Page 35 - ADNews magazine March-April 2022

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The metrics that matter in influencer marketing: ROI and brand safety
As influencer marketing scales at pace, the discipline needs to move towards metrics that matter to marketers – ROI and brand safety. GroupM’s creator marketing platform INCA helps provide clear and standardised metrics across influencer marketing and guarantees outcomes
for advertisers. Nick Hinchley, group digital director at GroupM agency MediaCom, outlines how new tech and accountability underpins the growth of influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing is growing globally at a rapid pace, according to Collabstr’s ‘2022 Influencer Marketing Report’ the market grew 42% year-on-year globally in 2021 and it’s projected this will grow to a US$15 billion market by the end of 2022.
The reason is twofold, first consumers trust the influencers they follow for brand and product recommendations with most consumers more likely to buy a product promoted by someone they follow com- pared to a traditional ad. Also 2021 saw Apple crackdown on data col- lection impacting social platforms. As a result, advertisers started looking for other methods to get in front of consumers.
But as marketers and brands adopt this new channel in their media mix, how do they approach measuring ROI and brand safety?
There has been uncertainty about the ROI of influencers in the past.
Issues around transparency, verification and measures of success are highlighted. Metrics such as reach, engagement rate, follower count can be calculated in different ways and may not show a true representa- tion of the performance of the campaign.
With the main two barriers to influencer marketing being reach, ‘am I actually reaching my target audience when I work with influencers?’, and ROI, ‘how do I track return on investment in a way that’s comparable to all my other activity?’ It becomes hard to compare influencer marketing with other channels, having no apples-to-apples comparison other than reach.
There is a clear opportunity for a better measurement approach that provides more consistency and transparency in commonly used metrics to make them comparable across channels. As part of our work with AiMCO, MediaCom has introduced standardised metrics across influencer marketing and have a tried and tested approach to deliver on influencer campaigns which includes; Audience Planning, Profile & Creative, Contracting & Technical Production, Activation & Optimisation and Analytics and Insights.
Here in Australia, platforms like INCA are being developed to tackle some of these issues with market specific solutions for advertisers. INCA is GroupM’s creator marketing platform which helps streamline the campaign process and guarantee outcomes for advertisers, helping provide a clear and standardised metric across influencer marketing.
INCA also addresses the issue of brand safety, using tech to assess each influencer’s relevance to a brand/campaign by tracking their past posts and campaigns, ensuring brands don’t engage with influencers that don’t match their brand values or safety requirements.
All this combined allows us to understand a brand’s audience, ensure that we have the right influencers for both brand safety and campaign objectives, optimise the campaigns to the best performing content and report based on a combination of influencer metrics, media metrics and beyond.
This aligns influencer marketing alongside other marketing chan- nels in a holistic and measurable way, moving away from vague met- rics and working towards driving tangible impact to brand building or generating sales.
WORDS BY
NICK HINCHLEY,
MEDIACOM SYDNEY GROUP DIGITAL DIRECTOR