Influencer Marketing in Japan can be as much as 9 times more effective than traditional advertising. However often measuring success is more difficult than traditional marketing. Businesses are often spending large budgets on campaigns, so understanding a return on investment is good to know.
Here are 4 easy ways to track ROI for Influencer Marketing.
1. Trackable Links
On Instagram (which is Japan’s highest engagement platform) they now offer stories, which makes utilising trackable links easier than ever. It’s very important when working with influencers to use trackable links so you can measure traffic, engagement and conversions on your website. Make sure each influencer has an unique trackable link but all links should land on the same campaign landing page, in this way you’ll know which influencers to continue working with! It will help you become lean and allow you to build a team of all star influencers.
2. Set Your Engagement Goals – Measurable KPIs
Engagement is everything for Influencer Marketing. Do the Japanese audience you want to reach already know about your brand or is this going to be first time exposure? Always set engagement goals for your initiatives. When you are getting more awareness, loyalty and social actions, Engagement metrics (including views, clicks, likes, shares, mentions, reach) will help you work out your cost per engagement.
3. Referrals – The easiest thing to look it up
Social engagement is something that’s very easy to access. You can even do this by looking at your own social accounts and seeing any changes such as ‘follower numbers’. Also analyse to see if your website has any new traffic from a specific market, such as Japan. If you see any increase in sales or inquiries directly after influencer activations this can also be measured.
4. Coupon Codes – Not for everyone but it can work.
In some cases you can provide unique promotion codes to your influencers. This is a direct way to track sales conversions generated from your campaign effort. You will be able to see which influencer are able to drive most conversion. Some brands and influencers don’t want to have discount codes associated with their brand or profile, in that case, just simply stick to trackable links. However coupon codes can serves a pretty good purpose: conversion tracking and customer incentive.
ROI in Influencer Marketing is going to be a key trend for 2019. We want to see measurable results from the campaigns we run. We know that Western businesses prefer a quicker turnaround for return on investment (brands love to see measurable results!) much more than Japanese businesses — which tend to be a little more relaxed. Let’s make sure to equip ourselves with some of these methods for the coming year!
