Data-driven influencer marketing

Key Takeaways

• A data-driven approach will give you a more profitable, engaging and targeted campaign.
• The Kolsquare Credibility Score helps you compare up to ten competitors and their respective influencer selections.
• The Kolsquare Discovery Tool data provides an overview of their demographics, engagement rates, reach or credibility and authenticity.

The goal of every brand is, naturally, to increase sales. But it’s equally as important to increase brand awareness and visibility which is where influencer marketing comes into play, and can even improve your long-term reputation.

It goes without saying that quality is extremely important. However, no matter how beautiful an image or creative concept is, people have to actually see it in the first place in order to appreciate it. That’s why it’s important to understand and use data-driven influencer marketing to your advantage. You should collect, analyze and interpret both past and real-time data.

Some marketers may not be fully convinced, as although they recognize the benefits, data-driven influencer marketing seems too costly and too time-consuming. However, making a long-term investment is the only way to boost sales, but also get a higher overall return on investment and brand reputation, leading to a higher ROI.

What metrics do you need to pay attention to in influencer marketing?

There are three main metrics to consider when determining the success of your campaign: reach, engagement, and sales. The first two metrics are also crucial when looking for the right influencers for your strategy.

Reach includes the number of followers, the engagement rate, perception, and the traffic your post, video, or collaboration can generate. So, you should always collect your data both for individual posts and for the overall project as a whole. This will give you a detailed overview and allow you to identify both the strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, you can analyze engagement, more precisely the number of clicks, likes, reactions, shares and retweets, comments and mentions. Finally, for sales, you should focus on sales performance, tracking and conversion rate.

In the Kolsquare Influencer Guide, you can read all the information in more detail. You can also find out which KPIs can measure the success of an influencer marketing campaign.

All this data is mainly used to calculate the Earned Media Value (EMV) of your campaign. However, it goes without saying that the resources you spend should never exceed the revenue, otherwise you would have to rethink your influencer campaign. You can also read how to effectively negotiate prices with influencers here.

Another important thing to remember is that influencers and brands are in the same boat when it comes to data collection. Many companies find it just as difficult as the creators themselves to get relevant data from social networks. Instagram, for example, has blocked almost all Instagram scraping methods with changes to its API and new anti-bot techniques, which means that there is a limit to how much information will be shared. TokTok is also quite difficult to draw information from.

This is where influencer marketing platforms like Kolsquare come in to help brands and influencers capture and analyze the data.

1. Understand the target audience

First of all, you should understand who exactly makes up your target audience. Who do you want to target with your campaign? Who is already following you and what are your followers interested in? (this can even be unrelated to your product). You can focus on your next campaign once you have understood your audience and which influencer is best to work with.

• An analysis of customer feedback can be extremely helpful. This will give you unbiased information about the product or service you offer. Why did your customers buy your product or use your service? What problems did they run into on your platform? Of course, this can be uncomfortable at times, as it’s never easy to be reminded of one’s weak points. Still, problems are there to learn from. So do it. Customer feedback can be:
• Customer reviews
• Complaints and bug reports
• Requests for new features and services
• Satisfaction with customer experience
• Questions/requests

Implement feedback into your marketing planning strategy to optimize your operations.

2. Compare and observe the competition

Knowing your competition is just as important as understanding your target audience. Use analytics tools to understand the key characteristics and demographics of their target audience and customers. Who are your competitors working with and on which channels? How do your direct competitors interact with their audience?

The Kolsquare Listening Tool helps you compare and keep track of up to ten competitors and their influences. Request a free demo today and we’ll set up a meeting with our experts.

On the Kolsquare blog we explain what social media benchmarking actually is and how you can use it as a strategy.

3. Identify influencers

How to find the right influencers: the Kolsquare database has more than 1.5 million influencers, divided into different categories. You can choose between social networks, by city or by area of interest to choose the best new partners for your brand.

In addition, Kolsquare’s discovery tool provides you with data about their demographics, engagement rates, reach or credibility and authenticity. This key information is defined by the Kolsquare Credibility Score. Each profile from the Kolsquare database receives a score out of 100 which evaluates audience quality and engagement rates. So, the number can be used to help you evaluate a creator’s content and engagement. This post also explains how to unmask so-called fake influencers.

Kolsquare calculates theCredibility Score based on the percentage of real accounts in relation to the followers of each KOL. Past data is also taken into account for the credibility score, for which the technology evaluates profile pictures, bios, number of posts as well as the ratio of followers to following.