Earned media value (EMV) can be a highly valuable metric for measuring the return on your marketing efforts. It can help you quantify your exposure and calculate the value you are creating with your posts. However, it’s not always easy to understand and implement in your marketing strategy.
Our goal today is to help you with this.
We are going to explain what earned media value is, how you calculate it, and why it’s such a crucial performance indicator:
Earned media value is an influencer marketing KPI used to measure the value that your campaigns generate. It takes into account the number of social interactions on your posts, including social media shares, likes, and comments. You can also use it to measure the number of interactions on your blogs and the ratings, reviews, and recommendations that are published by users about your brand.
Earned media value is an essential metric for identifying how effective your influencer marketing campaigns are. It can help you identify what’s working well, and what you need to improve in order to better connect with your target audience and boost awareness of your brand. Essentially, it helps you quantify how much of a reaction you are getting from each of your campaigns so that you can calculate the value and ROI of your influencer marketing efforts.
Think of it as a formula for calculating the monetary value of the exposure your campaigns generate. In other words, the ROI you can expect to receive as a direct result of your campaigns.
You can also use earned media value to determine the impact a specific influencer might generate for your brand. For example, you can use it to calculate the market value of third-party mentions to see which influencer might elicit more of a response from your target audience. This can help you pick an influencer that meets your campaign expectations. It’s also a very handy tool for calculating what a fair price is during the influencer negotiation process.
Let’s finish by looking at a few specific benefits of tracking this metric:
Earned media value is a highly effective measure of the value that an influencer could potentially create for your brand, especially compared to more traditional ROI calculations such as click-throughs and conversions. This can help you determine which influencer out of a shortlist can launch a more successful campaign. And by picking the best person for the job, you can boost brand awareness and increase your chances of hitting your marketing objectives.
Additionally, tracking earned media value enables you to optimize your budget allocation. By understanding which influencers yield the highest return, you can allocate more resources towards them and decrease or reallocate spending on less effective partnerships. This strategic financial management can significantly enhance your campaign's overall efficiency and effectiveness.
Moreover, by consistently tracking earned media value and analyzing the performance of different influencers, you can refine your approach and evolve your influencer marketing best practices over time. This allows you to stay ahead of trends, adapt to changing consumer behaviors, and maintain a competitive edge in the market.
Ultimately, integrating earned media value measurement into your influencer marketing strategy empowers you to make informed decisions, optimize resource allocation, and drive sustainable growth for your brand.
There are a few ways to calculate your earned media value, depending on your campaign objectives, content type, and communication channels.
One common formula combines both the cost-based approach (CPM) and the engagement-based approach (CPE) in calculating the Earned Media Value (EMV). Essentially, you have to multiply the total number of users that a campaign is displayed to (reach plus impressions) by the average cost for every thousand impressions (CPM) combined with total interactions (likes + comments), then multiply this figure by your cost per engagement (CPE).
The formula is as follows:
EMV = Users (Impressions + Reach) x CPM + Interactions (Likes = Comments) x CPE
Let’s break this down so that it’s clearer.
Impressions and reach: Reach is the number of people who see your campaign. Impressions is the number of times your campaign is seen, which can be multiple times by the same person.
Cost per mille / thousand (CPM): This is the monetary amount you spend on your campaign for every 1,000 impressions. The formula for calculating it is 1,000 x (cost / total impressions). For example, if you have 10,000 total impressions and you invest $20 in your ad, your CPM is 1,000 x ($20 / 10,000) = $2 for every 1,000 impressions.
Cost per engagement: This is a marketing metric that measures the average cost incurred by a brand or advertiser for each engagement generated through a marketing campaign. The CPE metric allows marketers to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of their campaigns by determining how much they are spending to elicit a desired response or engagement from their target audience. Calculating CPE involves dividing the total campaign cost by the number of generated engagements.
Let’s bring all this information together now and go back to our original formula.
If, for example, you launch a campaign that achieves 10,000 impressions, costs you $2 for every 1,000 impressions, elicits 500 interactions and your cost per engagement is $200, then your calculation would be as follows:
EMV = 10,000 x $2 + 500 x $200
EMV = $20,000 + $100,000
EMV for this campaign = $120,000
Keep in mind that although EMV is expressed as a dollar value, it doesn’t represent real-world dollars that you are going to get from an influencer. Think of it more as a benchmark that you can use to compare the value of an influencer with that of another to see who can generate the biggest impact.