Working with influencers to promote your brand is a powerful opportunity to earn trust among members of your target audience. If you can find influencers with the right audience size and relevance to your market, the partnership that follows could lead to excellent results for all involved. As a matter of fact, influencer marketing is so effective that we even wrote a blog about finding the perfect match.

So how do you track the effectiveness of those partnerships? It’s always important to know how well your marketing efforts are working, so you can monitor the return on your investment and decide whether these endeavors are worth continuing. Whether you already work with influencers or plan to shortly, it’s critical to have a plan to evaluate their performance.

Establish Your Goals
Knowing how well your influencer marketing is working comes down to having clarity on what you want to accomplish with these endeavors. In general terms, there are two reasons to use influencers – to grow brand awareness or to convert sales. While the line between these two objectives can get blurry, and there will be some crossover in every campaign, it’s wise to know which one will be your primary target before you reach out to influencers to discuss a partnership.

Tracking Sales Conversions
If you would like to use influencers to drive sales in your business, tracking the sales that each influencer creates is relatively simple. Depending on your ecommerce system, you might choose to use one of the options below –

Affiliate links
An affiliate tracking system is a quick and easy way to attribute sales to specific influencers. Each influencer will have a tracking ID attached to the links they use to drive traffic to your pages, and any sales that occur will connect to that ID. Regardless of your compensation agreement with the influencers, you can use affiliate links to see how accurate your campaign is working.

Coupon codes
Another good way to tie sales to influencers is through coupon codes. While this is not a form of automatic tracking, like with affiliate links, it’s still pretty accurate because few buyers – if any – would skip over the opportunity to enter a coupon code and save some money. To make this work, you’ll just need to provide each influencer with a unique coupon code, so you can track how many sales have come from each brand partner.

Brand Awareness Campaigns
It’s inherently trickier to monitor how well your campaigns work when they aim at brand awareness rather than sales. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. One creative way around this issue is to create a unique URL that will serve as a landing page for every influencer to link to when they promote your brand. You don’t have to build a new page for every influencer – you can simply make copies of the same page on various URLs. Then, by tracking how much traffic lands on each of those pages, you will see which influencers are helping to grow your brand in a meaningful way.

Don’t let the difficulty of evaluating influencers stop you from using this powerful form of digital marketing. There is much to gain if you can find the right influencers to expand your reach and build trust with potential buyers. Remember, it’s possible to track how well this strategy works using some of the abovementioned techniques. Best of luck!

For more content about Influencer Marketing, check out our previous blog on Influencers, are they worth the trouble?