Internet Marketing Association

Social Soup, Quantium Get Together to Gauge Influence


August 18, 2016


The value of influencer marketing is on the rise as marketers realize this breed of marketing is about the only one that people will actively seek out and interact with, except maybe for particularly funny Super Bowl commercials. While influencer marketing does vary in impact from one user to another, some believe there's a way to quantify this figure, and Social Soup recently got together with Quantium to do just that.


Thanks to this partnership, Social Soup is now Australia's first influencer marketing agency to offer a standard metric of sales attribution with its campaigns. With such a metric, Social Soup can determine which influencers are delivering the most effective influence and work accordingly.

The methods involved may sound a little shaky, but there's logic here. Quantium will be, anonymously, matching the actions of Social Soup influencers to aggregated sales data over a period of time to measure overall impact between times when influence is in effect and when it's not. Since spending on influence marketing is on the rise, so too is the need for effective measurement tools. The Quantium / Social Soup measure isn't the first such measure—Hypetap offered up an Instagram-specific influence measurement tool earlier in 2016, and most agencies have at least some kind of sales metric—but Quantium and Social Soup's system uses both online and offline data to get a better picture of what's going on.

Sharyn Smith, CEO of Social Soup, commented “This new methodology means we can reliably track the behavior of our social influencers and how that translates to driving sales in store. Social Soup is committed to ensuring accountability and measurement for our clients and we will shortly be announcing new technology to execute and manage our campaigns through an app.”

The problem with this is that it smacks of specious reasoning. Though there is a value in measuring what goes on in terms of sales during an influencer marketing campaign and immediately before and after it, it doesn't necessarily follow that it was the influencer marketing campaign that caused the changes in sales behaviors. It's the difference between correlation and causation; if a company runs an influencer marketing campaign in, say, November, and sales go up, what was the cause? Was it the influencer marketing or was it the fact that people do a lot more shopping ahead of December 25 for some reason?

It's important to have a sense of how much impact an influencer marketing campaign is delivering for the purchaser, and even a little knowledge is better than none. Getting a handle on the exact value of influencer marketing can be difficult, though, and many common measuring tools may not be that effective. The effort is worthwhile, though, and Social Soup and Quantium should get a lot of value out of even trying to make the measurements.




Edited by Alicia Young

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