Marketing through influencers affords brands unique advantages. Leveraging the platform and reach that these social media influencers have created for themselves allows businesses to reach out to a massive number of people in an affordable way. That is why this industry has rapidly skyrocketed to become a globally significant marketing form.
According to Statista, the influencer marketing market size has more than doubled from 2019, when it was valued at $6.5 billion, to 2021, where it is currently valued at $13.8 billion. The biggest driver of the success of this industry is the significant ROI brands can expect to see. According to a Shopify report, the average ROI for influencer marketing is around $5.78 for every dollar spent.
But not every influencer marketer is guaranteed to find success. Businesses must make informed decisions driven by data insights to help them define their influencer marketing strategy. Big data, accessed from various academic, commercial, and online databases, can provide the necessary information to create a more personalized, impactful influencer campaign.
According to insights from Google, 61% of people expect brands to tailor their experience to their preferences, and 90% of marketing leaders say personalization contributes positively to profitability. Marketing Evolution found that data-driven marketing increases ROI, with campaigns that leverage data personalization seeing 5-8x ROI for their campaign spend.
Below, we’ve compiled five of the different ways you can use big data to improve the ROI of your next big influencer campaign.
Target the Right Kind of Consumers
“The goal of your product marketing through influencers should be to find the right audience that your brand connects with, says Aaron Kozinets; Founder of Influence Hunter. No product or service will be targeted to everyone, and with influencer marketing, narrowing your scope can help you have a more personalized, targeted campaign that resonates with a key group,  he says.
If you are post-launch, you can look at the data collected from your previous customers. Find out the typical age, location, and any other demographic details you can glean to get a better sense of the people who use your product. If you don’t have a customer base to tap into, market research goes a long way.
Research the age range, budgets, and other details of the type of people who buy the product you’re selling. It shouldn’t be difficult to find data that will give you a clear image of the type of consumer you’re hoping to target. That’ll give you a base to build your marketing outreach.
Utilize the Best Platforms
If you’ve figured out who the customers are, you should use data to try and find the ideal social channels to target them on. Several different factors should influence this decision. For one, how old are they? Look at the demographic details of the platform you are considering using. If you’re selling a product marketed towards 40-50-year-olds, TikTok is not the platform for you. Only 30% of TikTok’s user base is 40+ years old, according to Backlinko.
Research the social media habits of the targeted consumers in the age group, socioeconomic status, and location that you’re hoping to prioritize as an audience base. Find the type of content that typically resonates with that group. Instagram is the most popular medium for influencer marketing, but get specific with it. Do you want to post video content on Instagram? Stories? A picture? These decisions should be informed by the social media habits of your ideal customers.
Find the Right Influencers
Now that you’ve figured out the target audience you prioritize and the social media platform you are hoping to reach them on, it is time to find the right influencers to help you launch your campaign. You have several different options, ranging from mega-influencers to nano-influencers. Many businesses tend to look at follower count as the only data point that matters when choosing influencers, but this is far from true.
Engagement rate is a metric that shows the impact influencers’ posts have relative to their follower count, tracking the number of likes, comments, and shares a typical post from an influencer will have. It shows how much the typical follower of an influencer will respond to a post by them.
Engagement rate shows you the real value an influencer provides, as an influencer with a high follower count that fails to generate any engagement may charge a higher price than a lesser influencer but provide less value. Influencers with lower follower counts tend to have higher engagement rates, so finding the right balance of influencers with large audiences and engaged followers will help you acquire high-value content creators.
Track your Campaign’s Performance
Once you’ve secured the influencers you hope to collaborate with; your campaign should be ready for launch. But the work isn’t done when your campaign begins. That is when some of the most critical work begins. One thing that many businesses like about influencer marketing is that it provides trackable data that can keep you up to date with the performance of your campaign.
While measuring ROI from influencer marketing campaigns is seen as the #1 challenge with influencer marketing, according to Mediakix, there are KPIs that help you monitor the performance of campaigns.
Affiliate codes, with different ones given to each influencer, can show which influencers have generated real sales. Monitoring your brand’s social media follower count before and after the campaign can help you track brand awareness growth, as can the number of impressions and reach of the influencers’ posts. You can also monitor the click-through rate, or CTR, of influencers’ posted links, which will help you track the traffic to your website.
Tweak Campaign Based on Data Insights
With the insights you’ve gleaned from your campaign, you should have a healthy understanding of where your outreach stands. Influencer marketing is a process; you may not find the success you were looking for straight away. That is why the data you’ve received is such a high-value asset. It should help you to tweak your campaign and alter it to optimize the overall performance and results.
The data you’ve generated should show you which influencers perform well for your brand and which aren’t. If an influencer is bringing in business and helping build your brand, continue with them! Long-term partnerships are fruitful in influencer marketing for both sides. Don’t be afraid to cut ties with influencers that haven’t yielded sales or high-performing posts.
Trimming your campaign down, so only the parts that are working for you are continued with will help you have an efficient and effective outreach. Look at all aspects of your campaign: the influencers, the targeted niches, the types of content. You should be collecting and analyzing the data about your campaign’s performance in these areas. Let the data from these campaigns inform your next steps, and you’ll have the most successful campaign possible.
By utilizing data, you can create a campaign that reaches the right people, through the right influencers, on the best possible social media platform. You can then track the performance of this campaign with analytics and tweak the campaign based on the insights you receive, which will lead to campaigns with the most possible ROI.
