Measuring Influencer Marketing Sales at Retail

Sales - it's the ultimate goal that every marketer is working towards. You hope that the tactics you have in place drive sales for your product. But when it comes to influencer marketing, measuring sales lift can be difficult, especially if you're also trying to measure sales lift at a specific retailer.

Our team has been fortunate enough to have won multiple awards for our influencer marketing programs, in part because they drive real business results such as sales. In one instance, we drove 209% more unit sales for a brand at a particular retailer. But the big question that everyone always asks is, how? It's an excellent question because you're not always able to know. 

Candidly, you can't always see and measure this type of sales life because you can't always strip out what influencer contributed. If you've got a lot of confounding variables in there, the data isn't clean. Let me explain.

You want to start by looking for a benchmark period that is essentially clean, to the best of your abilities. So is it at a time of year that is meaningful? If you sell candy hearts at Valentine's, you're not going to want to compare Valentine's sales to sales in June. Have you done any changes to price or promotion? Are you running a BOGO? Do you have a big coupon going on? Are there any other promotion options going on, such as end caps in-store or being included in the circulars? Has the competitor done anything differently? Are they doing a BOGO that might drop your sales? Have you changed your packaging? All those things you're going to have to think about as things that will change your results, either for better or for worse.

But if you can get a clean benchmark, the results can be really compelling. What we were able to do in the program we previously mentioned was use the same retailer, with the same offer, in this case it was a BOGO, on the same weekday that the sales were measured on. And it was the same product, so it was a very clean sample. We were able to see that we moved 209% more units compared to when they ran the last BOGO at the same retailer, on the same product line, on the same day of the week, and over 300% more sales than the normal time period when there is no offer going on.

So as I mentioned you won't always be able to do this, but when you can you may find some surprising and very delightful results on what your influencer marketing can actually do. 

Check out some of our other sales lift case studies, or contact us if you want to talk through what a program would look like for your brand.