How do you measure and track the results of your influencer networking efforts?

1 Define your goals

Before you start networking with influencers, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve. Do you want to increase your website traffic, social media followers, email subscribers, or sales? Do you want to boost your credibility, authority, or reputation in your niche? Do you want to build long-term relationships or collaborate on specific projects? Depending on your goals, you'll need to choose different metrics and indicators to track your progress and success.

2 Identify your influencers

The next step is to identify the influencers who can help you reach your goals. You can use various criteria to find and select the right influencers for your brand, such as their relevance, reach, engagement, authenticity, and alignment with your values and vision. You can also use tools like BuzzSumo, Klear, or Upfluence to search and analyze influencers based on keywords, topics, platforms, or categories.

3 Engage with your influencers

Once you have a list of potential influencers, you need to engage with them in a meaningful and authentic way. You can start by following them on social media, liking, commenting, and sharing their content, mentioning them in your posts, or sending them a personalized message. You can also offer them value, such as free products, discounts, referrals, testimonials, or invitations to events or webinars. The goal is to build rapport, trust, and mutual benefit with your influencers.

4 Track your results

Once you have established a connection with your influencers, you need to measure and monitor the impact of your influencer networking campaigns to track the results. Google Analytics can be used to track website traffic, conversions, and revenue generated by influencers, while social media analytics tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Buffer can be used to measure reach, impressions, engagement, and sentiment of influencer posts. Email marketing analytics can track open, click, and conversion rates of influencer emails, while CRM systems or tools can track leads, opportunities, and sales generated by influencers. Utilizing UTM parameters or custom landing pages, hashtags, mentions, branded keywords, segments, tags, custom fields, fields, labels or notes can all help to further track performance of each influencer or campaign.

5 Optimize your strategy

The final step is to optimize your influencer networking strategy based on the data and insights that you collect. To do this, you can employ A/B testing to see which elements of your campaigns, such as headlines, images, calls-to-action, or offers, work best for your audience and goals. Additionally, you can ask your influencers and audience for feedback on your influencer campaigns and use surveys, polls, or reviews to gather more detailed responses. Finally, calculating the return on investment (ROI) of your influencer campaigns by comparing the costs and benefits of your influencer activities can help you measure their success. All of these techniques will help you refine your influencer networking strategy for maximum impact.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?