The Daniel Wellington watch brand has much to be proud of. A mid-range watch, it has gone from being a relatively unknown brand to being seen on the wrists of celebrities like Kendall Jenner. In total: 3 million followers on social networks and $207 million in revenue in 2017 for the brand.

If you’re a social media marketer for a B2C brand, you’ve probably considered using Instagram influencer branding. Because after all, who are better placed to understand this platform with 800 million users  than these content creators? But before embarking on an Instagram influencer marketing campaign, it’s important to identify and compare which influencers seem most relevant and effective for your brand.

Establish a benchmark on the authenticity and engagement of your Instagram influencer

Indeed, this can sometimes hide fake accounts delivering fake likes and fake comments. In 2014 and then 2017, Instagram purged millions of ghost accounts, which caused certain influencers or celebrities to lose a considerable percentage of subscribers. Buying ghost followers, automating bot accounts, exchanging likes and comments with other users are common practices content creators use to inflate their follower count and engagement rate. . It is therefore important for marketers to identify the “real” influencers, i.e. those who do not use these methods, before starting a partnership with them and committing a substantial budget for their influencer marketing campaigns.

To distinguish between influencers using these methods and those with a truly engaged community, look at:

The engagement rate: on Instagram it is between 2 and 10%. For example, an influencer with 200,000 followers should have an average of 400 to 2,000 likes per post. If this figure is lower than this average, it reflects a lack of commitment and authenticity on the part of its community.

influencers, their community, interactions and posts

Instagram Stories: An engaged audience is an audience that views all of your content. A high viewing rate and high interactions are signs of an active community. As with the engagement rate, these should represent between 2 and 10% of the number of followers the influencer has.

Comments: most of the time, comments from automated accounts or from the exchange of good practices between users, are translated under influencer posts, by generic forms such as “OMG” and “Wow! Social media listening tools can also be used to automatically detect the most commonly used words in influencer post comments and thus detect accounts with an engaged community or not.

How relevant is your influencer?

By definition, schematically, a car brand will not hire a blogger or a beauty blogger for its campaign, unless it wants to reach a very specific audience for its product.

Demographics: What is the average age, gender, nationality of an influencer’s various followers?

The relationship with the brand or product to be promoted: What area of ​​expertise is the influencer in? Has he been involved in any product decisions recently?

Relationships of influencers with the Etam brand and the mediaExample of an influence network: Influencer relationships with the Etam brand and the media

Analyze the impact an influencer can have on your campaign KPIs

Once your campaign is set up and operational, you can evaluate in real time the impact of each influencer in relation to your objectives, so that you can adapt your strategies if necessary. You must therefore first define a set of key campaign performance indicators (KPIs) to then analyze, such as the reach or the sales generated by each influencer.

The number of articles published: How many messages has each influencer posted on your campaign?

Audience reached: How many impressions did your campaign generate through each influencer? What are the demographics of the audiences reached?

The volume of discussions generated: of the total number of earned media generated during the campaign, how many were generated by influencers and how many UGCs did your influencers generate? Tip: with a social media listening tool, you can automatically tag the discussions of influencers (or subscribers, customers) in order to follow their shares of voice in real time.

The quality of engagements: Compare the number of comments that actually engage with the brand or generate engagement versus the number of comments that are purely about the influencer’s personality or spam. Indeed, the influencer must somehow be forgotten for the benefit of your brand. Thus, for example, when the influencer Jérôme Jarre promoted his donation campaign, after a few days, the mentions on this call for donations were more shared than the name of the influencer.

Sales-centric KPIs include:

Benchmark your Instagram influencer strategy against your competitors.

It’s important to be ahead of the competition, including when it comes to marketing campaigns and using Instagram influencers. What is important for you to watch:

How your competitors are using these influencers for their marketing campaigns

The results: Online, what are the shares of voice and sentiment gained by your competitor during his marketing campaign with an influencer.

Also, when looking for the ideal influencer for your brand, you can of course eliminate those already engaged with your competitors so as not to create ambiguity among your customers.

To summarize :

While Instagram influencers, and influencer marketing in general, have been the target of criticism and skepticism about the value they can bring to a brand and their authenticity in the face of the gamified nature of social media, this does not mean that they are ineffective for B2C brands. With the right metrics, the right KPIs, and benchmarks in place, marketers can then identify the ideal influencer for their next sales or awareness campaign and assess its impact on the objectives set by the company. .