As with any marketing strategy, there are learnings and insights you can apply to different areas of your business -- the same goes for influencer marketing. Some marketers may find this difficult because of the challenges you're already facing with measuring the effectiveness of programs. Others may find this difficult because you're still implementing a traditional approach to influencer, one that lacks the data required to make these observations and optimizations.
Because our approach leverages real-time data and advanced targeting, we're able to pull additional insights from our campaigns that not only feed into influencer campaign optimizations but overall marketing optimizations that drive measurable business results for our clients. By using your influencer's audience as a focus group, here's what you can start to look for and where to find the data.
Throughout your campaign, keep an eye on which pieces of content are delivering the best results. We find that about 20% of campaign content outperforms the rest, so develop a system that helps you identify this content. More importantly, have a team member manually reviews these high-performing assets because that's how you'll get the most accurate insights.
Now ask yourself, what visual commonalities do these assets have?
EXAMPLE: You're a restaurant whose social content is usually beautifully-crafted, Instagram-worthy food shots. Well, the top performing content from your influencer campaign isn't strict food shots but images that include people at the table. That's an insight you could take to your creative team and say "we need to start incorporating more content like this, because that's what our audience wants to see and engage with."
The key to this tactic is to start by giving your influencers creative freedom to run with your initial brief and come back to you with new content types. If you make the assignment too specific and strict, you're going to miss out on these opportunities.
This is also a chance to see what type of content elicits what reactions from the audience. If your goal is clicks, but you're only getting likes, look for the content that drives the most clicks and think about how you can recreate the type of content.
>> Additional Reading: 5 Considerations to Help Simplify Influencer Content Approvals
This item runs similarly with that above, however rather than looking at the type of content that's created you're digging into the key messaging and story line that each influencer used. Again, run through your system to identify the top content but this time ask yourself, "What key message is the audience reacting to the most."
EXAMPLE: You're a coffee brand that specializes in cold brew coffee. However, you notice that those influencers who pushed messaging that promoted enjoying the cold brew coffee at a hot temperature rather than over ice are outperforming the other story lines. Now your internal team can take that insight and apply it to key messaging on your product packaging and other marketing efforts.
The way to garner these insights is to again allow creative freedom with your influencers, but also be sure to use an even distribution of different types of influencers. If all your influencers look like the same person, they're likely to come back with the same angle. Mix it up, and you'll be happy you did.
>> Additional Reading: 3 Questions CEOs Should Be Asking Their Influencer Marketing Teams
This specific insight can only be gathered if you're layering in a component of media buying to your influencer marketing campaign. At Carusele, we run ads directly from our influencers accounts so we're able to access and analyze more data than if we were to just be hitting the boost button or using the handshake tool.
What we do is build a profile out of our audience that's taking action on the influencer's content. This profile allows us to not only confirm that we're reaching the target audience, but unveils new attributes about this audience has in common. These insights can then be taken and applied to your internal paid media strategy to help expand your audience reach.
Want to take is a step further? By building a lookalike audience of those from your engaged audience profile, you can convert a higher percentage of those you're targeting. (We see lookalike audiences convert 2x better than our initial audience with Carusele campaigns.)
Now that you're aware of these insights, start by looking back on your old campaigns and analyzing them for optimizations you can instantly apply. If you're looking for a resources to help you get started or enhance your current influencer marketing strategy, contact us today using the form below and we'll get a consultation on the books.