Working with an influencer: terms you need to know

Working with an influencer: the terms worth mastering before you close the deal

When you're about to work with an influencer on your advertising campaign, there's a whole new vocabulary you need to get familiar with. So you don't miss a beat, below we'll explain all the terms you need to know, both during the pre-campaign phase as you research your influencer and in the post-campaign analysis.
Keep in mind that each social network has its own way of displaying data; we'll use Instagram and YouTube as our baseline. Working with influencers should be integrated into your marketing plan and be part of your content strategy to improve engagement and reach your target audience.

Pre-campaign: Finding the influencer to work with

Influencers are characterized by having the trust of an audience: whatever they say earns the credibility of their followers. On top of that, they deliver the message in a natural way, which creates a sense of closeness with the audience, who see them as friends or even older siblings to look up to.

When you're researching the influencer to work with, look at the numbers to meet your campaign objective, but above all—and almost more important—look at the image they project and the topics they've covered in the past. If the influencer you choose has values similar to your brand's, the campaign will be far more effective because it will deliver on those points of naturalness and credibility.

Of course, the data is necessary too, and combined with the above, it will help us make exactly the right decision.

The audience: age, location, and gender

If our product or service targets a specific audience (for example: teenagers aged 13 to 17 living in Spain), we have to make sure the influencer reaches that audience. To do this, we'll ask to see the following percentages:

• Age

• Location

• Gender

Reach and impressions

These terms let us forecast the impact of our campaign. It's very important not to confuse them with each other:

• Impressions: The number of times the post has been shown and generated a visual impact (it can produce several impacts on the same user)

• Reach: The unique users the post has been shown to

On Instagram, to get a sense of the numbers we can reach, we'll ask to see the impressions and reach of recent posts, preferably from the last 30 days.
On YouTube this data doesn't exist, but the equivalent indicator would be the number of video views. We look at the most recently uploaded videos.

Engagement

Engagement indicates the commitment the audience has with the influencer. To measure it, we take the data from the last month and run this calculation:

A good engagement rate sits above 5%.

In addition, on YouTube there's also the audience retention metric. This percentage tells us the average amount of time the audience spends watching one of this influencer's videos. And it also tells us the best moment to integrate our product or service, which is when the audience is largest.

All this data helps us find the most suitable influencer to work with, but what about afterward?

Post-campaign: the results

Once our campaign has ended, we'll need to know what quantitative results it produced, so we'll request the data we outline below again. But it's also important to look at the qualitative results—that is, the audience's reception and interest. To do this, we'll read the comments left on the posts and assess the quality of the content. It may happen that the production quality is so strong that we want to acquire the rights to reuse it in other initiatives; this can happen if the influencer we're going to work with shows strong commitment.

Reach and impressions

To measure the final impact of the campaign, we'll request the reach and impressions data for the post or posts that were published. For a more detailed perspective, we'll ask for the data 48 hours after publishing and again at 14 days.

Again, on YouTube we'll need to look at the video views for the video that features our campaign.

Clicks on our link

Most likely, the goal of the initiative is to redirect the audience to one of our websites. We can easily measure the traffic generated by the posts by tracking the link beforehand with a tool like Bitly; the generated link is the one the influencer will use. This lets us access the statistics and see how many people clicked on our link, along with other stats like the referring website and the location.

If the data meets expectations and the values they convey are similar to ours, we'll have found the perfect influencer to work with our brand.