If you've been keeping up with our blog this month by now, you know this month is all about brand campaigns, what they are, how they work, and if working with an influencer agency to run one for you is right for your current business goals. If you are just jumping into our series, feel free to read the last couple of articles. If not, we'll provide a quick recap before we jump into how to measure the success of a brand campaign with an influencer.

What is a Brand Campaign and How Does It Work (A Recap)

A brand campaign is a strategic plan to promote a business, product, or service that accurately reflects the company's values by employing influencers, brand ambassadors, or content creators to promote your brand to their audience using the most relevant channels. The goal of a brand campaign is to create a connection with customers and increase brand awareness and loyalty. A campaign is run for a predetermined amount of time, and the success is measured by Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) chosen before the campaign's launch.

It works by planning your campaign, finding influencers with the correct target audience, negotiating the contract, and pushing it live. When done correctly, you should have concrete results of its success.

Working with an agency may be a good idea if you don't have any experience with campaign management. The planning and execution of the brand campaign are carefully crafted by agencies, so businesses only have to involve themselves in the process if they want to. When working with an influencer agency, because it's their specialty, campaigns can often be crafted quickly and hit the ground running sooner, with more guaranteed success. Another thing influencer marketing agencies take care of for business owners is measuring the campaign's success.

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How is Brand Campaign Success Measured?

Before a campaign is launched, and often before the planning even begins, it is important to establish goals. Different goals alter the campaign strategy and tactics used. When planning any marketing strategy, I follow a 3 step outline. I will walk you through an example now. For this example, I'll use a made-up local coffee shop, let's call them Bulley Brew, named after my pet chihuahua, Bullet’s nickname. All of these will be unique to the brand, so depending on your brand's voice, you can have fun with this!

Step One- Establish Goals or Objectives

Increase Brand Awareness
Drive Sales (In person and online with merch)
Gain New Instagram Followers

Step Two- Outline a Strategy for Each Goal or Objective

Get our product in front of new potential customers
Get more customers to our brick-and-mortar location and website
Engage with our target audience

Step Three

Get our product in front of new potential customers
- Employ 2-3 local influencers to create content with our products and give a genuine review/ feedback to their audience
- Have each influencer post on stories, static posts, and a reel
Get more customers to our brick-and-mortar location and website
- Run a giveaway through the influencer’s page offering 10% off with mention of the post
- Create a landing page with a new sales funnel for online merch sales
Engage with our target audience
- Have the influencers tag us in their content
- Interact with comments on the influencer page from your business account

Once you have your goals, strategies, and tactics mapped, you can choose your key performance indicators (KPIs) or how you will measure your campaign success. Measuring the success of a brand campaign is an essential step in understanding how effective the campaign has been. Several ways to measure success include tracking metrics such as website visits, conversions, mentions, and engagements on social media, customer feedback, and customer surveys. A good starting point is setting KPIs specific to your campaign goals. You can then track these KPIs to determine how successful the campaign has been in achieving its goals. By monitoring these indicators, you can gain valuable insights into your brand campaign's success. Again, depending on the goals, the performance indicators will vary. For our example above, we will pick at least one KPI per goal. For our example, our KPIs will be:

Increase Brand Awareness
- KPI- Impressions and likes on posts
Drive Sales (In person and online with merch)

KPI- Increase in sales from the previous month
KPI-Landing page visits
KPI- How many people mentioned giveaway

Gain New Instagram Followers

KPI- # of new followers
KPI- % increase in eyes on our page

KPIs are the telltale sign to see a campaign's success and how well the strategies worked. An infinite number of goals, strategies, tactics, and KPIs can be used when planning standard marketing campaigns, influencer brand campaigns, or event marketing campaigns. These must be highly personalized to your brand and align with your mission and values. Each company has such a different brand voice, and target audience that there is no one size fits all approach to running successful campaigns.

In addition to key performance indicators, you can also use social metrics to help measure the success of your campaigns. Next month we will begin releasing result analyses of the brand campaigns we've run for our clients. In them, we will review the social metrics we've measured during the campaign. Social metrics are categorized into a few categories- awareness metrics, engagement metrics, video metrics, customer experience metrics, and ROI metrics. Some of our favorites include impressions, reach, amplification rate, audience growth rate, and virality rate. If you're curious about the different types of metrics and what sets them apart, our friends at Hootsuite have a great blog post that you can read here. Social metrics are vital, especially when running a social influencer marketing campaign. We like to use KPIs and social metrics to see how well the campaign is performing throughout the promotion. If we notice certain things are working well and others not so much, we can bob and weave a bit to ensure success. Here are 5 more KPIs, in addition to the ones from the example, that can be measured by the social agency running your campaign.

Reach: The number of users who have seen the influencer's content
Engagement: The number of likes, comments, and shares on the influencer's content
Brand Awareness: Tracking brand mentions and keywords associated with your campaign can help you measure the impact of the campaign
Conversion Rate: Monitoring the number of conversions that result from the influencer campaign divided by the number of visitors total
Return on Investment (ROI): Calculating the ROI of your campaign by comparing the cost of the campaign to the revenue it generates

Post-campaign reporting on the campaign's success is crucial to see how effective the strategies and tactics were in helping reach the business's goals. These KPIs and metrics provide valuable insights about your audience, strategies to use moving forward on new campaigns, progress towards goals, and can guide business decisions in the future. The feedback from new customers, the influencers, and potential customers is priceless. Public perception is so powerful in our current social climate. Making sure you are coming across in a way you are proud of to people who have yet to use your products or services allows you to grow and stay ahead of the curve.

More About Influencer Marketing:

How to Measure the Success of Brand Campaigns

The Power of Micro-Influencers: How Small Followings Can Make a Big Impact

What is a Brand Campaign and Do I Need One for My Business?