As influencer marketing keeps growing, so does the requirement to demonstrate impact. Google’s Tobias Rauscher shares how he managed to elevate influencer work to be a neighborhood of the marketing mix.
Here’s a well-known marketing question: “Have you considered including influencers as a part of this campaign?” The all-too-common nudge often stems from a desire to amplify a marketing message, and therefore the conversation normally includes references to lofty-sounding metrics like impressions, social media likes, and earned media value.
At Google, they fundamentally believe in the worth of influencers. except for influencers to be a reputable part of our marketing mix, They had to prove their return beyond vanity metrics, as Marvin Chow, our VP of selling, has acknowledged. “No doubt influencer marketing does something,” he said. “But to comfortably put spend and resources behind it, They would have liked to raised understand the return on investment, especially within the context of other channels.”
The good news: They actually managed to tug it off. the subsequent four points outline how they did it — and what other marketers can learn.
1. Stop selling impressions and likes as impact
Sure, impressions are essential for getting the word out, but they assert little about whether the marketing message actually broke through and, if it did, how it resonated together with your audience. They too have invited influencers to launch events (pre-pandemic) and packaged the estimated reach of their posts to demonstrate success. Rarely, however, did those posts communicate the intended marketing message, making the reported results unreliable.
Earned media value has equivalent flaws. It attaches a price to your estimated reach, which is predicated on the variety of assumptions and doesn’t address the attribution challenge. it’d sound like an exciting metric, but it’s hard to extract meaning from it.
Impressions are essential for getting the word out, but they are saying little about whether the marketing message actually broke through and how it resonated.
Our experience with comments is somewhat more nuanced: They love watching explicit brand mentions but have found little to no correlation between the sentiment of these posts and actual brand lift. Brand mentions in comments can function individual proof points that your message broke through but are by no means representative of the entire.
The bottom line: There’s only such a lot they will track. While there’s no harm in tracking what’s at your disposal, don’t leave it up to vanity metrics to assess the return on an influencer marketing partnership.
2. Embrace the advantages of long-form content
They didn’t need a classy measurement framework to understand that the majority of our marketing messages were too complex for static social posts. it might be impossible to elucidate in only 30 seconds how the Google Assistant can improve your lifestyle or how you’ll economize with Google Fi.
Long-form content gave our marketing messages more breathing space. Since YouTube creators excel therein format at scale, it made sense for us to seem to them for brand partnerships.
They didn’t need a classy measurement framework to understand that the majority of our marketing messages were too complex for static social posts.
Following a quick, creators incorporate the branded message or product into their regularly scheduled organic content calendar — in other words, during a video that lives on their channel. for instance, online entertainers The Try Guys promoted Google Fi in one of their episodes; designer Mr. Kate showcased Google Lens during a renovation; and “van life” YouTuber Jennelle Eliana used her Pixel phone to capture night photography.
3. Specialize in the brand lift to isolate the impact
YouTube BrandConnect, YouTube’s in-house branded content team, and our go-to partner facilitate partnerships between creators and makes and apply a data-driven approach to creator matchmaking and measurement.
Through Google insights and measurement tools like Brand Interest Lift, Influencer Lift, and organic view-through conversions, YouTube BrandConnect makes it possible for brands to truly measure the impact and efficacy of influencer marketing.
For example, Brand Interest Lift allows advertisers to live consumer search behavior resulting from viewing the creator’s video. Influencer Lift has allowed us to border sponsored videos with surveys, isolating the impact and tying it back to brand goals without requiring a typical brand lift survey attached to a media buy. It tracks the difference in survey responses from viewers of a branded content video against an impact group that did not see the video to work out the influence the branded content campaign had on key metrics, like recall, awareness, and consideration.
Securing regular brand lift results proved a serious breakthrough for us. It allowed us to quantify the ROI of creator partnerships and compare results across marketing channels.
4. Contextualize results within the broader marketing mix
When they started standardizing reporting metrics for creator partnerships — by that specialize in absolutely the lift, total people lifted, and price per person lifted — they were ready to effectively benchmark channels against one another.
Backing our partnerships with numbers helped us elevate influencer marketing to a reputable channel within the marketing mix.
This has led to novel insights around scale and effectiveness. for instance, they found that some top creators have helped us achieve the size of TV ads, at a significantly lower cost.
Backing their partnerships with numbers helped us elevate influencer marketing to a reputable channel within the marketing mix. And, more importantly, it unlocked funding and resources, allowing us to scale their efforts.
Source: Google