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6 Influencer Marketing Metrics To Watch and 5 Tools To Help

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6 Influencer Marketing Metrics To Watch and 5 Tools To Help

Influencer marketing sounds magical. You ask people to talk about your brand and its products with their digital audiences. When they do, your profits increase.

But influencer marketing on social media is more complex, and like any content marketing, its connection to the bottom line usually isn’t direct. How can you create a social media influencer program that elicits metrics that get the results you want?

#InfluencerMarketing sounds magical. But it’s complex, and its bottom-line impact usually isn’t direct, says @ab80 via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Tracking influencer key performance indicators (KPIs) requires structuring a program that uses metrics to identify influencers. It incorporates the most valuable success metrics and uses tools to help you assess and optimize what works.

6 influencer-focused metrics

Before you reach out to influencers, determine which metrics to evaluate. They can help you identify the influencers most valuable for your brand. Then, the metrics can help you evaluate how well their engagement works for your company.

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1. Reach and impressions

Audience size determines the category of influencer – macro, micro, nano, etc. That total audience can be on single or multiple channels. But that overview number isn’t enough. Take a look at the influencer’s reach and impressions:

  • Reach indicates the number of people who have checked a post, a story, or a video. That number could be bigger than the audience size because the content can be seen, shared, cited, tagged, and commented on by people who are not your followers (i.e., the audience).
  • Impressions encompass the number of times a post, a video, Reel, etc., appeared in newsfeeds. A post could appear in a user’s feed multiple times, or the user could click on it multiple times. Impressions may indicate better than reach how well the content resonates with the target audience.

Audience, reach, and impressions are not the same thing. Don’t treat them like they are, says @ab80 via @CMIContent. #InfluencerMarketing Click To Tweet

2. Audience engagement

Audience engagement can indicate how well the influencer’s energy, creativity, and effort contribute to the development of their channel. It indicates the followers’ level of interest. That, in turn, can influence the social media algorithms that seek to promote the most popular content.

When comparing influencers by audience engagement, keep in mind the metrics depend on the total audience size. The engagement metric calculates all the ways someone could interact with a social post – likes, shares, and comments.

To figure out the engagement rate, you can use a tool that does it automatically, or you could do it manually. Add up the total number of interactions with a post. Divide that number by the total followers of that influencer’s social media account. Multiply that result by 100 to get the engagement rate for that post.

3. Audience growth

Assess the audience growth metric before and after you contract with an influencer. Though the effect takes longer to appreciate, audience growth serves as another indicator of how well the influencer continues to attract an audience. (Tracking it also can be an indicator to let you know the influencer is losing audience.)

Track the influencer’s audience growth by tracking its audience numbers (followers) as each new post appears. Audience spikes usually directly correlate with the posting schedule.

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4. Brand mentions

When you’re working with an influencer, brand mentions are the most evident metric to track. It shows the number of times the brand is mentioned by the influencer and their followers on social media platforms.

When you’re working with an influencer, brand mentions are the most evident metric to track, says @ab80 via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

Track your brand mentions before and after holding a marketing campaign. This metric will help you estimate the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and how they influence brand awareness.

5. Traffic from social media

Just mentioning your brand in a social media post isn’t enough reason for you to partner with an influencer. You want their followers to get in touch with the brand. That’s why it’s important to have the influencer include a call-to-action link inviting the audience to visit your company’s site and interact with the brand. (How to incorporate the CTA differs by platform.)

If you use a CTA with a URL unique to the influencer, you can evaluate how well their mentions of your brand convert into traffic for your brand. If you don’t use a unique URL, you can look at your web analytics to assess traffic from social media and see if the social influencers’ campaigns have had an impact.

Give an influencer a unique URL to publish as their CTA. You can better track their performance, says @ab80 via @CMIContent. Click To Tweet

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6. Conversions from socials

As soon as a follower transfers to your website or an application, you can track their behavior. Converting the influencer’s followers is the primary goal for most influencer marketing campaigns – and it factors into the return on investment for the influencer deal.

What do you want the visitor who arrived through the influencer’s channel to do? Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter? Sign up for a product discount? Buy your services?

By identifying your conversion goal(s), you can use analytics tools to assess whether the social influencer’s campaign had the desired impact.

Note: To effectively define where your conversions come from, use trackable links. Their unique ID can show which social media content made the conversion.

Handy tools for influencer analytics

Tracking all the metrics mentioned and analyzing each influencer’s performance manually would be a nightmare for the most devoted marketer. These five tools can help alleviate those bad dreams in assessing your influencer engagement.

Brand and reach: Awario

My employer’s tool, Awario, tracks reach, number of mentions, and share of voice. It also compiles a list of influencers and their posts where your brand name is mentioned that received the highest reach.

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You can create alerts for your brand name and related keywords. The resulting mention feed shows social media posts related to your brand that you can sort by date, platform, hashtags, etc. You also can monitor the frequency of posts. The tool’s mention statistics section reveals reach, audience demographics, post sources, sentiments, and keywords.

Influencer search: HypeAuditor

HypeAuditor lets you find influencers on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok who match the needs of your marketing campaigns. You can search for influencers who already talk about your brand and/or whose audiences match your target audience. You also can search for experts in a niche and those who create authentic content – all vital criteria for finding the best influencer partner.

Influencer analysis: Affable.ai

Affable.ai is a marketing platform that lets you evaluate the influencers on your prospective partner list. It works for influencers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and more. You can learn their age, location, follower count, language, etc.

Affable.ai also serves as a platform to build, optimize, and execute influencer campaigns. Its influencer relationship management tool tracks influencer content, provides simple-to-export reports, and compares influencer performances.

Posts’ performance: GRIN

GRIN’s handy tool provides the most detailed information about a social post’s performance. It evaluates such metrics as engagement rate, clicks, and conversions. This information will help you quickly assess if your influencer campaign was successful.

Apart from influencer tracking, GRIN can also monitor various KPIs for your marketing campaigns, including a budget, revenue, conversions, and media value.

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Audience insights: Emplifi.io

Emplifi.io (formerly SocialBakers) is an AI-driven tool that simplifies audience analytics and management on social media. This multi-feature platform can analyze each follower and influencer profile, revealing ideas and strategies to implement in your marketing campaigns.

Metrics matter in social influencer marketing

You should assess the metrics before, during, and after your influencer social marketing partnerships. It isn’t a one-time activity. By paying close attention regularly to the numbers and adjusting as necessary, you improve the chances of a successful long-term influencer strategy.

All tools mentioned in the article are identified by the author. If you have a tool to suggest, please add it in the comments.

Want more content marketing tips, insights, and examples? Subscribe to workday or weekly emails from CMI.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute



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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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