Influencer marketing is an increasingly popular channel that many marketers are investing heavily in. The data gathered for Linqia’s report “The State of Influencer Marketing 2017” from the end of 2016 indicates that nearly half of brand marketers anticipated increasing their budgets in this area. Savvy brands have adjusted their strategies to embrace this channel, though doing it effectively still causes consternation for large and small companies alike.

Any Google search about influencer marketing will yield results showing businesses who claim to be highly successful with the channel, but also frustrated ones complaining that the price they pay for influencers doesn’t always back out to being a good investment. As with any marketing campaign, executives naturally need to ensure they are driving results, maintaining a budget and also driving ROI, which is where the performance-driven platform of Influencer.co can be a major benefit to companies and influencers alike. First things first, though…

When many influencers think of engagement they often think of comments and likes; however, engagement goes much deeper especially when calculating CPE.

How To Effectively Utilize Influencer Marketing

Before any brand sets out to work with an influencer, no matter where they’re engaging them, it is imperative that they first define their goals. Determining and then defining goals can be a long, strenuous process, but you can’t effectively build a campaign if you don’t know what results you hope to obtain. Marketers could easily spend thousands of dollars on influencer marketing and still fail simply because they began a campaign with no true ending in mind.

To help keep spending under control, many brands are now stepping away from hiring influencers based on likes and audience sizes and instead have began to hire influencers on a performance basis, with those metrics determining how successful (or unsuccessful) an influencer campaign is. thus, audience size becomes less important when selecting influencers than views and conversions generated by that audience, incentivizing the influencer to become a more successful marketer. Make sense yet? It will.

What Exactly is Performance Based Influencer Marketing?

Performance based influencer marketing is essentially CPE (Cost Per Engagement). It is used to help businesses compare influencers to one another and to their targeted audience. CPE gives you direct insight on how valuable your influencer is or could be to the audience in which you wish to target.

When many influencers think of engagement they often think of comments and likes; however, engagement goes much deeper especially when calculating CPE. CPE calculates clicks to the branded urls, likes, comments, shares, retweets and direct purchases. These calculations not only show the influencer how well their content is being received but it also gives marketing executives a live update on how well or how badly an influencer campaign is performing. This in turn gives brands an opportunity to either end the campaign or tweak it without the fear of losing a large amount of money.

The Uncertainty of Performance Based Influencer Marketing

When it comes to performance based influencer marketing, there is still a level of uncertainty for both the brands and influencers.

For a brand, there is often fear that influencers will begin to employ unethical tactics such as buying likes, shares, clicks, etc. in order to increase their CPE which could still end up costing brands thousands of dollars in budget expenses.

On the other hand, many influencers fear that if their campaigns do not perform well they are not just out of a paycheck, they have also wasted time on a campaign that yields no return on investment and for a full-time influencer, time is money.

If executed strategically; performance based influencer marketing has the potential to be lucrative for both the brand and the influencer with less risk for the brand and demonstrable success leading to high returns for the influencer.

Creating a Win-Win Scenario for Merchants and Influencers

For Influencers, monetization and tracking platform gives influencers the opportunity to work with a plethora of different brands without having to deal with the stress and anxiety of having to produce results within a certain time frame.

This new monetization platform also benefits the brands because they no longer have to search the internet to identify influencers. When brands join our platform they will be able to see our list of “invite only” influencers which also allows them to the benefit of working with more than one influencer at any given time to see which influencer yields the best results.

Despite the challenges of performance based influencer marketing, it is still much better for both brands and influencers to employ this tactic vs many fee structured strategies because they pay out could ultimately end up being significantly higher for both parties involved and everyone knows a happy marketer often means an even happier influencer.