Best Practices: How to optimize your Influencer Marketing investments with a data-driven approach?

When it is well mastered and understood, data in Influencer Marketing can be a real game-changer when using an effective and successful strategy. To reach its strategic objectives, it is necessary to have total control of the costs and potential ROI linked to a campaign to draw the costs and budget optimizations to be planned for future campaigns.

Also, as mentioned above, having a data-driven vision of its Influence campaigns allows a brand to access real information and statistics regarding the profile of relevant KOLs to activate, potential target reached and key results in the context of affiliate programs. These numbers can make a real difference in the success of a collaboration.

Nevertheless, defining the budget to allocate to an Influencer campaign is still a challenge for brands: which influencer to collaborate with to reach its objectives? How to be sure not to overpay for a collaboration with a KOL? How to find the right balance to maximize the ROI of a campaign? There are a few best practices to optimize your Influence Marketing investments, notably by using a dedicated technological platform. Here are the main ones.

The choice of the influencer

We mentioned it earlier. The choice of the KOL with whom to collaborate is essential and can change the whole deal of your campaign in terms of results and performance.
This identification must be done through qualitative elements such as the universe or the way a KOL communicates with his audience, but also based on quantitative elements such as, concrete audience data, centres of interests, ages, genders, geographical data, engagement on the platforms, etc.

All this quantitative information allows professionals to make the right choice in terms of profiles to activate and to go more efficiently toward the achievement of the campaign’s objectives.

A technological solution or a dedicated tool allows you to go more efficiently toward the profiles that are most in line with the objectives you have set and
the message you wish to deliver to a specific audience. For example, this is the case with Kolsquare which help you identify the relevant profiles for your brand, proposes in particular to the professionals:

• The Kolsquare Discovery feature provides insights into the demographics, engagement rates, reach or credibility and authenticity of KOLs as well as their audiences.
• The Credibility Score of each KOL profile, which is a score out of 100 that determines the quality of the audience and the engagement of each KOL in the Kolsquare database. This number tells you how to evaluate the content and the seriousness of the influencers thanks to technology that analyzes the profile pictures, the biographies, the number of contributions and the ratio between the followers and the followed accounts.

A platform allows you to find the right numbers based on advanced technology rather than relying on influencers sending you statistics. Especially since it can quickly become time-consuming to get relevant data on the social accounts of content creators via social platforms directly.
For example, Instagram with its API changes and new anti-bot techniques, has blocked almost all Instagram scraping methods, which creates limitation on the information shared. TikTok is also known to make crawling the platform very difficult.
Dedicated technology from Influence can help you get around these aspects when searching for the most relevant profiles for your next campaign.

Investing too much or too little: How to find the right balance for your campaigns

It’s not always easy to find the right budget balance when it comes to Influence Marketing campaigns. Several elements can allow you to adjust your budget and maximize your ROI thanks to vigilance on key data. For example, it may be wise to monitor the potential target reached or to compare a KOL profile with others that could match your audience data research as mentioned above. Again, we advise you not to rely solely on the size of a content creator’s community to maximize your results so that you don’t invest for the sake of investing without having a safety net on the possible results of your Influence campaign.

In addition to over-investing in a profile, there is a second issue of under- investing in a KOL during an Influencer Marketing campaign. If at first glance, a KOL is not the preferred profile for your Influence project, this profile may ultimately generate much better results than you could have imagined if you had based yourself solely on the size of its community on a social platform. This is the case with the activation of micro-influencers whose engagement rates are often much higher than those of their macro and celebrity neighbors.
They allow you to reach sales objectives much more easily than if you had activated a KOL with a larger community, given their privileged links with their followers. They will have a greater impact on the results of your campaign while requiring a much smaller investment. Again, it’s all about an observation of your previous Influence projects. Compare and analyze the profiles that have performed best in your last campaigns to activate the KOLs that allow you to fulfill the objectives you’ve set.

To put all the chances on your side and build an adequate budget for your Influencer Marketing campaign, we advise you to multiply the analysis and selection criteria to identify the most relevant profiles for your brand. In other words, those who resonate qualitatively with your brand will allow
you to reach your objectives of sales, number of followers, traffic on your site, etc, according to their performance in terms of content and audience in particular.