Today’s global market is becoming more consumer-driven and competitive which can make it difficult to reach high ROI (return on investment). Businesses do not only focus on attracting new customers, but also converting them into loyal ones. Conventional advertising methods (e.g., TV commercials and print ads) are not enough to achieve these goals.

What is one way to help you reach high ROI in your marketing campaigns? You’ll want to start connecting and working with influencers. Let’s face it, Influencer Marketing is the “new normal” when it comes to spreading a brand’s message and creating awareness. However, many still question whether it can really drive ROI. With no signs of slowing down, Influencer Marketing will continue to grow this year. So, when working with influencers, how can you ensure your Influencer Marketing campaign will reach high ROI?

How Influencers Create High ROI

ROI is a key performance indicator that determines the profitability of your business expenditure. Influencer Marketing has an ROI that is almost eleven times higher than the ROI produced by other forms of digital media. In particular, a recent survey reveals that for every dollar you invest in iInfluencer Marketing, you generate an average of $5.20 in return. Meaning to say, you get your money’s worth. Influencers are effective in generating high ROI due to the reasons outlined below.

Spread Awareness Through Word of Mouth Marketing

Word of mouth individually and collectively affects the purchasing decisions of consumers. People often rely on the personal experience of someone they know and trust when buying a product or service. They also trust an influencer when it comes to spending a lucrative amount of money on a newly released product or service. Why? Influencers are known for their honest opinions about products and services they share in their social media accounts.

Generate More Leads and Conversions

Influencers are people with a few devoted and engaged followers on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and other social media platforms. When influencers mention your product or service in their posts, their followers are likely to want to check out your business links, which allows you to nurture leads into conversions and sales. 

Influencer Marketing is a great public relations tool. It can send key message points to your target audience and allows you to engage with them to show you care. It grows your community of devoted customers and allows you to gather information about them.

Influencer Marketing is a powerful tool when driving sales. It can drive the needed knowledge, trust, reviews, and image that customers need to make a purchasing decision. You can add trackable links and measure instant conversions, but influencer activations will drive sales long past the campaign. Studies show that 83 percent of people discover new products or services on social media and 80 percent make a purchasing decision.  

Give More Credibility to Your Business

Influencer Marketing will boost your brand credibility and has the potential to position your brand as an expert in your industry. Moreover, Influencer Marketing will always be key for credibility, awareness, and genuine conversations with your followers.

Did you know that influencers come in three categories?

  • Celebrities
  • Social influencers (e.g., Instagrammers and YouTubers)
  • Industry influencers (e.g., bloggers, business leaders, and social figures)

Celebrities are the most well-known, but consumers are less trusting of celebrities. What distinguishes social and industry influencers from celebrities is their strong personal connection with their fans. Social and industry influencers are known for their honest reviews. As such, when they endorse your product or service, consumers will view it more as an authentic testimonial than a paid ad.

How To Choose Influencers to Make Sure You Reach High ROI

As mentioned, Influencer Marketing generates a high ROI—more than any other form of digital media. Unfortunately, few businesses fail to generate any revenue at all. So, what’s the problem? They select the wrong influencers.

With no signs of slowing down, Influencer Marketing will continue to grow along with the number of influencers in the social space. With 2.5 billion+ monthly active users on Facebook, 1 billion+ monthly active users on Instagram, 800 million+ monthly active users on TikTok, and 330 million+ monthly active users on Twitter, the numbers will only continue to increase. Those incredible stats are filled with countless influencers who are ready and willing to represent your brand. So, how can you identify the right influencers for your brand to achieve high ROI?

Here are the steps you should follow when choosing influencers to make sure you reach high ROI:

Relevance

Finding influencers who are right for your business is not as simple as it sounds. At Forward Influence, we do not just pick influencers based on their availability and popularity. Instead, we look at how aligned their content is with a brand’s messaging. After all, relevance is key to the success of Influencer Marketing campaigns.

First off, we ensure that the influencers we select belong to the same niche as the brand. If the brand is selling beauty products, then we will partner with beauty vloggers. Next, we consider target audiences. Our goal is to pair brands with influencers whose followers are interested in the product or service being offered. 

Reach

Reach simply refers to the number of followers influencers have on their social media platforms. The more followers they have, the more likely you can reach a bigger target audience. Influencers are categorized into different levels or tiers based on their individual reach on a given platform. Though they are separated only by their number of followers and not by any other criteria, their reach can tell us a lot about their overall engagement, likeability, and authenticity.

Engagement

Since follower counts can be artificially inflated, we do not just find influencers with a huge following. Even more important than the reach is engagement as it shows the loyalty of followers. An influencer might have a million followers on Instagram, but might only be getting a thousand likes per photo (or getting a lot of bot responses) indicates that their following is not loyal. If they endorse your product or service, it is likely that no one, or only a few, will care.

In contrast, an influencer with a loyal following is one who will get more likes, more comments, and more engagement on each post. If they recommend your product or service, their followers are likely to purchase it.

You can blindly choose influencers based on their followers and engagement. That’s always an option. But, to really achieve high ROI, you’ll want to dig deeper and find influencers who truly represent the look and feel of your brand. In doing so, the content the influencer produces will be authentic since the brand fits the influencer’s lifestyle and image. The last thing you want to do is simply work with an influencer who has a high reach, but doesn’t match your product or service. That mismatch can possibly do more harm than good and waste both time and money. Instead, working with the right influencers (maybe even influencers who have lower reach) will help you reach your desired audience in a more effective approach.

Each social media platform uses different metrics to track engagement. You can learn more about it here.

Visibility

The point of Influencer Marketing is to have your brands/products be seen in the digital world. It usually takes multiple exposures for someone to check your website. It also requires incredible effort for someone to revisit your website. Influencers who consistently and frequently post high-quality content tend to have a loyal following. It is more likely for their viewers or readers to return, bookmark, and share their posts about your product or service.

How to Measure ROI From Influencers

Do you want to know how much traffic and how many sales come from influencers?

Set Goals

Before enlisting the help of influencers, you have to know what you are trying to achieve. As such, you should set an achievable goal beforehand. For example, by partnering with influencers, you expect your sales to increase by at least $5,000 a month. If you accomplish this goal for the next consecutive months, it means that the influencers you are working with are effective in marketing your product or service.

Provide Promo Codes

When working with influencers, you can provide them with customized promo codes to give to their respective followers. When followers use the promo codes, you will know from whom they came.

Use Hashtags

When sharing a post about your product or service, require influencers to use hashtags. Also, ask influencers to encourage their followers to use the same hashtags as well. Hashtags effectively measure engagement in social media and track how many people purchased your product or service because of a particular influencer.

Ensure Impressions Are Targeted

One of the benefits of Influencer Marketing is visibility—whether you’re promoting a new brand or introducing a new product. Influencer Marketing allows you to reach the consumers most likely to shop your product. How? You need to work with influencers who closely align with your target audience.

Analyze Engagement

Engagement is a good indicator of how consumers feel about the brand. As part of your campaign strategy, you will have the influencers posting to their blogs and social media accounts. You should start to see mentions and engagement increase across the board. With all of these fun activities happening all at once, do you know which metrics should be tracked on each platform? With influencers posting to blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter (to name some of the heavy hitters), there are a lot (and I mean a ton) of moving parts and pieces that need to be recorded and tracked. Engagement is a valuable metric that brands can use to measure long-term return on investment.

Provide Affiliate Links

Combining your Influencer Marketing campaign with affiliate marketing is one of the simplest ways to track ROI in terms of dollars earned directly through influencers. You’ll want to create a unique tracking link for each of the influencers (if you want to measure them individually) or just one tracking link for the campaign (if you want to measure it as a whole). Influencers usually receive commission from these sales. However, the benefit to the brand is that these links will provide data around the number of clicks to the brand’s website, the number of sales, and the average order value for those sales.

Wrap It All Up

Partnering with influencers is a good investment for your business. Influencers can boost your ROI because they:

  • practice word of mouth
  • generate more leads and conversions
  • give credibility to your business. 

However, you have to select influencers who are right for your brand. Criteria to consider include:

  • relevance to your niche and target audience
  • follower counts
  • engagement rates
  • visibility

To measure ROI from influencers, you’ll want to do one or more of the following:

  • set goals
  • provide promo codes
  • use hashtags
  • ensure impressions are targeted
  • analyze engagement
  • provide affiliate links

By understanding how influencers can help you achieve high ROI, you will get your money’s worth and more.

What will you do with your next Influencer Marketing campaign to help generate high ROI?

Sources:

Key Indicators That Influencer Marketing is Right for Your Brand