Influencer and creator marketing is a valuable part of modern marketing plans, but a vast majority of brands still don’t understand how it drives business value compared to more traditional paid channels.
While industry trends clearly suggest that it works, most influencer campaigns continue to lack true business measurement:
Only 38% of brands measure influencer campaigns on ROI and ROAS, with only 26% using conversion or sales as their primary KPI.
Where revenue measurement is in place, a majority of brands continue to focus on click-attributed revenue.
Fifty percent of brands that measure ROAS from influencer campaigns measure success on click-attributed sales or voucher code redemptions.
Unsurprisingly – and despite consistent cultural and anecdotal evidence of the success of creator marketing – a majority of these brands come to the conclusion that influencer marketing is not very profitable.
This measurement challenge puts many marketing managers under pressure to continue to justify the channel investment, particularly in difficult trading conditions.
At Charlie Oscar, we measure influencer and creator campaigns through MMM (Marketing Mix Modelling) to measure both the direct and indirect impacts of channel exposures. Every campaign we activate includes industry leading measurement to prove the total business impact of influencers and creators, measuring incremental orders and revenue, and understanding what content drives the biggest revenue uplifts.
We have aggregated evidence across 30 brands running influencer and creator campaigns to identify three key learnings about the revenue impact of influencer activations.
1. Most of the revenue impact of influencers is indirect
MMM has been a popular method to measure traditional marketing channels for many years, a staple of TV, OOH and Print measurement and has powered the investment strategy for the biggest advertisers for decades.
Because this modelling runs on time series correlation models, it doesn’t rely on matching individual users to purchases, so it can avoid the common pitfalls of cross-device measurement and time-delayed impacts.
Crucially, MMM allows us to measure the impact of creator activity, whether or not a user clicks on the content.
Only 15% of people clicked on ads in the last month, so measuring business impact based on clicks is fundamentally flawed.
When we look at the impact of creator and influencer activity, we can break these impacts out into direct and indirect revenue:
Direct revenue is from people who see influencer content and make purchases straight away, these people show up on click based reports and will often use voucher codes associated with the influencer content.
Indirect revenue is from people who see influencer content, don’t respond straight away, but later act differently on other channels. We can’t see these people on click reports or voucher code usage (they
usually show as organic purchases or paid search / affiliate purchases), but we can measure the statistical uplift in their behaviour.
Using MMM, we can see that 80% of influencer revenue is driven through indirect impacts – that is, from people whose behaviour is influenced by influencers but do not click on links or use voucher codes.
Here we see influencer content having an old-fashioned broadcast impact. The same way brands have been built for years through mass reach media like TV.
To put that into context, for every £1 you see tracked against click-based purchases, there will be another £4 in untracked impact, which only exists because of influencer reach.
That uplift is clear when you look at the change in other channel performance when influencer campaigns are live:
Paid social campaigns perform 20%-30% stronger with influencer support than without.
Paid search campaigns show 15%-20% stronger CTR and significantly softened diminishing returns impacts with influencer support.
Brand searches increase up to 30% with strong influencer reach.
These uplifts in channel performance wouldn’t exist without influencers.
2. Not all influencer content is equally valuable
We know that influencer reach drives revenue uplifts even if people don’t click on the ads. Brand exposure and the reach of creator and influencer content are valuable. But not all influencer reach is equally valuable.
So what influencer content drives the most revenue per reach?
The first thing we see is content that drives the largest reach or most likes is not always the content that drives the biggest revenue impact.
So if you are optimising towards reach or follower counts, you might be optimising away from the strongest revenue impacts.
To normalise these metrics across campaigns and content of various scales, we look at “revenue per reach”:
Essentially, how much revenue (through DTC, or Amazon, or physical retail) is driven per 1,000 reach on any influencer content or campaign.
This is measured through our MMM outputs, so it takes into account both direct and indirect revenue.
There are some common findings across most campaigns:
- Video content drives 4x more Revenue per Reach than static content.
- Instagram Stories drive the strongest Revenue per Reach, 3x more than TikTok content and 8x more than Instagram Reels (though it can often be easier to generate larger reach on these channels).
- To camera reviews, unboxing and event content drive strong Revenue per Reach, significantly outperforming traditional content stables of product placement and tutorials.
- These content impacts vary depending on influencer niches (the type of influencers who are creating and posting content), with broader audience types frequently outperforming influencers who focus on the
brands specific category. - For example, for fashion brands, we frequently see higher revenue per reach from lifestyle and entertainment creators than from typical fashion and beauty creators.
- While this might seem counterintuitive, the relative uplift is logical when you consider that beauty influencers will create content for multiple fashion brands every week, while lifestyle and entertainment creators will rarely post fashion content. The relative impact of this content with lower competitor presence cuts through much stronger.
- When we understand these revenue uplift behaviours (which vary for every brand), we are able to optimise for business success, shifting influencer execution from delivering likes to delivering revenue.
3. Context is crucial to campaign performance
Most brands have a good view of which content drives the strongest response from their audience, and which creators deliver the content that works best for them.
But this is rarely a fixed and static relationship. Market and customer context are crucial. The content that performs the best in aggregate is rarely the content that performs best in each context.
The revenue per reach for some content types is much stronger than others (video significantly outperforms static; stories significantly outperform reels; product reviews and event content punch harder than most other content)
But none of these relationships is static throughout the year. The content that works “best on average throughout the year” isn’t the best answer for “the best content to drive pre-sale intent in low awareness
markets”, for example.
When we want to build out creative and creator strategy for the medium and long term, we need to look at how these relationships change, so we can use each content type when it is most effective.
In this case, we can break down our Revenue per Reach metrics into contextual periods of the year:
Business as usual (BAU), pre-sale, during-sale and product launch.
As the chart above shows, creator impact varies across these periods and changes significantly depending on creator type.
Celebrities deliver strong value, but they work hardest when they have “new messages” to deliver. Their Revenue per Reach is much stronger during sale periods and product Launches.
Ambassadors deliver weaker value during BAU but deliver significant value during new product launches and sales. As a long-term partner, ambassadors’ audiences are more exposed to the brand and show smaller incremental reach and uplift when promoting BAU messages; however, this closer brand association helps to drive strong performance when delivering new messages, such as sales or product
launches.
Mid-sized and macro creators deliver relatively stronger BAU performance. While individually they have smaller audiences than larger creators and influencers, they benefit from a closer relationship to their audience. When individual audiences are combined, the total reach from these influencers is significant, and because they typically have less association with big brands and competitors, the content they produce drives larger uplifts even without the hooks of new product launches or sales.
All content works harder during sale periods, as purchase propensity is increased, but the relative value is larger on the bigger, more established relationships, such as ambassadors and celebrities.
There is no “best content” or “best creator” that covers all of our needs. And understanding when each content type works hardest allows us to match the content to the business strategy and improve overall business performance from creator content.
Conclusions
- When you combine these three effects, you take influencer measurement from a mix of soft metrics (reach and follower growth) and direct sales metrics (click tracked revenue and voucher code usage) to full funnel business and revenue growth.
- There are some key areas that every marketer should focus on when assessing the effectiveness of influencer
marketing campaigns: - Measure the indirect impact of influencers alongside the direct impact to understand full funnel value.
- Campaigns which were previously classed as unsuccessful may actually turn out to be valuable business growth levers.
- Understand what type of content drives the strongest revenue uplift, not just the strongest engagement.
- Focus strategically on under-appreciated content and influencer niches that drive disproportionate value.
- Use creator and creator content to access new audiences who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to your marketing, particularly on digital channels where algorithms favour audiences who look most like your
current customers. - Use data as a springboard to guide and inspire more impactful ideation and creative direction for your influencer partnerships. Taking a data-driven approach to influencer discovery and content briefing shouldn’t be seen as limiting the creativity essential to this channel’s success.
- Align the context of the business to the content and the creators. By understanding how different influencers and content types drive value in different time periods, we can align influencer content and
strategy to the business cycles that underpin the wider marketing strategy. - Getting a clear understanding of these behaviours brings influencer marketing in line with longer-established marketing channels, and helps to value and justify these investments on the business value they can drive.
- Creator-led brands understand these relationships instinctively, and proper measurement allows all brands to
benefit from these uplifts in growth.
