How to Know if an Influencer Marketing Agency is Right For Your Business? Part 10: They Help You Define Your KPI’s

It makes me angry when I hear that Influencer Marketing Agencies are providing campaigns without defining goals with their clients.

Marketers - if you’re in the business of standing out - don’t let agencies do this to you.

Goals and KPI’s are critical for the growth of your organisation.

1. They help define your strategy.
2. The allow you to measure the success of your campaigns.
3. They also allow you to re-calibrate your future output.

So how do you avoid being scammed by your Influencer Marketing Agency Partner?

Here is part 10 of my series on “How to Know if an Influencer Marketing Agency is Right For Your Business?”

With today’s blog post looking at the importance of your agency partner helping you decide on your KPI’s!

• Read Part 1: Pricing - Here
• Read Part 2: Their Location - Here
• Read Part 3: Their Track Record - Here
• Read Part 4: They Ask You How You Want to Measure Your Potential Campaign - Here
• Read Part 5: They Educate You on a Typical Campaigns Steps - Here
• Read Part 6: They Ask What Else You're Doing Online! - Here
• Read Part 7: They Ask What You're Doing Offline Too - Here
• Read Part 8: They Tell You if They’ll Be Utilising Micro or Macro Influencers
• Read Part 9: They Let You Help Decide on Using Macro Influencers or Micro's Too!

Part 10: They Help You Define Your KPI’s

1. They Help You Define Your KPI’s

When you go to a new Indian restaurant, and even after having spent over 20 minutes staring at a menu, sometimes you can still not know what you want to order.

And then to make matters even worse, the waiter comes over for the 15th time in that time period to ask, “are you ready to order?”

So, what do you do? 

The easy way out is to pick something, anything, from the menu to save yourself the embarrassment of having to send the waiter back again (and also a potential unpleasantry in your food too!). 

The other option you may have is to respond by asking the waiter for their advice. 

Advice which they give is often centred around the questions of “what type of curry do you normally go for? Hot or mild? A dry dish or sauce based one? Lamb or chicken?

And often as a minimum, you know the answer to these questions.

This is the same when it comes to requiring a brief to be created for Influencers as part of your campaign.

Often, you won’t have all the knowledge or know-how as to how to achieve the desired results of a campaign.

However, most likely you do know what your overall objective of the campaign is - and what you’d like to see as a result. 

And that’s the very reason you work with an agency.

Just like the waiter, they should be prodding and probing you to provide answers that may not necessarily give you the desired result, but they should have enough to go away and know exactly how to put together a set or series of scenarios to deliver what you’re trying to achieve.

For example, they could start with “do you want to create, brand awareness or a campaign that is purely about return of investment?”.

And the best KPI's, are those that are SMART.

Further to that, they may then say, “who are your typical audiences?” From that, they will know potentially which age range of Influencers to include and ethnicity - and what type of messaging and language that Influencer should then include.

So just how a great waiter or waitress is able to decipher the information you give them to help you pick a dish that will leave your cravings satisfied, your perfect Influencer agency partner should be taking the little information you give them, and be able to share with Influencers exactly what you’re trying to include as a brand.

This, in turn, will give you the best chance of succeeding through your Influencer campaign.

Because planning, and briefing in turn, is the foundation for success.

And p.s, for those who are wondering, my favourite dish is a homestyle chicken korma!