Influencer marketing is on a roll, with marketers increasing budgets from just $1.7 billion in 2016 to $13.8 billion in 2021.  With all of this investment in influencer marketing, how should a brand ensure maximum ROI from their influencer campaigns?

As a company that has worked in the influencer marketing space for over 10 years, SheSpeaks has developed a three stage model that maximizes influencer marketing investment for clients. 

Our model relies on analysis of thousands of executed influencer marketing campaigns and integrates the organic impact of Influencer programs with incremental paid media.  

The approach builds leverage into Influencer campaigns, using the inherent engagement of influencer content to significantly increase the performance of traditional paid media like video and display to deliver winning overall campaign ROI for our brand partners.

Stage 1: Organic Influencer Campaign

In the first phase of an Influencer program, we deploy multiple posts from carefully chosen Influencers who develop highly engaging content and whose audience matches the brand’s target consumer/shopper.  A successful Influencer marketing campaign relies on the creativity of our Influencer partners to support the brand’s voice and objectives, and once the campaign is launched we can very quickly measure which posts are delivering the highest.  Using this data, we can quickly identify which posts have the opportunity to drive results with a broader audience.

Stage 2: Paid Media Social Boosting

For the best performing, highest-engagement Influencer posts, we invest incremental dollars to expand the audience on the social networks where the posts appear.  Using the native advertising tools from the social networks, we can quickly access new audiences that are very similar to the Influencer’s audience, based on demographics, interest, and behavior-based targeting.  This has a double impact – we help our Influencers grow their audience, and our brand partners to reach new consumers.

Kraft at Target Art of the Burger Campaign

Reese’s at Walmart March Madness Campaign

Stage 3: Expanding the Audience with Paid Media

Expanding the audience brings Influencer content outside of social networks, to more traditional online advertising channels like display and video.  Ad units that incorporate Influencer content consistently perform better than non-Influencer units, which means that for each advertising dollar, the brand gets better results, and better ROI for the overall program.  Results from Stage 2 help to tailor audience targeting, as we have a strong understanding of which content resonates and drives results with specific audience characteristics.

In both Stages 2 and Stage 3, we can tailor the investment and audience targeting to meet the objectives of the campaign, including impressions, clicks, follows, purchases, and video views.

According to our client Nobles Crawford at Reckitt Bensicker:

“The flexibility of Influencer content is limitless if you have the right licensing package. Being able to use their likeness in standard ads and OLV outside of their social platforms is clutch in helping achieve breakthrough and brand likeability metrics. Influencers can provide a plethora or different opportunities if you brief your campaign precisely and you find a good partner to engage with the talent.”

Using this approach, we’ve driven great results for our brand partners including a 400% increase in video view over plan by using Influencer content which resulted in $242K in additional value.

We have lots of other examples and would be happy to chat further about how this approach can help maximize your influencer marketing campaign ROI.

Interested in learning more?  Please contact Missy Tiller at missy.tiller@shespeaks.com