When To Extend Influencer Marketing Campaigns & Partnerships

You carefully analyzed hundreds of influencers to find just the right fit for your influencer marketing campaigns. You designed a campaign to perfectly showcase your product to the right audience.

Once the campaign starts and the creators start posting their content, you start seeing positive engagement and metrics. It seems like you hit the jackpot and your influencer marketing campaign is a success.

But what do you do next?

Do you just copy and paste the campaign across more influencers? Maybe you should just stick with the current influencers you chose and build a long-term partnership.

Early success is great, but you want to build on that momentum and keep it going to get the most out of your efforts.

Below, we’ll go over what to do once you launch your campaign and start measuring the results. Whether it’s a huge viral hit or something more modest, the key is to build on what you’ve already created to keep the momentum going.

Don’t Throw Good Money After Bad

A wildly successful campaign is the dream of all marketers. But not every campaign will work, especially early on in a company’s lifecycle.

One mistake that newer brands and fresh digital marketers make is that they spend good money after bad hoping that their marketing efforts just need more time to pay off. This can happen with influencer marketing, PPC ads, and with many other channels.

For example, they’ll budget a certain amount for a paid advertising campaign and the results are mixed or slightly negative in the beginning. There is often an instinct to believe the campaign just needs more time to turn positive and start gaining traction.

However, this is rarely the case and a borderline paid campaign will never turn into a positive ROI campaign if you just let it run longer.

While it’s true that some marketing efforts take time to reach their full impact, such as with brand building or brand awareness, they should still show positive metrics right out of the gate.

A poor-performing campaign means there is something fundamentally flawed with either the strategy, the messaging, the marketing channel, or the influencers involved.

The reason this is important is that you need to determine the difference between a good campaign that you can build on and a poor campaign that needs an overhaul or needs to be scrapped.

Some of that knowledge simply comes from experience. But much of it can be determined through metrics, which we’ll touch on in the next section.

Metrics To Measure Your Influencer Marketing Campaign

To truly determine if your campaign is finding success, you need to evaluate hard numbers or metrics that show a real change.

For most campaigns, you’ll want to carefully look at the following stats.

Traffic

If your campaign is designed to send customers to a website or offer page, you need to accurately measure the increase in traffic to your sites or channels along with where those customers came from.

Your website should already have some type of tracking software to help you measure traffic. You can also use something like Google Analytics, which is free and offers a good deal of granularity to examine exactly where your traffic is coming from and what it’s doing.

Key traffic stats to follow:

• Visitors
• Sessions
• Time on site
• Pages visited
• Referral sources

Your conversion ratio will be related to your overall traffic. This means you want to know your baseline ratios of traffic to sales before you start the campaign. Make sure to account for specific times of the week or seasonal factors that impact your conversion ratio.

Engagement

Engagement is when an influencer’s audience interacts with your sponsored content in one of several ways. This can be a comment, like, a share, or another interaction specific to the platform.

The higher the engagement the better, but you need to know the baseline for your campaign style and the type of influencer you’re working with.

For example, micro and nano-influencers can have average engagement rates of 5-8% on TikTok. Larger influencers like mega and VIP accounts often have engagement rates of 1% or lower.

The type of campaign and content will also play a part. Makeup and cosmetic content usually has the highest engagement rates while nail content often has the lowest. So your niche will also play a role in what your average engagement should be as a target.

These examples are averages across the platform, in this case, TikTok. You can access these metrics via the free Audience Insights tool within TikTok.

Most other platforms such as Instagram include similar free tools that are indispensable for analyzing your campaigns and influencer performance.

Brand Awareness

For brand awareness, the metrics are generally easier to measure. You’re looking for total impressions and views as the most important numbers to track.

However, engagement is still important and a high view count with below-average engagement indicates there may be a problem with either the messaging or the choice of influencer and their audience.

You will also want to incorporate social listening tools to monitor brand mentions across various platforms.

Common tools like this include:

• Hootsuite
• Mention
• Talkwalker
• Buzzsumo
• Awario

Each of these tools offers its own features to choose from. You can also monitor specific hashtags related to your campaign directly within the platform’s native analytics tool.

ROI

Return on investment (ROI) is important for any influencer marketing campaign, but it’s measured differently based on the campaign type and goal.

For sales, it’s rather easy and you simply look at your conversion rates and total sales minus the cost of the campaign. 

You want a positive number here but sometimes in the case of subscriptions, the lifetime value of the customer needs to be taken into account. With subscriptions, a break-even or even a loss initially doesn’t necessarily mean a failed campaign.

An ROI can also measure more than sales. Total Earned Media Value (EMV) takes into account the value of the exposure that your campaign created.

The EMV is highly dependent on the campaign type and your brand’s niche.

Overall, you will multiply your total impressions with the Cost Per Mille (CPM) for your niche, channel, and other factors.

For more information on metrics and KPIs, you can view our guide on influencer analytics here.  

When To Continue Influencer Partnerships

Metrics and KPIs are solid numbers that you can rely on, but deciding when to continue a partnership may involve less tangible factors.

In this section, we’ll go over some of the areas to consider if you’ve had a successful campaign and wonder whether you should continue a partnership with an influencer.

Strong Content Collaboration

Depending on the campaign, if the influencer and your brand worked well in creating custom content that fit your messaging, you should consider continuing the partnership.

For simple paid product mentions, this won’t be a factor. But if the influencer understood your creative goals and the brief and delivered exactly what you envisioned, you likely want to build on that partnership in the future.

You Can Create New Campaigns With The Same Influencer

Some campaigns can’t be duplicated. For example, a campaign for a limited-time promotion or live event coverage.

However, if you created tutorial content with an influencer or another type of campaign that can be repeated with a new content brief, then you should consider extending a partnership.

With this type of longer-form influencer content, you can even consider sponsoring a series of videos that share a common theme.

Brand Loyalty & Authority Is Your Goal

One benefit of partnering with the same influencers is that helps build brand loyalty and authority over time. Your sponsoring of content that the audience enjoys helps to position your brand as an integral and authoritative presence in the space.

If this is your goal, longer partnerships can work better than one-off campaigns.

Downsides Of Longer Influencer Partnerships

While extending a partnership does have upsides, there are a few downsides to consider.

Reduced Returns

Generally, as you use the same influencers, your campaign ROI may start to decline. This can depend on the product or service being promoted though.

Higher ticket items and subscription services can often have a higher ROI with extended partnerships. Campaigns meant to drive one-time sales or impulse purchases usually see a decline over time.

Reduced Ability To Reach New Audiences

Focusing resources on extended partnerships can reduce your ability to seek out new audiences through new influencers.

This is especially true for newer brands who may not yet fully understand their target customers. As you discover new potential customers, you want to have the resources and budget available to target them with new campaigns.

Audience Fatigue

Over time, the audience can grow fatigued by the campaign or brand messaging, even if it changes. You can generally detect this type of fatigue in engagement metrics or traffic.

Contractual Issues

Influencers may want a longer contract if you ask to extend a partnership. This protects them if you leave suddenly and they lose other opportunities due to relying on your sponsorship.

Conclusion

When deciding on when to extend a campaign or partnership, it should always start with metrics and KPIs.

If the numbers aren’t showing you what you want to see, extending the campaign won’t suddenly turn them around.

Next, match your extended partnerships with the campaign type that suits each situation.

Some campaigns are simply one-offs and won’t benefit from an extension. For these situations, it’s best to take what you’ve learned and apply it to a new campaign to reach a larger audience.

You can always return to previous influencers you’ve worked with if the situation warrants it.