Halloween adornments are beginning to pop up, and Mariah Carey’s Christmas album has already hit the shelves – a clear indication that the festive season is fast approaching.
This holiday period usually spans from early October through the end of January in the following year.
Shoppers are in a fervor of purchasing due to the numerous holidays within this timeframe, making it essential for your brand to be primed to seize this opportunity.
In this article, we’ll guide you through the 3 essential influencer marketing metrics you should be tracking for your upcoming holiday campaigns, ensuring that your efforts spread holiday cheer and deliver real results.
But let’s start with the basics.
Table of Contents
What is influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing is a strategy based on utilizing the influence of popular personalities, experts, and opinion leaders to promote products, services, or brands. This marketing approach involves creating partnerships with Influencers who have significant influence in a particular niche or among the target audience.
Influencers can be bloggers, celebrities, experts in a certain field, or even regular people with a large social media audience. The main idea behind influencer marketing is that recommendations and advertisements from popular personalities are considered more authoritative and credible, which helps to increase sales and attract new customers.
It is often used on social media, where Influencers create content related to products or services and share it with their audience. The effectiveness of influencer marketing depends on the right influencer, the authenticity of the collaboration, and the alignment of the brand with the values of the influencer.
What influencer marketing goals can be set for holiday campaigns?
The first thing you need to do before launching an influence marketing campaign is to decide on an objective that aligns with your overall business goals. Both the placement formats and the metrics by which you will evaluate effectiveness depend on this choice.
Let’s take the example of Amazon influencer Program. This program offers unique opportunities for influencers to connect with their audience and drive sales through Amazon, making the tracking of these metrics even more significant. You can either start such a campaign and onboard multiple influencers to promote your holiday campaigns as well.
Influencer marketing can work at different levels of the sales funnel:
- Increase brand awareness
- Attract subscribers to a landing page and traffic to a website
- Directly drive sales
The media effect, i.e., working at the top level of the sales funnel, is obvious because of the high advertising reach. But in practice, influencer marketing is used for all purposes. Even when stimulating sales, it can be cheaper than traditional channels like contextual and targeted advertising.
The value of influence marketing is in the high involvement of the audience in contact with advertising content due to loyalty to a particular blogger. This determines the expectation of high conversion to a targeted action of the audience.
Which action to set as a target action is up to the individual advertiser. Suppose you are a manufacturing and trading organization in the FMCG segment, have your website with an online store, and are represented on leading marketplaces. In that case, you will probably attract traffic directly to the selling platforms.
You will familiarize the audience with your products through other tools, and the target action in influence marketing for you will be a sale.
What influence marketing metrics should be tracked for holiday campaigns?
Examples of the brands that leverage holiday marketing campaigns and influencer marketing are Ikea, John Lewis, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and WestJet
KPIs always depend very much on your goals for your advertising campaign. At the same time, the goals should be measurable. The effectiveness of blogger advertising and the entire campaign should be evaluated correctly and objectively. For example, “I want my brand to become more recognizable” is not a clear, measurable goal but a vague desire.
Another great example is this: “I need to reach at least 500,000 people from Argentina and Brazil on YouTube, as I want to scale in the Latin American market, for which I made my new mobile game. I also need the ads to bring in at least 10,000 new users.” Here, we already see several metrics that will allow us to judge the success or failure of an influencer marketing campaign.
The metrics that must be tracked during and after the influence marketing campaign are also determined depending on the goals.
1. Brand awareness
You can find out how your brand awareness was affected by the advertising campaign in several ways:
- Track the dynamics of search queries with the brand name or product advertised – this can be done in Keyhole.
- Evaluate how much traffic to the website from branded search queries has increased.
- Conduct market research in one of the services that specialize in this.
Each of the methods has its disadvantages. For example, if you run several outreach campaigns simultaneously, you can only track the overall dynamics of brand requests. Marketing research services can give detailed data on a specific campaign. However, they do not give real results but predicted ones based on the responses of their audiences.
Publication reach is an indicator that is indirectly related to brand awareness, so some measure media effect by it. How publication reach actually affected brand awareness depends on how relevant the blogger’s audience is and how well the integration was done.
Likes, comments, and reposts are audience engagement metrics, so some marketers also consider them in addition to reach.
Evaluating how much the audience liked the ad campaign is essential. This can be done by evaluating the ER (it is measured by the ratio of audience actions to reach). Analyzing the audience’s reaction to the ads (likes, comments, reposts, etc.) is necessary. If the advertising placement is well thought out, it receives a proper response from the audience (the tone of comments can trace this).
2. Traffic to the website and new subscribers
The number of website visitors coming from a blogger can be tracked in Google Analytics. The main condition here is to add an individual UTM tag to the blogger’s link.
The number of new subscribers is sometimes more difficult to calculate. There are nuances here.
You can give a link to your profile when posting on Instagram or Facebook, but in the official statistics, you cannot track how many users came to you from this link.
That’s why experts recommend advertising with different Influencers within an interval. This way, the data will be cleaner. For example, if a blogger has posted Stories with integration, you should wait at least 24 hours for integration with another blogger. For posting in posts, you can wait a week. Usually, publications stop gaining views during this time.
3. Sales
If the advertiser has correctly configured analytics, the user’s path from the blogger’s post to purchase can be traced simply using UTM tags. However, the more common tool here is a customized discount promo code that the blogger communicates to the audience. This has several reasons:
- The promo code further warms up the audience
- Purchases using a promo code are easier to track
- Promo codes can be tracked on marketplaces where Google Analytics is unavailable.
What metrics can be tracked when the goal of an influencer marketing campaign is sales?
CPA (Cost Per Action) is a great KPI. In this case, we are talking about the cost of an order, but you can measure CPA at different levels (for example, the cost of a click to the website) and optimize your ads based on that.
To measure CPA, you must divide advertising costs by the number of target actions (e.g., orders).
ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment) is another great KPI. To understand whether a blogger’s advertising has paid off or not, you need to:
- Subtract the cost of launching the advertising campaign from the profit that was made thanks to the blogger
- Divide the result by the total advertising costs
These are essential influencer marketing metrics.
Bonus: Keyhole for influencer marketing campaigns
Keyhole can be a valuable tool for tracking and analyzing influencers in your marketing campaigns. It provides real-time data and insights that can enhance your influencer marketing strategies.
- You can search for specific influencers or hashtags relevant to your brand or target audience. This helps you identify influential individuals who align with your brand values and have a significant impact on your audience.
- Keyhole uses advanced algorithms to monitor and track key metrics related to influencers’ social media activities. It provides you with detailed analytics on their engagement rates, reach, sentiment analysis, and follower demographics.
- Keyhole is not just limited to tracking influencers. It also helps you track the success of your influencer marketing campaigns.
The platform provides comprehensive reports on engagement, impressions, and conversations generated by your campaigns. This means you can see how your campaigns are performing, identify top-performing influencers, and gain valuable insights to optimize your future campaigns.
Wrapping up
With the holiday season just around the corner, the time is ripe to strategically plan your influencer marketing strategy. These metrics are your compass, helping you navigate through the competitive holiday marketing landscape.
So, as you gear up for your next holiday campaign, employ these invaluable metrics as your trusted allies in creating a memorable, impactful, and successful holiday season for your brand. May your holiday campaign be merry, bright, and, most importantly, data-driven.
Don’t forget to unlock social media insights and try Keyhole’s free trial right now!
Author Bio
David van Luijn, Chief Marketing Officer at Tourism Group International. It sells over 4,5 million Tours and Tickets yearly through ticket offices, online channels, attraction box offices, PDAs, shop-in-shops, and partner platforms.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are the most important metrics to track in holiday influencer campaigns?
While various metrics are relevant, some of the most critical ones include engagement rate, conversion rate, and reach. These metrics help you gauge the effectiveness of your campaign in terms of audience interaction, conversion into sales, and how wide your message is being spread during the holiday season.
2. How can I measure the engagement rate for my holiday influencer campaign?
To calculate the engagement rate, tally up the total likes, comments, shares, and other interactions on your influencer's content. Divide this by the total number of followers or viewers. The result, typically expressed as a percentage, gives you insight into how engaging your content is and how well it resonates with your audience during the holiday campaign.
3. What's the best way to ensure a successful holiday influencer campaign using these metrics?
A successful holiday influencer campaign is not just about the metrics themselves but also about using them to make informed decisions. Regularly monitor the metrics, analyze the data, and be ready to adjust your strategy accordingly. Collaborate closely with your influencers, and don't forget to create content that aligns with the holiday theme and your brand's message to maximize the impact of your campaign.