Transcripts
1. Dive In: in miscue share course, we're gonna be covering off influence on marketing Return on investment. So we'll start with identifying water, the key objectives and strategy for your brand or business. So what is most important to you and how you likely to measure that that return? So what are the key metrics and the tools available to help you? And lastly, how do you go about in a practical sense, actually, doing those measurements and really saying way you will find the biggest return? I'm Kim Westwood. I'm the founder and managing director of a company called Shocking Links. We are an influence or in content marketplace, and we focus primarily on fashion, beauty and lifestyle influences with a key focus around quality of influence, transparency in data and results and obviously, conversion. So for us, it's really important for our brands and brand partners to be able to see a conversion in the influence marketing if it so, where do you go to get more information? There's a number of places that will be able to help you. One is influencer Marketing Resource is dot com. This site has a plethora off information tools, templates, data, actually, as a forum where you can connect with leading experts in influencer marketing, you can ask lots of questions. It's a really good place to visit if you're looking for some advice around tools and platforms and more of a technology flavor. There's another website which old recommend, which is influencer marketing. Hum. They do a lot of reviews on different platforms and marketplaces and provide a summary of the different costs and benefits of age. So definitely check that out. We have to have a shopping links block. So on our block we run a lot of articles. We interview some influences. We get lots of detailed information that we share. Obviously, things changed. The industry is moving so quickly, so always be sure to check out some of those latest industry articles on the shopping links . Blawg Leslie. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. This is my my profile. I'd love Teoh catch up with you. Connect if there's any opportunity to meet, definitely reach out to me. Don't be a stranger. You can also connected of us on any of our social media platforms were on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter
2. How to Avoid an Underperforming ROI by Creating an Influencer Strategy: Hi, I'm Kim Voice would I'm the founder and managing director off shopping links. We are an influencer content marketplace that specializes in fashion beauty and my style influences with a particular emphasis on the quality of those influences, the transparency of our metrics and results and the conversion that those influences provide to our brand partners. When 86% of women rely on social media to make a decision about a purchase that they want to make and influence of marketing delivers 11 times higher return on investment than traditional forms of digital marketing, it's no wonder many brands are turning to influence the marketing today. Some have predicted that the industry itself will be worth a whopping 10 billion by 2022. I appreciate that everyone watching and listening to this skill share course is that bearing stages of the influence of marketing journey, influencer marketing. When we started shipping links, it was not even a term. So, you know, fast forward four years, and it's become close to a mainstream marketing tactic for many brands, particularly those in the fashion and lifestyle industry. You know we'll be covering off in this course a whole range of concepts and and, I guess, ways of measuring and different forms of measurement or touch on some interesting pieces that perhaps you haven't thought off. Although there is an assumed introductory level of knowledge. Ah, lot of the foundational aspects. Ah, lot of brands are still missing out on so again, depending on where you're at at the stage of influence of marketing will depend on what you find most valuable. But we'll work our way through from the start, and hopefully you will take away some really key ideas and ways that you can measure your return. So first up is developing your influence of marketing strategy. Do you have one already? If you don't, now's the time to sit down and make a night of exactly water these and why you're working with influences. We've seen so many people before, start out working with influences and not have a clear objective. And it becomes so frustrating because when they get to the end of their campaign, or when they get to the end of working with the particular influence or a particular set of influences, they really don't feel that they got the value. They really don't feel that they got the return that they were hoping for. And when you sit down and you ask those brands, what was it that you are actually wanting from that return? You can quickly see that that was not clear. And that was not a clear objective that they said at the start of the campaign. So one of the things we want you to do is really decide on your goal. Are you looking for awareness? Do you want to boost sales ahead of the holiday season, such as Mother's Day? Or do you want to enter a new market? We see so many brands who would like to enter into new markets. They want to do some market research and from testing. So perhaps there are us brand and they want to move into the Australian market or in Australian Brown, who's looking to export to the US The 70 different options around that brands really need to sit down and understand. Why is it that we're working with influences, then decide on the tactics that you use? What are the tactics, you know? What are you looking to do? Do you want to gift the influences Perhaps you want to work with a smaller number, and you want to really focus on those relationships. Perhaps you're just looking to pay some influences. You might have a tanning product, you wanting to just get that tanning product out to as many people as possible. It really depends on your strategy as to what tactics you will then use. So why do you need a strategy? A lot of Brand said. Well, why do I need a strategy? So many people just jump in and they just get contacted by influences and they decide to work with them. We'd say they really keep pace around. They see some research that accompany out to did out of us that did a research on brands who were using influences. Although they found that 70% of brands were using influences on the 10% reused the content that that influence it generated. So if you think about that in an acre system off influences, it's really important to take, um that content that the influence it has generated and you'll be getting new traffic, you'll be getting lots of, I guess, new visitors to your website from that influencer. But the content itself is really valuable. So how do you reuse that? And how do you make sure that you're getting the most value? And you're really leveraging that when you think of only 10% do that. There's so much value that's left on the table, which is something that we want to change. Also in a touch briefly here on the old Fante City off influences. There's been a lot of I asked news in mainstream media of late around, you know, buying fake followers and, you know, and that practice And how prevalent is that pack practice within the industry? Um, obviously, you know there are opportunists that will take advantage of that, and I encourage you to go and read this article. It's a bit lengthy. Grab stuff covered, a sit down and, you know, take the time to read through it. It covers off a lot of issues, and I think some of the key things around these issues things like, you know, making sure you get to the right audience. So identifying who is your audience is a brand. Um, why is your audience so critical? How do you know that's your audience? What are the demographics. What are the regions, Um, anything that you can find out about your ideal customer profile? Make sure you've captured that. Then what you need to do is go and have a look at the influences following. So who is their customer? Who do they have following them? Water. The demographics. It's really important to make sure you get a really strong match between your ideal customer profile and the influences audience in order to get a really strong return on investment. What we see sometimes is that you get a brand who will be, say, looking for selling swimmer. They'll go out to the market. They'll just find some really great maybe instagram influences or some Instagram models, and you'll be looking at the demographics of that. Perhaps they didn't receive the right return. When you take a closer look at the Influences audience, perhaps they're more skewed towards males, perhaps them more skewed towards fitness. A fitness audience. So you may not really be selling your product, and that audience may not actually be your target customer, so it's really important to look at both of those things to get a strong return on investment you need to look at your customer profile, and you also need to look at the customer profile off the influencer. Okay, so let's get started on a class project. So I think one of the key things that I have spoken about so far is really making sure that you record and write down your objective. So this may be what you're thinking is the most important aspect. And maybe you're thinking sales sales sales says we need to get sales. I encourage you to go away. Now, grab a piece of paper in a pin and go talk to a number of different people in your organization. Have a chat. Do you have a nest CEO strategy? Do you have an S U team? Maybe you have an external s CEO service provider. Go chat to them. I understand exactly what it is that they're trying to achieve for many CEO perspective. And make sure you know and understand that before you start working with influences, it might be that you need a really good domain authority. So you might need a blogger who has a really strong reputation with Google. So you might be looking for that as one of your objectives, you might be looking for content. Go seek out. Who is it that's responsible for your A. T. M's or your direct mail outs within your business? Um, maybe you don't send a newsletter out to existing customers now. This could be a really great way that you can use influences to convert your existing customs or to increase the sales there. Go chat to the team that work on shooting the model content and shooting the content for your campaigns or for your look books. Perhaps again, this is a way that you can also reuse content from your influences in existing ways. Within the organization. It might be sales. It might be brand awareness. It could be a PR activity. You might be wanting some feedback on a product you might be about to launch into a new region, and you might want to see well, how do we localize this? How does the local market perceive these product to make sure you go around, check out your organization, find different people and ask them What is it that they're looking to achieve what is their objective, and then bring all of that back. Make a note of all of those things. And I'm sure as we work through this skill share course, you'll be soon saying all of those things are very, very, very important in how you measure the return. So off you go go find now within the within the business who it is that is looking for content or is looking for reach. And, um and you compile a list of all the things that are really important to you annual business.
3. Set an Objective: if you haven't already written these things down, I encourage you now to grab a pen and paper and write down some of the reasons why you are wanting to work with influences. So the first thing is it a visibility or awareness campaign? Are you looking for your brand to reach more people? The metric around, this would be looking at an increasing social following or perhaps an increasing reach. Has your product reached a certain number of people? Maybe you're looking for an increasing INSTAGRAM followers over the period of a month so you can set some metrics there around that and what's important in terms of visibility or awareness. Ah, lot of people, they might be launching a new campaign where they might be launching on you put up time. So a lot of times those people are just wanting brand awareness and reach. So in that instance, you'd be looking for those influences who have maybe a higher following. So there's a lot of instances where you'd be picking an influencer just because they have a higher following. But for Brent brand visibility and reach, that's definitely one of them. Are you looking for sales? So gifted product can be a great way of converting into sales. You can get lots of conversations started. You can get lots of people introduced to your brand by gifting products out. So if you are gifting products, what are you looking for? In return of that? Are you looking for certain exposure? Are you looking for an instagram post? Are looking for a block post? What is it that you're looking for around that? If you are looking for sales, how many units do you want to sell? Do you have a key performance indicator around or metric or a target that you're trying to hit? I can sometimes be really difficult. A lot of brands say came. I'm really wanting sales from this campaign or, you know, I need to demonstrate to management that sales are going to generate from this. When you're working with influences, they often at the start of an over shoppers journey, so they're not necessarily at the end. So at the end of ah, shoppers journey might be a price comparison Coupon codes site. It might be a conversion or a special discount that you're offering the start of the journey or the start of the channel or the fund or whatever you wanna call it is all around introducing people. It's all about exploration, and bloggers are really great at introducing people to your product. They have a built up trust with their audience. They know their audience, and many times they can share with them something that will then convert further down into into a sale. So it's not often that you see a direct link between an influencer and a sale. It's often a rocky journey that you might see over, say, 30 or 60 days where people are customers. Your customers are actually wanting to be introduced to products so they'll be searching that we re searching and not even going to store. Take a look at it, so it's not necessarily a direct conversion that you'll see from an influencer. It's really important to stick to your strategy. So oftentimes what we see is a brand will say, Hey, look, I really want to generate sales from this influence of marketing campaign. They start out, they work really hard. They gift a bunch of influences, and then they don't see the return so that them fall out of the process or they dropped their strategy and and, I guess, pivot to something else we would say, Definitely stick with your strategy. We have seen it so many times where a brand will start working with a number of influences . They don't see a lot of conversion into sales. They see a lot of traffic. So obviously the Influences audience are responding really well to the perhaps, but they don't actually see the conversions just yet. Now what we see is those that do full out there, probably never going to see the conversions. They probably gonna have to start again and find those influences and really start building the relationships. Those will we see some really good sales and conversions have often worked with influences over a period of time. And, like any marketer, will tell you, it's really important to make sure that you're working consistently and getting that message out consistence consistently. It is about trust, and it is about converting that existing follow up to your product. The other reason why you might be looking to work with influences is engagement for your brand getting some positive sentiment, getting some introduction, clicking through finding out who you are and really finding out more information. So you wanting your potential customers to engage with your brand? Is it content? Is it that you're looking for additional content? I had a statistic recently from a shoe footwear company. They had so much requirement for content that they were essentially using the brand generated content that was meant to last them six months in 30 days. So they're trying really hard to supplement that content that they, internal content teams and intern internal media teams are coming up with the trying to supplement that with influence of content. Is it conversion? Are you asking yourself what percentage increase in traffic is it that you want to see things to remember? Firstly, know your audience. We've got so many instances off brands who will use an influence of hats. They've built up a really strong relationship with an influencer based on fashion. So the same conversion they've worked with the influencer they know the influence are they have gifted them some product and they've converted in terms of traffic and maybe some sales around fashion items. They then launch ah homewares range. So that's a cushions. Candles. They send them out to the influencer in the hope that they will get a similar type of response, as they did for their fashion brand. And he was sort of assumed that they are going to get a similar response because you would think that a K, if they're follower, likes fashion, and they'll probably also be following them for their lifestyle and their there. Maybe they're cushions and candles. In reality, that's not the case. So in some situations we've seen some bloggers who generated great return based on their fashion audience and based on their following. But we don't see that same return when we look at other verticals, such as lifestyle or home ways. So it's really important to know the audience and know how the audience is going to respond . And sometimes you can only do that with trial and error. So sometimes you do need to give it a try, and you can give it a try with again gifted products, so you don't necessarily need to jump headfirst in and pay the influence of a bunch of cash and get them Teoh promote your products. First of all, we would recommend that you see the product. So you give the influence or some sort of experience or or give them your product so that they can test it. They get to know you. They can get to understand the brand and the messaging. And if you see a return, if you see some sort of traction with that, then you start to work with that implants or over a longer period of time. And in somewhat of an ambassador type relationship now you may not choose to work with them for very long because you might have other objectives that you're looking for. But it's really important that you do see up front. What is it that you want to achieve? What sort of audience does the blogger have? And then how well does that bloggers audience respond to your product? And how does that audience then become a customer off yours? It's really important to know their audience and know your or an audience and ensure that there's alignment between the two. So in terms of things, um, to note from this lesson to on setting an objective, some of the things that we we just should touch on know your audience. No, the influences audience, nor the influences, style and brand. No your goals and objectives and know how you're going to measure these. And that's what we'll be covering off in the next lesson. How do you measure your goals and objectives? So it's really important to, firstly set your goals? Why do you want to work with influences? And then it's really important to measure the return on that in terms of what is it and how you actually going to measure it. So let's drive straight ing toe Lesson three.
4. Common Metrics to Track and Tools to Help Track Them: Let's first look at the definition, overturn on investment and then look at some of the common ways that we can measure return on investment. So the definition of return on investment is the number of new customers that become aware of your brand through a campaign. Some common metrics to track include website referral traffic so the number of people that land on your e commerce site social media reach the amount of mentions and new followers that you receive to your page or your social media account. Email. Click through rates and click toe order rights so these could be from your A. T. M's or from your newsletters that you send out number of conversions or potential new customers who reach a specific page you designate, such as your shopping cart. Growth in customers. This might be the people that sign up to your newsletter, all those new customers that have never been to your site before. So being able to track those and sales through joint influencer and affiliate marketing campaigns now we're not gonna touch too much on affiliate marketing in this particular skill share course. But it's really important to understand the intersection between influencer and affiliate marketing. It's really important, particularly for those brands again. If their object Davies to be tracking Vyron affiliate Network, then it's really important that you make sure that you've got that detail and that you've spoken to those people within your own organisation who manage your affiliate program. Some of the tools that we've used to help brands track these metrics, so let's take a closer look at these. You can either jumping at this point to your own INSTAGRAM account or your brands instagram account even also jump into Google Analytics. Or you may have any commerce platform that you're running on may be running on Shopify Magenta. Um, it's important to have a look at exactly what it is that you can track using those existing tools. So let's jump straight in and have a look. So if we'll have a look of the instagram in science essentially with Instagram inside previously, up until now we have not been able to access the detailed behind an INSTAGRAM influences audience. This is now just being released a zone a p I to certain businesses and brands. It's really important to check whether you do have access to these, um, you may have some different tools that you're using within your business that will provide you access to the instagram insights of the influences that you're looking to work with. If you don't have access to these tools, I would definitely recommend that you use an influencer marketing platform or a market place like shopping links. We have access to this information. We can see exactly who the audience is. And again, it's just wasting your time, your resources and product. If you don't really understand exactly who the audience is that your you're essentially targeting or reaching with your campaign. So on instagram insights, you can see a range of things. You can see the age range, the gender. You can see the regions of influence so you can see where that influences audiences from. So are they aligned to your gain, your marketing strategy and your customer segments? Are they, for example, of a in Australia? Are they in the U. S. Or perhaps they're from a different part of the world, So maybe they're from ah, particular country that you may want to really start to pressing to in terms of your strategy. So really seeing exactly where the INSTAGRAM influences audience are located is particularly important and aligning that with yours. And you can get that from me insights you can get when the hours are that your influencer is most active or when their followers are most active. So when do you want your influence it to be posting about your brand? You can pick up all of those things. What day of the week might you want them to post? Once you've got insight into these Instagram analytics, you've been able to make some really informed decisions about who it is that you wanting to work with, which blogger is best aligned to your brand or to your customer group, and then what it is that you might want them to share. And when, based on obviously some of these metrics so really important to take a look at the instagram tracking to take a look around, look at the instagram metrics. If you don't have access to them within your business as part of the tools that you currently have access to, we would definitely recommend using a platform to get that information. It's invaluable when deciding which influence their toe work with. Secondly, we would recommend some sort of integration with your existing e commerce platform. So again, have a chat. Maybe it's with your tech team. Maybe you've got on online a commerce team. Seek out who it is within the business that manages that part of your your organization and have a chat to them. We've done lots of really great integrations within shopping links to different platforms, for example, on each other, so we can see here again. Vyron ap. I serve IRA technical link. We can see the detail behind which influences drove. What traffic at what time? How many orders did they drive? What was the average order value So we can see some of those key metrics by just linking up to the e commerce platform. That's the same with magenta and again Shopify. It's really quite simple. It's not complicated. Toe actually put a Pixar tracking onto your shopping cart and actually start to see which influences are driving, what traffic and what sales we can then report that back into our platform so we can show you essentially, um, an end to end view of exactly who the influence of Waas what the metrics are around their audience and then what they returned. So regardless of how you're managing your influence of marketing campaign, whether you're doing it by a spread chief, whether you're doing it with the existing tools, technology or market place, we would say Definitely look at the instagram insights. Have a look at your own e commerce platform. See whether there's any opportunity it'll for you to integrate with that, so that you can start to record anything that the influence or is driving in terms of their traffic conversions and obviously, sales. If that's of importance to your brand. Okay, so touching back onto Google analytics and why Google Analytics is so important, Really making sure that you can access your influences analytics and making sure you know exactly the domain authority and how valuable that blogger is to Google is a really great way to understand exactly the likely return. If you have a look at how many unique visitors they get to their blogger over the course of a month for an average of the last three months, that will give you a really good indication of how many people will see your brand and see the content that the bloggers sharing about your brand just by looking at some of those metrics before you decide which influences toe work with next, we will have a look at the analytics within instagram itself. Some of the metrics that you can look at in terms off instagram are things like How many people did your content reach? What with the number of impressions for the content, how many people engaged with your content, how many people click through to your profile or through to your brand from that instagram share or from the content that was created. So it's really important to also have a look at not only just the metrics that you can see up front before you choose to work with an influencer, but also having a look at some of those metrics at the back end. So how many people did do reach, for example, integrating your Google analytics so that you can check on how many people converted or how many people landed on a particular page? So these are some of the ways that we would encourage you toe obviously measure and record the success of your influence of marketing campaign. So in the listens to come will be going through a range of different measurement times and metrics, and some of those things include, or maybe related to your objective off visibility impressions and ultimately reach. So how we measure for that will cover that off. We'll look at measuring for engagement. So how do you actually measure for engagement? Who acted on the information that they saw who clicked through to your website, who is thought out from additional information or came into a store? It's a really looking at engagement. They will look at the importance of content. So how do you measure that? Is there a way that you can measure how valuable that content is, whether that be, you know, a link through whether that be in your newsletter or your A T M's? We'll explore sales and revenue and some options for tracking that which we've sort of touched on, and we'll look at measuring conversion and what that might look like. Lastly, I've got a hidden Jim. You do have to watch to the end to find out what I think is the most important aspect and what is going to return you a greater value than all of those really solid metrics. It is something that shopping links we firmly believe in and I personally believe will return. You're really great result. So definitely keep watching. And I'll share with you what I think is my secret weapon for creating a really great return on influence on marketing investment.
5. Measuring for Visibility, Impressions and Reach: in this lesson. We're gonna cover off how you measure the return on investment. When we talk about an objective that is all about visibility and reach. So when we first started influencer marketing, you know, back, you know, four. So years ago, when it started to really take shape, we had a number of brands who said, Hey, Kim, can you help us find, um, people to wear our product in Instagram now? There were no measures metrics. There was no diem's at that stage. There was no insights into the influences audience. We just assumed that the influence of would be building up an audience and some of the influences that we work with today who have close to immune. Fuller was started with shopping wings back then and had a mere 10,000 followers, but it was still an important time. It was still an important place for brands to start to build a presence. Previously, you would say that you needed to have a fine number or you needed to have a website, and then it got to the point where he needed to have an INSTAGRAM account. Otherwise you didn't really exist on. That was really the point where we started to help brands. We started to find it. Girls in Instagram we started to connect with them and connect the brand with them, give them some product and asked them to post and share it. So it was all about your visibility. It was all about your reach. It was all about building up an audience and really having a conversation or starting a conversation with that audience there, really using an influence that to reach the audience that they had. So some of the things that we look for around this we look for impression. So we look for which platform it ease that you might want to be working on. Ah, lot of brands that we work at work with are still looking for Instagram. But it may be that you wanting to reach a Twitter audience or you wanting to reach a Pinterest. That might be a very visual brand, and you might have built up a really good loyal following on Pinterest. So regardless of what channel it ease that you're looking for rate John, it's really important to go back and have a look at those metrics. We now have the luxury of having those metrics, so definitely take advantage of those. Don't just go with the first influence of that comes to you, Diem's Yuman says. Love your product. Please gift it to me and I will share it with my followers. It's really important to understand exactly what that audience looks like and and how important that audience sees when you compare that to your existing customer base. Is there a good alignment there that will really inform, obviously, how you going to measure it? So look at the impressions. Compare those impressions that you get on your own account, So have a look at your own Instagram analytics. See how maney impressions you get on the content that you share. This is the impressions that the blogger gets on their content that they share. That's a really good way of saying whether the impressions that you'll for the influence of that you're working with is driving you a greater return than your own content on your own channel. To really make sure that you use those metrics where you can is your campaign targeted, so are you really targeting it towards your key audience? Who is that key audience. Make sure that you're really looking at who that is. What are their interests? Are they interested in fashion, beauty and lifestyle? Are they interested in marketing? Are they interested in some of those topics that we now have access to? We now can interrogate that dollar and see who it is that we actually want to target. In terms of those metrics, look at the Google analytics. Make sure you go back into that information. Like I said before, it's really important that when you have a look at the instagram, all the social media audience, that you also compare that with the Google analytics. Because if it's a really good influencer, they'll be redirecting their traffic on to multiple channels. They'll be saying to their their instagram influences. Come check out my blog's there was saying to their block traffic, Hey, following me on Pinterest. But we really making sure that the audience is connected to them on a whole range of platforms. They're the ones that you want to work with. They're the ones that are taking their role as an influence of very seriously, and you can see that data you can see that that that there's a correlation between the Instagram audience and the audience on their Google analytics. Used the instagram in science. So again, take a look at the Instagram insights. Take a look at those metrics. Have a look at when they're posting. Have a look at when you might want the influence of to post about your brand. If you're gifting product, it's a lot harder to actually ask for a whole range of deliverables. It's really hard to share or to tell the influence that this is what I want you to share at this particular time. But when you're paying the influence also, when you're doing a paid promotion posts, you're actually spending the money with the influence up to reach their audience. It's really important to have a look at that data to see when it is that their most active . When the audience is most active. Make sure that that's a line toe when you're requesting them to post, make sure that you've got some of those metrics and you've built that into your campaign so that you do see those results. We could talk about new customer acquisition for a moment now, the influence of channel drives an incredible amount of new customer acquisition. In fact, most brands that we work with will tell us that they work with influences to drive new customers to their a commerce platform. So whether that be a swipe up in an instagram story, you could include so many different ideas into your campaign around. How you going to convert that that influences audience into your customer base? You could have a swipe up to sign up to a newsletter. You'll be doing a lot of things to try and trap that daughter and and track that information so you can see how many people have come back to your website. How many people have come you to your website? How many people have signed up as part of that campaign? So that's all about awareness and rate. Having conversations. It's really important again. If you're objective is s ego, it's really important to be having those social conversations and being front of mind. So we often talk about front of mind at shopping links because if you're a shopper and your browsing through instagram, you seeing a whole bunch of things every day and it is saturated. There are so many people talking to you. There's so much noise within a social media platform, it's really important to take away from that that there are key messages. There are things that you need to the front of mind for. So it might be, for example, ah hum that I'm a consumer and I'd like to buy a dress for a wedding. Now I might have in my mind three places that I would go to shop for a dress. I've gone to their websites, have a really found anything I truly love. So I'll go to Instagram as I'm browsing in my daily activity, and we now understand how Maney Alice everyone spends in instagram every day I'll be browsing through there. If you're not front of mind as a brand, you're not there. You're not visible. The chances are I'm not going to find you. But those brands who are gifting who are seeding product, who was starting those conversations their front of mind. There, there. Now it really is important to build that into your strategy. So if you're looking to work with influences over a period of time, that's also really important and Of course, we're saying that it's not all about gifting. You do need to pay influences, and you need to pay some to reach that particular level of audience or a particular influence level. But seeding and product gifting, I can't stress how important muddies to start out to really see whether that audiences responding to see the reach, to see the impressions, gift the product track, how much exposure you're getting track. How much the influence of likes your product. Are they sharing it organically? Are they delivering more than they promise? All of those things will really help to tell whether or not that influences audience is going to be a really good fit for your customer base. So really, track all of that. Have a look at the measurements. Have a look at the audience demographics. Try and get as much daughter as you possibly can to make an informed choice about who it is that you're working with. Cover off some case statistics. He are so 28% of 272 marketing managers polled said that influencer marketing was there fastest growing customer acquisition method. This came first with nearly twice as many respondents rating at a head off organic search, so we can just see the influence of marketing. For many brands, the key here is awareness. So it's about how do I get my product, how we get more people introduced to my product, and how do I ensure that I'm finding the right influences to do that? So a lot of times this does come back to reach. It does come back to the number of followers, but not only the number of followers. It can't just be the number of followers. They really have to be followers that are aligned to your customer demographic.
6. Measuring For Engagement: Listen five, this listen is all about how do you measure your return if your objective is all about engagement? So sometimes a brand will have an objective That's all about reach, which is what we covered in the last session. Um, and decision is all about engagement. And what people are finding is that engagement can sometimes be amid a better measure of return. Um, then just reach alone. So engagement. Let's cover off the definition and cost per engagement is the definition is measured in terms of dollars spent per like comment or interaction like click throughs. One common way for marketers in the influence of marketing industry to measure the success is a cost per engagement metric. So cost per engagement is really the way that we measure whether or not someone has acted on, um, on the information that they have received. Okay, so let's look at the measurement of engagement. So actually, engagement is a much better success measure than just reach alone and cost per engagement is a way that marketers have come up with a measurement or a metric that quantifies how much engagement was received based on how much I spent on the campaign, so we just often referred to this as a CP and within the shop, England's platform, the results prayed to clearly covers off a CPI. It takes into account all the elements. So it takes into account obviously, how much reach it takes into account. How many clicks, how many likes, how many comments and how many sales or video views. If there was a video shared as part of the campaign, so it's actually the physical action that someone has responded to. Whatever that messages that you've shared, it's more than just reach its actual physical engagement with the product or with your message in some way. So engagement, really. It really looks at whether a customer or whether a follower of the blogger is actually going to have some sort of affinity to the brand. So are they going? Teoh engage with that brand and having more likely to become brand loyalists over a period of time? So it's a really good way to measure, um, how the audience is responding to your product. So are they buying it? Are they liking it? Are they asking questions of the influence of where did you get that What size are you wearing? How are they reacting? And what is the sentiment to the brand? And it's really important to build this into your overall strategy because it is more than just reach its actual physical engagement. But some of the things that we often see is that consumer behavior is not. It's not linear, it's it's sometimes lump in terms of how it looks. And what we do find is that even though someone may have engaged with your product in terms of liking it, they may not click through and make a purchase. All there's many shoppers who will no engaged with the content or appear to engage with the content, but we'll click through. So if you're only measuring certain aspects like like and comments and you're not measuring click throughs to your website, then you might not be seeing the full picture because there's so many people, um, in Instagram or in social media consumers in general who won't actually come in tow like even though they have made a direct purchase from that influencer as part of that campaign . So making sure you're you're tracking the Four Measures of Engagement not just likes and comments, which is some of the common ones that we see brands tracking but looking at also whether they click through to the website website and whether they did convert and make a purchase . So engagement is more than just reach. Engagement is all about the sentiment. It's all about how the audience responds to your product and to your messaging and whether or not they take action on that, that's how we measure engagement. And there's lots of ways that we can do that we can obviously track again. In the instagram metrics, we can see whether or not people have clicked through. We can see what landing page they came through onto in the e commerce platform. We can track that we contract the sales that have been generated. We can see exactly where within that process Ah, shopper has dropped out and it's not always the case that engagement will lead to a conversion of a sale. But engagement is a really good indicator off how well the audience is receiving your product and how likely they are to convert either now or in the future. So it's really important to ensure that you're tracking and measuring engagement, especially if that's one of your key objectives
7. Measuring For Content: This is one that many brands often overlook the value of content. And it's one close to my heart because I feel that there is so much that brands are just not leveraging. Now. If we look at the L two statistic that only 10% of brands who were using influences are actually reusing the content that the influence of generates as part of a campaign is frightening. There is so much value there that's being left on the table. So we come back to content content. Could be all of the things related to imagery to writing about your brand, the wording, the messaging, the stories that they might share, the little video clips that they might create. All of those things are pieces of content that it generated as part of your campaign. And if you've got the content as a specific objective in your strategy, and then this is someplace that you really can generate a lot of return And revenue on influences, for example, can create content at a lot. Lower cost than a brand can create content themselves. Think about on location shoots if you need your products to be positioned with Sydney Harbor bridge or the Eiffel Tower, you can easily reach out to an influencer, contract them to deliver content. You can give them the brief. Often many of these influences they either have professional photographers are professional videographers that can work with them. They also have teams of people that they can call upon. They've got relationships that got networks. They can create a group of community of influences within that particular location, so it gives you a product of really localized feel, and you can get great content at a fraction of the price. Then you can, obviously as a brand deliver, you could get content. You can pop into your website. You can get content that you can then use in advertisements. For example, you can use those content that content. You're in social media platforms and channels. So content is one really often overlooked aspect, too, in front for marketing, return on investment and one that we feel that shopping links is really valuable on something that all brands need to ensure that they're measuring. Only use a case study here when we talk about content. We've been working with a number of brands to actually measure the effectiveness of the content. So how do we actually measure the return on content? So it's often a hard one to pinpoint and a difficult one to say Yes, I've got a return on that other than you got content generated for a fraction of the price , that's more of a cost reduction tactic. But with the return, we've actually been able to see how much influence of content has been able to generate in terms of a return. And I'd like to look at a case study now, um, from a large retail brand that we worked with who didn't have a lot of on site location content. So this was a UK brand who was looking at reaching in a strain market. It was the opposite. It was the opposite hemisphere. So it was summer in Australia. It was winter, um, in the UK And if you have a look at this content that was created, the brand was able to essentially take the influence of imagery. So the influence of created a blonde post. They created a range of images. Um, they also created some social posts that they shared on their social media accounts of their shared on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. The brand was able to take those high resolution images and put them into their own tedium , so their direct mail campaign Elektronik direct mail campaign out to their existing customer base. Now this bone has a significant customer base, so they were really looking to test whether or not their existing customer base would respond to these influence of images. And you can see here, in terms of the results, 60 units of the swimwear was sold. That was far greater than any objective that they had set for themselves. They also had an increase, ah, 33% increase and a 21.6% 22% increase in sales. As a result of this as a result of this, ADM and using this influence of content, they had a cost per engagement off 28 cents on. Then they also got the social metrics, so they got the third party endorsement of someone else promoting their products. But they also got so much content that they were able to then use to convert their existing customers. So when you add content to have strategy, you really start to see a huge increase. So you're getting obviously all of the audience coming in. So you're getting all of that new customer acquisition. You're getting the influence of talking about you. You're getting to be front of mind in terms of your potential customers. But you're also being able to convert your existing customer base from these influences images. Now, we've done a lot of testing on this at shopping links, and we found consistently, ah, greater increase in click through rate and a greater increase in sales time and time again , we've done a B testing. We've done testing where we've just used influence imagery we've done testing were just used product imagery or imagery from the brand, and we've found that influences imagery. It does have a huge success rate in terms of converting for existing customers. So really, look at that. Make sure that you have a have Ah, I guess, a process in place, and you have a tool that manages your influence. The imagery shopping links. We have the content gallery, so as part of any collaboration and influence, the uploads, their high resolution images and the brand is able to use that content for any digital purposes and campaigns following the campaign or following the collaboration. So make sure that you've got somewhere that you can hold in. Store those images that tags and tracks that understands the licensing around that so that you've got lots of options to share that a brand came to us just recently and said, Hey, look, we need some imagery from Mother's Day again for Father's Day. You are able to then go into your system or go to your location of where your images of stored search for those images and share those images, reusing as much of the content as possible time and time again. Well, we often talk about evergreen content, and it's really important that you do get those can't get those images and get the rights to use those images. There's a lot of talent managers who perhaps won't be so keen on you using it for any paid advertising, so they won't want you promoting it out on Facebook, for example, in ads. But where possible would encourage you to negotiate the rights for those images. You will see a lot more value from them. So if you paps a shoe brand and you get lots of images around the shoes and in the shoes go on sale. You could then use those influence the images to Dr Facebook ads out into the community. And maybe you get, like your dedicated audience or a lookalike audience to the influence are, and you will then be able to use those images again as assets to convert existing customers or to convert new customers into shoppers. So content, we would say, is particularly important and definitely something that you need to have a chat with your teams. Have a chat with your social media team. Have a chat with your content team within your business to make sure that you've got that built into your strategy and you're clear about what the objective is on that and how you will measure the success. Obviously, when you've got the pool of content there, you'll be looking at ways that you can raise that time and time again. But making sure that you've got the content and you've got the rights to the content is really important up front. Before you even start the campaign, make sure you negotiate those into the contract with the influencer, so that you've got the ability to use that, use that content and generate more sales and revenue from that content. We've got an example here that I'd like Teoh draw your attention to. It's just an example of comparing the costs off and influence a campaign creating content versus an in house branded campaign. So the national campaign example that you can see here on the screen, um, was at a cost of $92,000 the shoot for the creative fees alone in that is $6000 now to work with influences to create that content and create beautiful imagery in context with 1/3 party endorsement for your brand is a fraction of that price. So to be worth just taking some time, have a look through these case study here have looked through the example that we've included on the screen and just start to appreciate that. Yes, you do need some of this hi res branded content that his own imagery at his own brand in terms of its imagery and have you may have worked with a creative agency to come up with, but also understand and appreciate that the influence of content can in many instances drive you a greater return than your commercial in brand content that you've had built. So it's worth taking a look at this, some at this example here and and yet just taking some time to reflect again made with the relevant teams and come up with what your own strategy is going to pay.
8. Revenue and Sales: Lesson seven. How do you measure return on investment in terms off revenue and sales? So if your objective is a brand, is revenue and sales, then how do you successfully measure that in terms of your return on what you've invested now? I'm sure a lot of people have skipped through to this segment. Um, because we see a lot of brands who come to us that shipping wings with a really clear objective. I'm after revenue, bottom line, increasing sales. And that's why I'm using influences now ever covered off in the earlier lessons. It's really important to understand the sales journey off your customer. And what is the time it takes someone to think about the product purchased the product? What is that lead time? It's not gonna be the same for everything is obviously different, depending on different types of products, different industries. And it's also dependent on whether there's a sale in place. How time ladies at Mother's Days of Valentine's Day are you likely to have a bit more activity around? Those certain dates may be spring racing here in Australia, maybe Halloween in the U. S. So there's lots of different, different ways that you can measure sales and revenue to some of the things that I want to cover off in this lesson are things like Click to buy. So the instagram functionality that's recently being released, which allows brands to include a shop herbal link within the post itself that clicks through into, obviously your own shopping cart, um, affiliate links Affiliate links are an interesting aspect to tracking conversion. So some brands have really strong affiliate network relationships. They're looking Teoh influence the marketing platforms for more of a content post, Um, so more of that sort of lifestyle imagery in the lifestyle content that comes with influences as opposed to price comparison and coupon codes. But the intersection between influencer marketing an affiliate marketing is becoming a lot more blood. It's really clear that we want to track influencer marketing, and one way that we can do that is by our affiliate links a number of different affiliate networks. You may have heard off records and affiliate window share sale. There is a number of different affiliate networks that you might be a part of all that you might be interested in exploring the way affiliate networks work is you generally work with a new influence of via that affiliate network there, provided in terms of the influence or with a unique tracking code. That tracking code is just tracked back to a website, and then you pay a commission on sales for anything that's generated in terms of sales and revenue to your to your business or to eight Commerce Platform. Some affiliate networks work on a click basis, so you might be paying, say, 20 cents per click. Others work on a cost per acquisition that is a sale home, so you might be paying a percentage of the sale that was generated via that affiliate network. Some of the limitations are obviously the tracking details. So it might be that the cookie window on an affiliate link might be 15 days, maybe 30 days on. A shopper may not purchase from the influence or maybe introduced by the influencer, but might not come back to this light, Let's say, for 60 days or 90 days. So in that case, that sale will not be attributed to the influencer, even though they drove essentially the awareness. Now, a lot of affiliate networks are working closely with influence on marketing platforms like ourselves to really look and see whether or not there is a way that they can attribute a percentage of the sale to and influence that if they drove the first click as opposed to the last click. So brands are starting to become more interested in aware off the influence or and their impact in the journey. And if we have a quick look at it at a shopping journey, oven influencer of ah, of a shop are and look at how the influence it interacts in that you can really clearly see that when you start tracking, it may be that the influence introduced the shopper to the product. The shopping may then have received an electronic direct mail from the brand. They may have done some more research. They may have seen another brand sharing a similar type of product, again doing some more investigation. They may have been seen an ad or retargeting to them on a website that they were visiting, and they may then click through, so the influence or may interact in various different ways. Throughout that journey, that may see it several times on an influence of before they actually convert so, like, are saying earlier, the the actual process for for conversion or that sales journey is not necessarily linear and the influence, or maybe interacting in several stages off that. So with affiliate marketing, what the affiliate marketing teams are really trying to do now is come up with How does a reward influences throughout that journey? How do I reward them if it is the first click? Or maybe it's the third click, Um, and the last Click all. Maybe it's It's a price comparison or coupon code site that's driving that last click in terms of the sale. So affiliate networks were a really great way to see how much traffic and see how much sales have been generated from an influencer. Likewise, influencer marketing platforms like shopping links. They're able to connect directly to your e commerce platform. So in various similar way, you just don't pay the commission on the sales. You obviously just see how much is tracking and recording and and how much traffic is being generated. Another really great way is promotional codes, and this is really good in terms of tracking down the line purchases, so you might give a primer code to a blogger that's a unique promo code might be related to the bloke name or in some way related to the product. The month the day that you're you're trying to create generate that sale and conversion. So promo codes are a good way you can within your comments. Platform. More commerce. Shopify, magenta They all have different ways that you could create the promo code that you can obviously then provide to an influencer and that can be tracked. Some brands don't like to keep promo codes floating around in terms of evergreen content, so it might be that you might want to use a promo code, for example, in an instagram story. So you know it's going to last 24 hours and then it's going to expire. So you know you're going to see that Perma code pop up down the line. But sometimes you may want to see that come down the line, so you might want to have a blogger who's sharing it, and then you might want to see well, how much am I getting? Many months after that blogger has shared that content. Now we've seen in terms of our results page and now tracking that this bogus that will generate sale, sales and revenue and traffic as much as 12 months later. So if the blogger has a really good way off searching their side and they're repurposing content and pushing that content back out, t their audience, you may find that you're seeing sales generated from, ah, post in a campaign that you ran many months, if not a year earlier. I'm so good way of measuring sales is obviously those primary codes and really being able to tie those back to an individual instagram influencer. The other option is Google Analytics. So like we looked at before, Google Analytics is a great way of getting to a really granular level of detail around the behavior and activity that a shopper does on your platform and where they're coming from. So if he set up certain types of events within your Google analytics, it's a great way of being able to track where did that traffic come from? And did that traffic then come into that that sales channel and did it then convert. So that's another good way off, Of course, measuring the revenue in and sales. Often times It's quite complicated. So sometimes you need a Google Analytics expert, or you need someone who's got some really strong skills around Google analytics. I'm sure you'll find a whole range of courses on school share that will be able to support you in terms off Google analytics and getting to the detail around sitting up those events . But they're a really great way of checking and measuring the return that each individual influencer is creating in terms of sales revenue. Um, and traffic the other way is really isolating your influence of marketing campaigns. And one really good way of doing this is actually picking a product that you might focus on for a number of weeks or for a particular week or for a number of days. So if you've got a number of influences that you're working with and you're thinking, I can let me check how how these influences are converting in terms of this product, or you might choose one influencer and so I can't really want to get to the one of whether this influence or is driving any sort of conversion is often a little more subjective. So you're you're pushing product out and you're seeing whether or not that particular product is converting, as well as whether that particular influencer now it may be that the influence of themselves is driving lots of traffic. So you may see some, um, peaks in terms of the traffic that's coming to a website. But you may not see the conversion, and there's lots of reasons why someone may not be converting in terms of a shopper. So there are things like, What is your return policy? How long is it gonna take to ship the product? Do you have international shipping? How well does your shopping can't perform? Doesn't remember some of the details that event ID. All of those things can impact on whether or not a shopper will convert when they do actually come to your site. So sometimes it might be that the influence that has done a really fabulous job of getting the traffic to the site, and it's just a matter of getting that site to now convert. So so sometimes we can't blame the influence that if they didn't drive those sales, but this is just one way. If you don't have any of sort of the technical expertise, or you don't have anything else that you can create in terms of coupon codes. One way is just to isolate the campaign and say OK, this week we're going to be focused on white T shirts. Eso Let's see how many white T shirts we can sell if we use a bunch of influences. Um, so there are a number of different ways that you can really start to measure the sales and the revenue that you're deriving from the influence of campaign. Like I said, it's not as hard as you might think. There's lots of ways that you can work with different platforms, different influencer marketing platforms, affiliate networks to really be able to track and trace to a pretty granular level of detail. How successful each influence there has bean at driving traffic and sales to your website.
9. Measuring For Conversion: I can't measuring for conversion, so we're up to lessen eight measuring for conversion. Oftentimes, conversion is a better metric to measure than necessarily sales and revenue. And I say that because there are so many reasons why someone may not check out in terms of your e commerce platform, that could be a whole host of reasons. It may be the wrong time of year, maybe the wrong product. It could be the cart. It could be the way your shipping is processed. It could be a whole host of reasons Why so really good Metric around. Conversion is often traffic. So how much traffic did you get as a result of working with a particular influencer? Once you've got that traffic, there are so many things that you can do with that, you can trap it within your website. You can retarget to those customers. You can ask them to sign up. You can offer a discount to them, so there's lots of ways that you can then convert that customer once they do get to your site. So looking at conversion metrics which really come back to engagement. So how many people clicked through to the website and what was that sort of measure in metric like it's really important to also build that in because that will tell you part of the story. And hopefully you've bean, uh, learning and listening to all the different parts that make up your return on influencer marketing investment. And if you focus on any one single area, you may not be seeing the full picture. And the four picture is really critical to being able to report back and really analyze whether or not you've achieved what you set out to achieve. So one metric is obviously, um, conversion. Another way that you can measure conversion is a hashtag campaign, so you might ask your influence or to include a certain hashtag. And that hashtag might be something that you're trying Teoh use to generate more traffic and conversions from a different pull off off instagram users or Facebook users, etcetera. So a good way is to think about hashtag campaign now. A lot of brands will come up with, like a really cute hashtag that they want to use. I really encourage you to think strategically about that. Hashtag So is it a particular location? Is it a particular audience that you're wanting to pick up on that hashtag and obviously then convinced
10. Establishing Relationships: so earlier on, I said I was going to save the best to last, and I was going to share with you my personal view about what makes a really strong return on investment when thinking about using influences and working with influences. So what is that secret weapon in your influencer? Marketing us and or well, I would have to say relationships with influences. Um on. I think it comes really from the strength of the industry itself and the reason y influencer marketing became so popular and such a strategic tactic. YSL around that word of mouth marketing that it goes beyond paying an implant, that it goes beyond gifting them. And it comes back to the relationship that your brand has with that influence, all your agency has with that influence or your influencer marketing platform might have with that influencer. Now there is so much that you can get from an influence a relationship that you could never get with payment. So having your product as part of their life having that organically appear in their feed, um, in their stories in their everyday operations and they were, and the way they go about their life is far more valuable. Um, and we'll demonstrate such a greater return than paying an influencer straight up, getting them almost to advertise your product. This is all about how do you really work closely with the influencer Now? There's lots of things that you could do to get better relationships with influences. Um, there's an investment of time, obviously some of the things that we've done it shopping Linksys. We've really grown close to influences as part of events, so not necessarily running an event so that you've got people posting and sharing about your products at the event, but really to build those relationships. So the influence I understand your brand understands the messaging, what you stand for, what's important to you. What is the key differentiator? Fuel brand. Once you've built up that really strong relationship with that influence for its not easy on to work with them to promote your brand and you see ah, huge return. So we've seen amazing posts. We've been able to get influences to participate in a brand that maybe wouldn't have been a good fit for them, um, based on a relationship and there, then willing to give it a go. So obviously you don't wanna have ah, match way. You're getting an implant. Who doesn't gel with the prior to that doesn't have the right audience, but at least getting affording the door with the influencer all comes from having that relationship with them. Some influences. It doesn't matter how much you gonna pay them, they won't promote your products, and that's OK. But if you had that relationship with them and you built that nurtured that worked with the influencer, cared about them. We do a lot of work with influences where we really take a closer look at their audience. We take a closer look at their life and what's important to them. And a good example is, um, we worked with, um, a brand in the UK who was looking Teoh Get more brand exposure. So more reach on visibility in the US And we worked with that one of their high profile influences in the US who has over a 1,000,000 followers, Um, who charges a lot of money to post on instagram story. Um, but what we did is we looked at how could we gift that blogger? How could we customize and really target the gifting towards her and her family. And by doing that and creating that customized thief and really building that relationship , communicating with her, understanding what she likes and what her family likes, we were able to give and receive huge promotion as a result of that. So I think adding a little bit of kindness, adding a little bit off relationship into influence. The marketing is only going to flourish. You're only going to see the better results if you do that. And if you just, um, stopped to think about what it is that the influencer might like out of your collection or out of your products or your services, think about what works for them and what will work for their audience. And I promise you, you will see so much, much, much, much greater return, um, on your investment than you would if you didn't build those relationships. So please think about relationships, um, and think about how important they are in your whole evaluation. Off return on investment. So, in terms of building relationships, just a few key takeaways do your research. Make sure that you really find out which influences are gonna work with your product in your brand. Take the time to understand the influences. Follow them for a while. Comment to get to know like their things. If they really are true, fit for your brand and their audience seems like your ideal custom audience, then really get to know that influence really start to build that relationship. If possible, try and run some events. Um, we found it really interesting this last fashion wake, one of the lead collections. What they did was they gifted to the collection to influences. So rather than actually do around my show, gifted the collection to influences. And then how will private dinner in the designers home? Obviously, building relationships is key to that brand, and and the exposure that they received from that was far greater than obviously thing. Outcome of a runway show and the lastly customized the gifting really think about who it is that is the audience off this influence. I think about the influence of themselves, their family, what they care about, what they like and gift them, something that will really resonate with them and their audience. See how that goes. See what the response is like before you go in with with a payment or with an opportunity to be an ambassador for your brand, I get to know them first and really build that relationship and build that understanding of their audience.
11. Final Steps: thank you for taking the time to listen and learn from my skill share course on influencer marketing. Return on Investment. I've loved sharing with you what I've learned with friends over the last four years, but I think one thing's certain is that the influence of marketing industry is so new. Andi, essentially, it is changing so rapidly, so please make sure you check in obviously some of things that we would have recommended to brands 12 months ago. We would no longer recommend to them so pleasing. Sure that you are checking in and obviously coming up to speed on all the new tools and technologies that are available in summary. Some of the things that I really like you to take away from this kosher course on return on influence from not getting investment today are the following points. Be sure to set your objectives up front. So what this means is, don't just do influence the marketing because everyone else is come up with key objectives . These will be critical toe working out how best to measure the success of your campaign chapter. Other people with in your team's on your business identify the tools so What this means is go back into your business. Have a look at what tools? What techniques, what options you have to integrate those tools and techniques into your influencer marketing campaigns at shopping links. We love working with businesses of all shapes and sizes to help them articulate their strategy and build the relationships that are most likely to convert for them. Three. Be sure to stick to the strategy when the going gets tough. Obviously, there will be influences who will not meet your requirements. Recognize that up front and build that into your overall approach. When you do find the ones for your business that convert, you will know who they are for, Although you might have one or two key objectives, try and measure for many more. You'll be really surprised to find a way your true value is being realized from your influence from marketing campaigns and effort. Sometimes it will be in the place that you least expect, and lastly, remember that influences of people BC's why influencer marketing has been so successful. Take a deep look into how you can build their strong relationships with them, and I really encourage you to do that. Look for every opportunity to connect, and I look forward to seeing you again
Kim W., Founder and Director, Shopping Links
