A Measure of Success

August 19, 2020

Influencer marketing continues to change how brands can have one-on-one conversations with their audience through an authentic influencer that they trust. All too often, however, the question is asked: “How do you measure your work?”.

For most other channels, measurement is simple. You can see how many people visit a website. You can count your CRT. You can see likes and comments. Or, in the most commercial sense, you can tell by an increase in your sales.

Influencer marketing works on an entirely different level. Rather than a Call To Action, influencer marketing gives an audience validation. It is validation in their choices or habits or lifestyle or fashion or financial decisions. The audience chooses to follow an influencer because they see something in that person that they trust. It could be a celebrity. It could be an investment banker. It could be a doctor. For whatever reason, that choice comes with an inherent degree of trust in what the influencer has to say or how that influencer is acting.

So rather than having a measurable metric, influencer marketing offers something far more valuable: brand awareness, brand love and brand loyalty. It’s a lot like a marriage. Most people try to put a metric on marriage. How long have you been married for? Is this your tin wedding anniversary or your diamond wedding anniversary? How many people try to measure how much love is in the marriage rather than how much time?

Influencer marketing brings the love and trust, things that can’t be measured. For now.

While experts in influencer marketing like R-Squared use traditional metrics to monitor and give a sense of measurement during a campaign, we know that these metrics are not the right ones to capture the efficacy of influencer marketing. We know that, while there are a vast number of different ways that digital can be measured, there are also a vast number of different ways that those numbers can be ‘massaged’ or bent to reflect a desired outcome.

And that is NOT what we foresee for an industry that has so much potential to make meaningful change in the world.

As the Chair of Influencer Marketing for the IAB SA, our CEO, Stéphane Rogovsky, is working with experts from around the world to find ways of measuring the true impact of influencer marketing on brands and on consumers. It’s a new discipline and requires a new way of showing the world just how effective it is.

For now, influencer marketing works very much like the old school big brand adverts worked – the ones you used to see at the cinema, or on prime-time TV, or at the Superbowl. It creates brand awareness for a new audience. It provides validation for your active audience. And it builds love for a brand by showing your audience that they matter, that you acknowledge them, that you are as invested in their time and interests as they are in you.

Like the love that powers a marriage through the good times and the bad, in sickness and in health, it’s not something that is easily measured but you can see and feel it across a room.