influencer brief and save everyone some grief. It can take the form of a short deck of slides with the do's and don'ts of creating content for your brand. You may include information about:

• What your brand cannot be associated with
• What products or services to not associate with your brand
• How the product works
• What the brand values are
• etc.

Include Content Examples

That’s a great way to co-create high-quality content. Send them previous campaigns that worked well, ads you created for other campaigns, etc.

Provide a List of Required Hashtags

Include a list of required hashtags. Make sure the influencer has access to information regarding what the product is, what it does, what the benefits are to help them communicate that to their audience in their own words. 

Use a combination of seasonal and evergreen creative briefs to help creators produce content week after week. Evergreen content produced by influencers are great to help fuel other campaigns on other platforms in the future (with their permission of course). Content producers find it difficult to continue creating new content week after week, day after day, etc. 

Make it clear what the guidelines are, that involves setting up an approval process. Define how they are going to share content before it goes live. Avoid mistakes, misclaims and any other potential threats to your brand. Be sure that the influencer is getting their context approved before it actually goes live.

This is a partnership: they are working with you, not for you. So make sure you support them as well as they support your brand. Boost their efforts on Instagram Stories, on Twitter. Make it known that you are collaborating. 

UTM links are great for that

You shouldn’t succumb to the hype surrounding influencers. Tracking the impact of your influencer campaigns with tracked links will help you see clearer. UTM.io is a great tool for that. Use a unique UTM link or custom link for every influencer. This allows you to see where traffic is coming from in Google Analytics.  

Or use promotional codes for tracking

You can also use promotional codes if you are asking an influencer to help sell a specific product or range or products. It’s a great way to see what type of impact your collaboration is having on your bottom line. 

Going beyond metrics

Consider the engagement with the content. Conversions don’t happen overnight. Sometimes, if you can say that the content or the influencer is resonating well with that person's audience, you can actually jump in there as the brand and help push that conversation along. 

Hope this was useful for you! We aren’t including any call to action for anything because we aren’t an influencer agency. We just wanted to help offer some solutions to a few issues we noticed our clients were having with other parts of their marketing. If you plan a Google Ads campaign or want to improve your SEO, let us know!