INFLUENCER RELATIONSHIPS; A DISCUSSION ON MEASURING VALUE

Undertow’s tips on how to build a measurable and successful influencer relationship.

As the world of marcomms continues to grow it is only recently that we have become able to refine, improve and learn from the influencer relationships created across past projects that have used engagement with social media influencers to market and talk about our clients.

While there are still many varying opinions throughout the industry, current insights and following the discussions all provide further evidence not only of the power of social engagement, influencer relationships and celebrity endorsements but also of the nuances and pitfalls still highly prevalent in strategising, measuring and reporting on these relationships.

Throughout all discussions however, a key learning and common oversight has been identified. In order create a stable and rigorous social influencer relationship you must ensure there is a clear understanding of core business values and identification of desired business outcomes before commencing any creative plan outline.  Before any strategy planning, the first step must be to understand what we are trying to accomplish and further still, how we manage and measure success.

Having identified these core business outcomes, we then look into favourable behaviours that will aid us in indicating campaign achievement.

“The metrics for social media used to be all about likes and followers. That was the first step. Now social media enables core business objectives and provides so many different metrics and new data streams on customers and their behaviour.”*

Are you looking to grow brand visibility and awareness?  Then you may want to focus on likes and regular content updates, if you are looking to create more brand loyalty and affinity then you will be looking for consumer engagement, in which case comments and shares will provide commentary and customer input into your brand content.

If you don’t know what you want to achieve how will your team or agency ever be able to deliver?  Without clear goals we cannot identify the desired behaviour we are looking to affect, create clear KPIs or sound metric systems for post-reporting and analysis.  After all, it is the post-reporting where the learnings really become evident and more importantly allow us to evolve and refine our approach moving forward.

*What Is The Value Of Social Media Engagement?”, Kyle Wong, Forbes.com (http://tinyurl.com/hr7dfh3)