I’ve been in the content marketing industry for well over a decade. And throughout this time, I’ve noticed that brands aren’t tying their influencer marketing performance to content marketing KPIs. Even though content is central to most influencer marketing campaigns, their campaign measurement efforts would typically be confined to traditional influencer performance metrics.
However, tracking your content marketing performance can give you a broader look into your influencer campaign performance as a whole. It can provide a more comprehensive understanding of how the campaign is delivering results, which allows for more accurate measurement.
In this post, I break down some of the top content marketing KPIs that you need to track for your influencer campaigns. Let’s take a look.
Before I dig deeper into the actual metrics you need to measure, let’s first clear the air. You may be wondering exactly how content marketing KPIs are relevant to your influencer marketing efforts.
The first thing we need to understand is that most influencer marketing campaigns involve the use of content to promote your message. Whether it’s an entertaining influencer-generated Reel, an in-depth YouTube review, or a how-to blog post – it’s all content marketing, only with influencers as your medium.
So how the content performs directly ties into how your campaign ultimately pays off. Everything from how many people watched the content to how they engaged with it and took an action influenced by it will reflect in your overall campaign performance.
Sure, many brands have been tracking influencer content performance all along. But that doesn’t mean they’re tracking the metrics that actually matter. Most influencer performance tracking efforts are limited to vanity metrics such as likes, views, impressions, and reach. So there’s no knowing just how impactful the content really is in delivering actual business value.
For example, is the content driving visits to your campaign landing page? Or is the content encouraging people to use the influencer’s custom discount code?
With the right content marketing KPIs, you can get a better understanding of how your influencer campaign is resonating with the audience and contributing to your bottom line. Some KPIs can even show you whether the campaign has a larger brand impact when it comes to influencing brand reputation and audience perception.
Likes are a common way to measure influencer marketing content performance, but they only tell half the story. It’s easy to “like” someone’s content and simply keep scrolling afterwards. So most people who liked the influencer’s content might not even continue interacting with it. And if there aren’t any further interactions, it’s unlikely that the content will pay off.
Moreover, likes are easy to fake using bots and fake accounts. They’re the easiest way for influencers to fake engagement and make their content look like it’s performing better than it actually is.
This is why you need to look into other engagement metrics beyond likes to accurately measure audience interaction. You can use these content marketing KPIs to understand how the content resonates with the audience and whether it entices them to interact.
Looking at the overall engagement rate of your campaign and influencer-specific content will give you a general idea of how your campaign is resonating with audiences. How well is it driving interactions, especially considering the number of people who saw the content? This can help you see if the content is engaging enough for audiences, because when people engage with the content, it indicates that they’re showing interest in the product or messaging.
And the more engaging the content is, the better the chances of driving action. You can use Influencity’s influencer ROI reporting tool to track engagement rates across different platforms. It even breaks down the interaction split by platform, type, and publication date. So you can get a more detailed understanding of how the content is resonating across platforms and the types of interactions it’s eliciting.
The comment section is the first place to look if you want to get more qualitative data on how your campaign content is engaging audiences. A post that gets a lot of comments may seem like it’s doing really well. However, people also engage with content that they don’t like. So if a large portion of those comments is negative, it could have a negative impact on your campaign.
This is why you need to dig deeper and look at the sentiment behind those comments. Are people expressing anger, frustration, and confusion? Or do they seem more excited and fascinated? These little variations in sentiment can tell you a lot about whether the content is positively resonating with audiences.
Check out the following comments in an influencer’s post about recording the sound of a frozen bubble. You can instantly see that most of the comments are positive, indicating that people actually enjoy the content.
Beyond the sentiment expressed in the comments, it’s also important to check for the quality of comments. Since some influencers may buy engagement from bots or participate in engagement pods, you’ll want to take a closer look at whether the comments are actually authentic.
Look out for content that gets too many generic comments that don’t add to the conversation or emoji-only comments. Meanwhile, comments that are highly relevant to the content – whether they’re adding to the conversation or asking questions – tend to be genuine.
When I find content that I truly enjoy on Instagram, I tend to share it to my Stories or with friends who might also enjoy it. And when I find content that I might want to see again later – such as a recipe or an informative parenting post – I tend to save it to my collections. Similarly, people are saving and sharing content that they find enjoyable or valuable.
This is why saves and shares are relevant content marketing KPIs to help you understand your influencer marketing performance. You can view these metrics within the native analytics dashboard of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Get influencers to share the save and share data of the content they created for your campaign to understand how it’s performing.
Click-through rate is another effective content marketing KPI that you can use to see how well people are responding to your campaign content. How many people are clicking on the link after seeing the content? This is typically used for campaigns that involve sending people to specific landing pages or product pages.
You can get an idea of whether the content was compelling enough to drive people to your product or landing page. Even if it doesn’t end up in a purchase or conversion, it still shows that the content managed to stir curiosity and entice people to learn more.
Engagement metrics are well and great, especially as they can show you whether your influencer marketing content is resonating with the audience. However, they don’t always translate to actual business outcomes. People may leave comments about how much they like the product without actually buying it.
So you should also track metrics that can be directly tied to your revenue. These content marketing KPIs can show you if the content is driving conversions and sales, which ultimately translates to actual business value.
Whether you want people to buy your product or sign up for something, they have to visit your website. This is why you need to look at how influencers are driving traffic to your website to understand how their content is performing.
You can use influencer tracking tools like UTM links and assign a unique URL to each influencer. This will make it easier to track the traffic that a certain influencer can generate. So it’s easier to see just how impactful their content is and their contribution to your campaign. By creating dedicated UTM links for your campaign, you can also measure its overall performance.
In the same vein, you can also use affiliate link tracking to understand your influencer marketing performance. For campaigns that combine influencer marketing with affiliate marketing, influencers are given a unique link that they can share with their audience.
This link can then be shared through blog posts, YouTube videos, social media posts, and bios. And you’ll be able to track how many purchases were made using that link.
Here’s an example of a blogger sharing an Amazon affiliate link for the equipment she uses in her cooking.
While affiliate links are mostly used for tracking influencer commissions, they can also be very helpful for measuring your campaign performance in general. By seeing how many sales were generated through each link, you can see how well the influencer content resonated with audiences. You can also track the total sales generated across all your affiliate links to understand the campaign’s overall performance.
Even for brands that don’t have an official affiliate program, promo codes are a great way to track sales generated through influencer campaigns. This involves providing a unique discount code for each influencer. The influencer then creates content promoting the product and encourages followers to use the code for a discount.
By tracking promo code redemptions, you can understand how persuasive the content is and whether it manages to drive actual purchases. So it’s an effective way to understand the impact of specific influencer content.
You can use Influencity to create audience discount codes that are unique to each influencer. Then track the usage of those codes to see how specific influencers are performing and how the campaign is generating sales as a whole.
Finally, you’ll also want to look at some content marketing KPIs that indicate that the campaign resulted in long-term brand impact. These metrics can show you whether the influencer content managed to boost brand reputation and positively influence perception to strengthen your presence in the market.
You’ll want to track whether the campaign generated long-term brand awareness and helped you attract loyal customers instead of just one-time sales. That way, you can understand the long-term return on your influencer marketing investment.
The content created by influencers should help people discover your brand. A campaign that performs well will ideally drive a significant increase in brand awareness, which means that more people are learning about your brand through the influencer content.
You can measure brand awareness by looking at how your brand mentions have increased over time. Look at the patterns to understand whether the campaign drove an increase in brand mentions. Make sure to keep tracking these numbers even after the end of the campaign so you can understand if the spike is short-lived or if it remains consistently high.
Influencity’s monitoring tool helps you track your mentions history, so you can see how your brand mentions have changed over time. This makes it easy to visualize whether the campaign drove an increase in brand mentions and whether the trend continues even after the campaign ends.
While brand mentions are a good indicator of brand awareness, they don’t tell you the whole story. In some cases, a spike in brand mentions could also be associated with a media backlash or a PR crisis. That’s why you need to enrich the data with sentiment analysis.
Make sure to track audience sentiment around your brand mentions to understand if the conversations are positive or negative. Influencity’s monitoring tool helps you track whether your brand mentions are positive, negative, or neutral. It even breaks down the sentiment distribution across platforms, language, gender, and age.
Additionally, you can use the sentiment history graph to see how these sentiments have changed over time. Try to connect these shifts with your campaign timeline to understand how influencer content has influenced brand perception.
As you can see, there are plenty of content marketing KPIs that can be directly tied to your influencer marketing performance. Whether it involves metrics to understand audience interaction or long-term brand impact, make the most of the KPIs shared above to improve your performance tracking and maximize your campaign outcome.