While stunning visuals and winning creative concepts will certainly catch shoppers’ eyes on social media, the secret to taking your influencer marketing activities to the next level is being data-driven.
In this blog post, we will cover what it means to work with influencer marketing in a data-driven manner and how it can amplify any influencer marketing strategy.
What is data-driven influencer marketing?
At Cure Media, data-driven influencer marketing entails using historical and real-time data throughout the planning, activation, and follow-up stages of influencer activities to optimise current and future campaigns.
One of the primary reasons that brands hesitate to be data-driven with influencer marketing is the cost. Unlike other digital channels such as display and SEM, influencer marketing requires a substantial, long-term investment in influencers and content.
Data-driven influencer marketing is worth the investment, however, as it will make it infinitely easier to improve the channel over time and generate a greater ROI.
Choosing the right influencers
Being data-driven begins with choosing influencers. Using data at this stage of the planning process should be as obvious a choice as it is when using other channels.
Take paid social ads, for example. When using an ads manager, you choose your target group to make sure that you are reaching the correct audience. It would feel crazy to buy ads without targeting. The same should go for influencer marketing.
Using data to choose the right influencers entails more than looking at vanity metrics, as even seemingly straightforward information like an influencer’s location and age can be misleading.
For example, if you want to reach millennial women in southern Germany, you may assume that Alina, a 30-year-old influencer based in Munich, is a good fit for your campaign. But, once you look further into Alina’s profile with the help of an influencer tool, you would find that 80% of her followers are actually located in Brazil.
This is why prioritising data over vanity metrics is a critical component to succeed with your influencer activation. With data on your side, you’re able to weed out fake followers and identify accounts with a genuine influence on your target audience.