When it comes to marketing, a key performance indicator is a strategy’s return on investment, otherwise known as ROI. When it comes to influencer marketing, it’s no different. To ensure you’re getting good bang for your buck, you’ll want to know you’re making a profit from your partnership with an influencer. But how do you achieve this? In this post, we’re going to share some useful tactics for improving your chances of getting a positive ROI from your influencer marketing.

1. Choose an influencer that aligns with your brand identity: The goal of an influencer collaboration is to extend your brand reach to an audience who are likely to be interested in the product or service you provide. Therefore, it’s vital that you partner with influencers whose values and ethos align with your brands’.

At Sway Me Good, we make the process of finding the right influencers for your campaign simple. Our platform allows you to filter through a selection of trusted, verified creators based on your specific requirements. We’ll be able to tell you what you can expect from their posts so that you can go into the collaboration with all the knowledge you need to make an informed decision based on the likely outcome of your partnership.

2. Set clear goals: Before signing a partnership deal, outline clear and measurable campaign objectives, and ensure that both you and the influencer agree with whether or not these goals are realistic. Some common objectives for influencer collaborations include:

• Brand awareness: This goal is defined by what you expect the reach of your campaign to be, which is to say, how many individual users the content should reach.

• Post engagement: Another objective of your campaign should be to generate likes, shares, comments, and saved posts.

• Conversion rate: Ultimately, you want to ensure that your collaboration with the influencer results in conversions, whether this means sign-ups to your newsletter or an increase in sales.

Our platform provides brands with an upfront estimation of how we think a post will perform on a particular influencer’s profile so that you can set your objectives on estimates based on a detailed analysis of the influencers’ previous performance.

3. Outline a clear content strategy: In the grand scheme of advertising, influencer marketing is still a relatively new concept. That being said, it shouldn’t be approached as an afterthought. Your collaboration with influencers should fit into and complement your overarching content strategy.

Remember, the reason that influencers are so good at what they do is because they know how to craft compelling content that appeals to the masses. That being said, defining a clear content strategy will also help your chosen influencers to create content for their own channels that effectively represents your brand image. This will ensure that the partnership supports your broader marketing objectives and that your brand identity and values remain at the forefront across all touchpoints.

4. Cultivate lasting relationships with influencers: Sure, one-off collaborations can be great for allowing you to achieve short-term goals, such as a spike in sales or a boost in followers. However, building a long-term relationship with an influencer will enable you to take your marketing strategy to new heights.

For instance, in 2018, the jewellery company, Daisy London, started to collaborate with influencer Estée Lalonde to make a jewellery collection so popular it led to the release of further collections.

Although this example isn’t evidence of a typical influencer collaboration, whereby an influencer might post a photo of themselves wearing a jewellery company’s necklace, it’s demonstrative of the powerful reach of influencers, as lovers of the brand and Estée alike sought out items from the collection.

5. Track the success of your campaign: To understand whether or not your campaign is successful and generating a positive ROI, you need to track those all-important metrics. If you aren’t consistently evaluating what’s working and what’s not, you won’t be able to make the necessary adjustment to the campaign. It’s likely to be a waste of resources.

When it comes to knowing which metrics to track, some important ones to consider are those outlined in step two: impressions, audience engagement, and conversion rate. For a more detailed overview, check out our blog post here [link to “Which metrics to track” post]. From this data, you might even find that you need to pivot mid-campaign so that you can reach your campaign goals.

The ever-increasing sway of influencers over consumer decisions means that brands that aren’t incorporating influencer marketing into their overall marketing strategies are bound to get left behind. But we understand that for many brands, knowing where to start is easier said than done. That’s where Sway Me Good comes in. Our intuitive platform makes organising collaborations with influencers a breeze. Head over to our brand page to find out more about how we can help.