Last updated on June 1, 2018, 3:42 PM

Content marketing in collaboration with influencers Tips for KPIs

Right in the headline about the buzzword Kaiser made for influencer marketing :)

In the last few months I have noticed that more and more agencies are entering the market that provide bloggers with content marketing or influencer marketing or blogger relations. Of course, this has been around for a long time, but what I find strange is that there is still no real professionalization and development of products.

There are simply more agencies doing the business as the demand continues to grow. But there has not yet been a quantum leap in the quality of the product, “influencer marketing”. (As of September 2017: and it still doesn’t exist).

The offers that come in are usually very, very thin and there doesn’t seem to be much brainpower invested in reporting on the performance.

Even on the agency side, I always tried to break down as precisely as possible what was actually being done when making offers. Now, on the client side, I also expect more details from the agencies on the subject of content marketing via influencer marketing or blogger relations.

I can well imagine that this approach works quite well for customers who have not yet dealt with the topic of bloggers very intensively and who may no longer be part of Generation Y. It must have been the case here many times that people simply said “We need a few bloggers too”.

But Generation Y is slowly moving into positions where they can make a difference with marketing budgets. I therefore assume that our generation’s natural approach to this topic will also increase the quality requirements for an influencer marketing offer.

That’s why I thought I’d try to explain what quality standard I would (personally) define for an influencer marketing offer. Any marketing manager would definitely be happy about that :)

happy

But before I continue reading, I want to make it clear that I am not an advocate of “pushing everything on the bloggers’ faces and definitely putting content in the corporate wording for the customers,” or even of achieving performance goals through these measures. On the contrary, such a cooperation should actually represent a perfect symbiosis in which, ideally, the blogger fits the customer/product so well that a blog post is created that fits in completely naturally and is not perceived as disruptive company advertising. The content of the blog post should still have added value/use for the reader/fan of the blog. The blogger should have complete freedom and write exactly as he always does. Ideally, some of the blogging glory transfers to the customer or product and everyone is happy.

Of course, it is also important to mark the blog post to make it clear that this is an advertising/sponsored post.

The following lists are actually just about making the basic requirements for these collaborations a little more transparent and professional (from the client side).

The perfect offer for influencer marketing

Ideally, it doesn’t just consist of the price and a blogger’s name. Because I’ve already gotten something like that.

The next stage would be if at least the URL of the blog is included. But unfortunately it’s still a bit poor.

So much for the fails.

It would therefore be nice if the following points were included in an offer submitted by an agency or the influencer:

Price
- Divided as modularly as possible into costs per blogger / influencer
- Agency share for project management/support
Blogger / Influencer Information – Data Sheet – Hard Facts
- Blog and social media channels and their URLs
- Blog Analytics
  - Austrian user share of total traffic (or if it is even more important for the customer, e.g. only in Vienna, then specify in more detail)
  - Total page views per month of the blog
  - Total unique visits (or visitors) to the blog per month
  - Average time per visitor stays on the blog per month
  - Page views per month for an average blog post
  - Unique visits (or visitors) of a blog post on average
  - Average time spent per visitor on a blog post
- Total reach per social media channel (i.e. fans, followers, subscribers)
- Social media performance data (if the blog post is redistributed there by the blogger)
  - Austrian fan share on the various social media channels
  - Facebook fans
    - Average organic reach of a posting
  - Twitter followers
    - Average organic reach of the tweet
  - Instagram followers
Average organic reach of a post/image
- Blogger / Influencer Information – Data Sheet – Soft Facts
  - What subject areas does the blogger write about?
  - On a scale of 1-10, how well would the agency rate the blogger’s fit with the customer’s brand or product (1= best)
  - Have there been other collaborations with the blogger and what experiences could be gained (very cooperative, or a little more difficult, etc.)

The perfect reporting for influencer marketing

For reporting or a preview of what can be reported, you can simply copy everything from above. And additionally:

Screenshots of the blog post
Screenshots of the social media shares of the blog post (if made)
Screenshots of the promotion of the blog post on social media channels (e.g. if the posting was still advertised on Facebook)
Google Analytics (or tool used by others) Screenshot of post-campaign metrics for blog post
- and also exported as text/excel form
- Ideally Excel exports of all performance data mentioned above ->Blog Analytics Website performance data

More KPIs for influencer marketing

It can also happen that someone immediately asks about the CPM (Thousand Contact Price, or CPM Cost Per Mille). As an agency you should probably have this ready too. This will of course be high, but if you are clever you can argue that away, as bloggers are of course much more authentic and credible than all other media and of course they are much more precise in their target group. They are just influencers. This amount of authenticity cannot be measured -> therefore, based on gut feeling, this has to be weighed up if the CPM is quite high in purely mathematical terms and can compete with the price of a special medium / magazine / niche blog.

If the primary goal of content marketing efforts is awareness and branding, the following KPIs will probably remain that are most important:

Page views / views
Time spent on the blog post

If the goal is more towards performance (which in itself is not entirely the point of content marketing / influencer marketing per se)

These KPIs will probably count more

Page views / views
Link Cliks to the customer = redirects or conversion rate (i.e. how many users clicked the link and went to the customer)

In the end, here is a guide to very good information for the database of blogger information, according to which various agencies can build their blogger pools.

Influencer Marketing Blogger Relations Guide

One more thing – tracking pixels in influencer marketing

In the future, the word pixel installation, or tracking pixel installation, will also be used more often in relation to influencer marketing. Since customers (who are in the know) are used to having a nice path to conversion analysis from their ad server, bloggers won’t be able to completely ignore it in the near future either. (In Austria this will probably take another 10 years).

Important to know here:

Just the tracking pixel installation itself isn’t a bad thing, since everyone has already integrated Google Analytics or other tools. Furthermore, it helps the customer immensely to be able to correctly assess the impact of content marketing via Blogger. Using path to conversion analysis, it is possible, for example, to see whether a blog post served as a preparation for a product purchase or a visit to the customer website at a later point in time.

Example: User reads blog post and is tagged -> 3 weeks later, the user searches for the product on Google and clicks on the customer’s ad -> Customer knows that the user completed the purchase via a search ad, BUT had initial contact with the product via the blog article -> Conclusion: Blog article had a very good preparatory effect and was worth the money.

What I would advise against:

It would be important if the bloggers ruled out that this tracking pixel, or actually this tracking pixel marking of the user, is also used for remarketing purposes. It should be prevented that the user is bombarded with advertising materials from the customer just because he read the blog post and was thrown into the remarketing pool. Because this assignment would be possible through the tracking pixel, but as a blogger you could quickly lose out on your loyal readers.

Example: User reads blog post and is marked -> User is added to the remarketing list -> 2 hours later, the customer’s advertising material for the product that was also briefly mentioned in the blog post is displayed on all websites that he then visits.

This is of course an extreme example, but we know similar experiences from Zalando or booking.com.

So that’s my two cents on this topic, and I’m excited to see how everything will develop here. – > I am also happy to advise on this topic as a content marketing agency lone fighter, more about that here :)

Blogger Bar Camp Graz 2016 and discussion on KPIs and influencer marketing

And for anyone who is even more interested, I will be at the Blogger Bar Camp in Graz on Saturday, April 23rd, 2016 and will be doing a session/group discussion on the topic.