As an influencer, you want to know if your content is reaching and engaging your audience, and if you are achieving your goals. But how can you measure your success as an influencer in the creator economy? Here are some tips to help you track and evaluate your performance.
Before you can measure your success, you need to define what success means to you. What are your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives? For example, do you want to increase your followers, views, likes, comments, shares, conversions, sales, or revenue? Do you want to build your personal brand, grow your community, or collaborate with other creators or brands? Write down your objectives and align them with your content strategy.
"Would you rather be famous with no money, or rich and no one knew who you were?" The general population determines an influencer's success based pretty much on the size of their following, and unfortunately, many influencers get caught up in this same train of thought when it couldn't be further from the truth. By definition, you're successful if and when you reach your goals, so your goals are what matters. Are you wanting to become influential for pride's sake? Are you wanting to use your platform to grow your business? Create a movement? Success doesn't exist unless you're clear about what you want to accomplish first!
Depending on your objectives, you need to choose the right metrics to track your progress and results. Metrics are quantitative indicators that measure your performance, such as reach, impressions, engagement rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, or return on investment. You can use different tools and platforms to collect and analyze your metrics, such as Google Analytics, social media analytics, or third-party apps. Make sure you understand what each metric means and how it relates to your objectives.
Why do you think that they add mile markers to the route of a marathon? You back your metrics out of the goals and objectives you've set! If your goal is channel growth, you should be targeting engagement rate, views, and yes... follower count to a degree. If you've built a strong following and are looking to monetarily convert an audience, then you need to prioritize CTRs (click-through rates), purchase conversions, sign-ups, etc. Your metrics should coordinate with the part of the sales and marketing funnel you are focused on based on your objectives!
To evaluate your performance, you need to compare your metrics with a baseline or a standard. This can be your own past performance, your competitors' performance, or your industry's average performance. Benchmarking can help you identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and adjust your content strategy accordingly. You can use tools like BuzzSumo, Social Blade, or SimilarWeb to benchmark your performance against others in your niche.
Social media is so niched down at this point that the best way to benchmark your performance is to measure it against your past performance! However, this requires you to go into an evaluation period and put out a good amount of content without any expectations. You need to transcend being just an influencer and become an experimental marketer!
To improve your performance, you need to test and optimize your content. Testing means experimenting with different variables, such as content format, length, style, tone, topic, headline, call to action, timing, frequency, or platform. Optimizing means analyzing the results of your tests and applying the best practices that work for your audience and objectives. You can use tools like A/B testing, split testing, or multivariate testing to test and optimize your content.
To measure your success, you also need to get feedback from your audience and stakeholders. Feedback is qualitative information that tells you how your audience feels about your content, such as their opinions, preferences, needs, problems, or suggestions. You can get feedback from surveys, polls, reviews, ratings, comments, messages, or interviews. Feedback can help you understand your audience better, improve your content quality, and increase your audience loyalty and satisfaction.
To measure your success, you also need to review and report your performance regularly. Reviewing means summarizing and interpreting your metrics, feedback, tests, and optimizations, and assessing how well you achieved your objectives. Reporting means communicating your performance to yourself, your team, your clients, or your sponsors, using charts, graphs, tables, or dashboards. Reviewing and reporting can help you celebrate your achievements, learn from your mistakes, and plan your next steps.