influencers and Earned Media Value
Performance marketing is great. You sell products. Those products have a value. That value can be benchmarked against the cost per sale and wham, bam thank you mam, you compare those numbers to see if your ads were cost effective. Thanks, my work here is done. Quick lunchtime pint anyone?
Pints in the sun aside, influencer marketing has offered fresh challenges to marketers in measuring efficiencies of marketing budgets. Occasionally there will be ways of tracking ROI. TikTok Live is leading the way in driving product sales, or even utilising affiliate codes as an effective way for brands to see the return on investment from influencer spends. However, the strongest thing influencers have to offer is awareness and brand love – they talk about and endorse a product and their nurtured, committed audience get to know about the product, and fingers crossed, love it.
Collab posting is not just a benefit for legal transparency, but also comes with the advantage of allowing brands to see the results of those messages. Otherwise it’s (frequently) a couple of emails at campaign end in order to get sent some screenshots from the back end of the TikTok app. And to be honest – what more can influencers offer us. The hard work for them is building their brand and their audience. It’s up to us, the marketeers, to prove that us working with them delivers valuable results.
Breaking it down, there’s really 2 core elements to think about with reporting…
Your core metrics
Impressions, engagements, clicks etc, all benchmarked to assess their quality. These offer handy like for like metrics that can allow influencer content to be compared to more conventional, brand owned social media activations, as well as feeding into these results. Quick tip here, don’t forget to include the delivery of these at campaign end in the contract. Nothing worse than finishing a campaign and not being able to get hold of your results!
These can in turn feed into any brand love metrics you may have in place.
Earned Media Value
Earned Media Value is a metric gaining more and more popularity, and one that seems to have half a dozen different definitions still. In short, EMV allows us to attribute a financial value aligned to media costs for as near like for like comparison for influencer activations as you can get.
This allows for marketers to understand a financial value from the campaign, comparing the social metrics to conventional media costs. At Spinnaker our methodology combines the value of impressions with engagements, with the rationale being that EMV based on impressions or engagements alone under appreciates the impact of influencers. You are not just getting reach and likes, you are getting them delivered by an authentic mouthpiece, directly to their earned and engaged audience. This is why the average engagement rate for a brand on Instagram is 0.50% and for an influencer on Instagram is 1.85% (per Social Insider).
The core element that adds gravitas to EMV is the reliability of the CPM and the CPEs used to calculate the value. This is most reliable when it comes directly from media spend for the brand being promoted, on the same channels. Sometimes this won’t be available, so reliable benchmarked data can be substituted in to calclulate.
The equation breaks down to this:
EMV = (Impressions x CPM) + (Engagements x CPE)
And just because nothing is ever simple, all of this comes with two very significant caveats from us:
You are not just getting impressions, you are getting impressions from an established and engaged follower of the influencer.
You are not paying any production costs. This is a notable saving and one that cannot be overlooked.
