Demand is rising for influencer marketing services, with brands doubling down on this marketing tactic across all industries.
The impact of influencer marketing has driven social media to overtake paid search as the largest global promoting channel, in line with Influencer Marketing Hub, and greater than 80% of marketers find it to be an efficient strategy. There aren’t any signs that its popularity will decelerate; in the US alone, the influencer marketing spend is predicted to grow by 14.2% in 2025.
As a results of all this interest, an increasing number of brands are turning to influencer agencies to search out creators that match their needs and may deliver on their campaign goals. But as influencer marketing matures and investment in it rises, there’s a growing demand for cold, hard data that proves ROI and makes operations more scalable.
This makes data an important resource for influencer agencies, who are attempting to scalably forge high-quality matches between influencers and types. It’s a competitive field, and agencies are under pressure. They need data so that they could make the right decisions and drive demonstrated success for his or her clients.
This need is pushing more agencies to construct out their very own web scraping capabilities, so that they can know their data is fresh and reliable.
Golan Manor, CTO at NinjaInfluence, articulates these requirements in a case study from Bright Data, a number one web data platform. “We gather publicly available web data to find recent influencers, match our customers up with the right influencers of their category, track their campaigns once they’re running – after which deliver insights to the brands running the campaigns,” Manor says.
“Without this ability and access to publicly available web data it could should be done manually, which is sort of not possible,” he continues. “We desired to be certain we reach gathering all the public web data needed to maintain our databases accurate and up to this point.”
Indeed, the social media data that agencies seek is vast and varied.
Creator Engagement Metrics
Agencies have to know the size of every influencer’s following and their reach and engagement levels, so that they can confidently assess the extent to which audiences take motion based on the creator’s content. Too many influencers have fake followings and/or inflate their engagement metrics, making it a struggle to tell apart between real reach and following, and that which has been bought or manipulated.
Some of this information will be derived from viewing the comments and reactions on each post, but it surely’s time-consuming to perform manually. Some insights can come from platform analytics or the creators themselves, so long as you may trust them.
On the other hand, honesty will be hard to return by at scale, and a few data is difficult to trace, like whether someone is de facto taking note of the video they’ve kept open long enough to be logged as a view.
Creator Audience Metrics
The more insight you may gain into the demographics and psychographics of every influencer’s audience, the higher you’ll have the opportunity to match them with the right clients. It lets you filter out irrelevant audiences and adjust each campaign’s tone and content.
But demographics includes aspects like profession and income level in addition to age, gender, and placement, and psychographics covers more nebulous issues like interests, beliefs, and values. You might gain some information from platform analytics, but running analyses of unstructured keyword data pulled from the open web often proves to be more useful.
A given influencer can’t necessarily inform you much about the people of their audience; data privacy regulations prevent platforms from sharing this data; and individuals may not include this information of their profiles. Acquiring it might require cross-referencing social media profiles across multiple platforms, potentially merged with publicly available data like housing registries. Some influencer database platforms like Modash concentrate on these data points.
Compliance Metrics
It’s increasingly vital to confirm that each influencer you’re employed with complies with all the relevant regulations, otherwise, you may be accountable for fines and penalties and your repute may nosedive. “Today’s purchase journey starts with trust,” points out Chad McKenzie of Impact. “While transparent partnerships construct trust, keeping track of what every creator posts can feel like herding cats.”
Agencies have to ascertain that creators adhere to legal and ethical guidelines regarding disclosure and transparency for sponsored content, in addition to more industry-specific rules like firearms promotion, responsible alcohol use, safety requirements for power tools, or possible negative effects for health products.
Now that influencers operate across so many platforms, it’s very difficult to make sure that all their content is compliant. What’s more, as hard because it is to scan and analyze text posts and pictures, videos and podcasts are one other story. Comments made during live esports or gaming streaming are even harder to ascertain. This is one other area where AI tools might help.
Content Performance Metrics
Alongside the creator’s engagement and audience metrics, agencies are thirsty for insights into content performance. This includes what content types the influencer posts and which engagement styles they see from each type; how often they post; and the ratio of sponsored to organic content they share.
When vetting creators to potentially partner with, it’s vital to Investigate which sorts of content they excel at and to explore which content types resonate best with their audiences on different platforms.
You can find a few of this information from platform analytics, through API data, and tracking hashtag metrics. Google Analytics comes into play here too, in addition to data from landing pages and coupon codes, but these sources are only relevant when it pertains to campaigns your team is managing. What’s more, some content is ephemeral, like “Stories” formats on Meta, Snapchat and TikTok, making it difficult to trace data after the fact. Some platforms also refrain from displaying private data like post impressions.
Real-time Campaign Performance Metrics
Influencer agencies also need performance metrics, resembling impressions, click-through rates, and conversions, but they need it in real time. Rapid, up-to-date information makes it possible to regulate campaign decisions and maximize results, like pivoting to take a position more in a particular influencer, platform, and/or content type, if you happen to see that they’re high-performing.
“Make sure you’re watching performance metrics throughout the campaign, not only at the end,” says Nycole Hampton, an integrated marketing strategy consultant, adding “If you see that a creator’s audience is LOVING the content, you may consider adding more content in the partnership and keeping things going.”
Much of this data will be accessed through platform analytics, hashtag metrics, Google Analytics tags, and affiliate link metrics. However, maintaining with all of it in real time is what makes it difficult. Automated solutions that consolidate all the data could make a serious difference.
Data Makes the Influencer Marketing World Go Round
There’s not any room for influencer marketing agencies to follow their gut and make decisions by instinct alone. Social media data is significant for effective campaigns, and access to reliable, up-to-date information is what allows your agency to face out from the crowd.
Setting up the right strategies and tools to make this possible could soon be table stakes.
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