According to the study, 65% of brands plan to increase their budget on influencer marketing in 2020. As more brands start to use influencer marketing, the need for a data-driven approach is increasing. The aim of data-driven influencer marketing strategy is to measure the performance of influencers and how the campaign is going. Thus, data is driven by influencer profiles and used to grow the effectiveness of your investment and estimate the ROI later. In simple words, data-driven influencer marketing is estimating ROI based on the relevant statistics and data taken from the influencer discovery until the end of the project.

Data-driven marketing is for covering all the insecurities brands see and in turn, offer better solutions. Data-driven influencer marketing takes several steps such as influencers discovery, building relations, campaign management, and reporting. Before partnering with influencers, it is important to scan influencers’ profiles, analyze their demographics and branded posts.

Define your goals

All strategies start with defining your goals. Do you want to drive awareness or brand loyalty via influencer marketing? 

Identify what you want to achieve with this campaign and how you plan to manage it. Depending on your goals you decide on platforms, influencers, and content. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, you do not focus on the sales part but the brand mentions, product reviews. But if you want to generate more sales paying influencers is not enough, you need to give coupon codes, special discounts for influencers’ followers. 

Find influencers

After deciding on your goals, the next step is finding influencers. As the number of influencers increasing day by day this phase will take your time. You need the ones who are already in your target audience and have that audience. Successful influencers in your niche have more fame and more sponsored partnerships. At the beginning of influencer marketing, macro-influencers referred to as the best channel for high ROI while now micro-influencers with less than 50K generate more engagement rate and ROI.

Fake influencer activity is another reason to leverage data for advanced influencer search. To deceive a large audience and high engagements influencers do not avoid buying bot followers and likes. This is why finding the right influencers takes beyond demographics, industry, and quality content of influencers. Marketers suggest working with the market experts, agencies and audience analytics tools like Keepface to reduce the time spent and money. 

Decide on the right platform 

Well investigated research allows picking the right platform in terms of content, project goals, region, and etc. Instagram is the number one platform for the number of sponsored posts and the most impactful channel among social media platforms. Keeping in mind that ⅔ of marketers will spend on Instagram for influencer marketing, it can direct brands to optimize their projects for Instagram. However, the saturation of existing markets helps brands to appear in the new platforms with new ideas. TikTok is the second most downloaded non-gaming app in 2019 after Facebook.

Drive data for the on-going projects

Now that you found the right influencers and released the campaign on the right platform, your goal is to reach the target customers at the highest possible rate. To optimize your marketing campaign, you can divide the project into parts and periodically evaluate the relevant metrics. AIDA – sales funnel model is a great way to measure performance. AIDA is an acronym that stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. In essence, the AIDA model proposes that in order to move the consumer through a series of important steps from brand awareness through to action marketing messages need to accomplish a number of tasks. Let’s see what are these tasks and how they can be applied for influencer campaigns.

Awareness

The awareness part is about introducing the product, grabbing your customers’ attention. The simple way to evaluate the project in this round is to check the campaign post, read comments, consider negative and positive views, and analyze how influencers are interacting with followers. This is the only time you can impact the campaign results, expand the reach.

Look at different metrics, like Engagement, Cost per Engagement, Cost per Impression. As the aim of data-driven influencer marketing is to create engagement, focus on authentic posts to reach maximum potential. Higher engagement lowers the cost per engagement. The low cost per engagement implies your every dollar spent smartly. Higher engagement also generates higher impression which in turn, means low Cost per Impression. 

Interest

In the Interest funnel, to keep track of the project add links to the posts to direct customers to your landing page or website and give URLs to influencers to know the best performers. Look at Click-Through Rate. again, higher the CTR means you are working with the right influencers. Following CTR, estimate cost per clicks.

Desire

Now that you the average number of people are eager to buy, increase the visibility of your product, and provide more information. Successful management of this part will lead to getting more customers to find your product a good fit for their desire or to see the solution for a specific problem they are experiencing.

Action

Following all the steps,  check the conversion rate to see which proportion of the visitors made a purchase from the campaign. A higher rate of conversion shows your influencer worked well to direct your potential customers to real buyers. Further, estimate cost per acquisition to see how much each customer action costs. In the end, all these metrics are considered to evaluate ROI. 

Keepface solution 

Because of the time and volume of data marketers recommend third party help. Marketing agencies and influencer marketing platforms know the touchpoints of the market and have the required expertise. Keepface has different tools such as Influencer Analytics, Influencer Marketing Software that provide a full-service influencer database to brands. The tool gives all the metrics and data about influencer and project performance, helps to monitor and optimize all active campaigns, and give reports at the end of all campaigns.