Measuring the Effects of Influencer Marketing

Today, savvy organizations add a powerful voice to their marketing program: that of their customers who are strong fans and vocal proponents of their products and services. Cultivating and leveraging these individuals’ momentum is termed “influencer marketing,” and it’s a branch of marketing that draws from all disciplines and adds more than a little dash of human psychology.

To date, however, it has been hard to quantify influencer marketing. You know how many clicks your website gets. You know how many people open your marketing emails. Influencer marketing hasn’t been so easy to track, and as the old saying goes, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Many companies have struggled with efforts to correlate influencer activity with the strategic objectives so they can understand where their efforts are working best. Just because you count a person with broad reach among your influencers doesn’t mean that person has been effective for your marketing campaigns.

Influencer marketing solutions provider Traackr recently announced the launch of I3, a product designed to quantify the value of influencer relationships on business, and benchmark their influencer programs in the marketplace. The company says it works by aggregating vast amounts of influencer content across all major platforms and layering rich engagement data over influencer activity showing how an influencer’s audience interacts with their content. The solution was designed to reveal the actual results an influencer generates with all of their content, no matter if it is sponsored by the brand or organically produced.

Influencer marketing company JMR Connect’s CEI: Connect solution also has built-in tools that allow influencer marketers to track and quantify their efforts against bottom-line business objectives. At the Holmes Report’s In2 Summit held in February in Chicago, the CEI platform was honored with a Best Marketing Technology Sabre Award. JMR Connect’s application included a case study for Yorktel, which has been able to leverage the CEI platform to increase brand awareness and targeted engagement via influence marketing. Analytics capabilities allow users to maximize return on investment by measuring engagement and running cost-benefit analyses.  The platform, says JMRConnect CEO Mostafa Razzak, fills a gap in the corporate communications landscape between content creation and sales and marketing.

“PR and corporate communications professionals are too often fighting an uphill battle when it comes to convincing employees to share company content on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and in many cases, making them aware of media coverage, case studies, whitepapers and other content,” said Razzak.  “CEI solves these problems by not only pushing this information to them, but by also empowering them to share on multiple social media platforms with a single click. They no longer have to take time away from their jobs to search for this information and create individual posts. Each post is developed for them and tailored for the respective platforms. Amplifying visibility and quantifying the value of each campaign has never been easier.”