To prepare for my upcoming talk at Jewelry Ecomm Live!, I’ll be publishing five posts throughout September about influencer marketing for jewelry brands. In this post, I explain what you can expect when working with influencers, so you can anticipate ROI and feel more confident about moving forward with an influencer marketing campaign for your jewelry brand.

First and foremost, before you set any expectations for your influencer marketing campaign, you must define your campaign goal. Examples of clear campaign goals include increasing brand awareness, reaching new customers, boosting sales, managing brand reputation, and creating new content. Of course, you probably want to do all of these things for your jewelry brand, but you’ll actually accomplish more if you set one measurable goal and focus on achieving that goal, at least for now.

Next, you must define the metrics that will let you know whether or not you’re on the way to achieving your goal. One of the best things about being a marketer today is that we have so much data at our fingertips. However, the trick is to know which data is most relevant, collect reliable data, understand how to analyze the data, and then learn lessons from it, so you can use data to make better marketing decisions in the future.

According to a study conducted by Linqia, engagement is the most-used metric in influencer marketing programs (cited by 90%). However, many marketers also use metrics like clicks (59%), impressions (55%), and conversions (54%). Metrics like reach and product sales are also popular. The metric or metrics you choose should directly correlate to your campaign goal.

When they’re used to determine the health of a campaign, metrics are also called Key Performance Indicators or KPIs. To better understand the difference between metrics and KPIs, try to remember the last time you went to the doctor. Your blood pressure, body temperature, height, and weight are like metrics; they’re important pieces of data but not necessarily useful if you’re not concerned about heart health or don’t have a fever. However, if you went to the doctor with the suspicion you have the flu, and your goal is to feel better, then your body temperature would function like a KPI in a marketing campaign, while your height probably won’t apply.

Here are some examples of KPIs that marketers use to measure the success of common campaign goals:

Brand awareness: Customer opinion, purchase intent, follower growth, web/in-store traffic
Content creation: Likes, engagement, clicks, comments, volume of content
Sales conversion: Conversions, coupon/discount code use, shopping cart abandonment rate

How should you be mining and tracking this data, so you can view the health of your campaign? These days, a number of tools are available, and many of them are already embedded in the platforms you use every day to execute your marketing efforts. Some of the most powerful data tracking tools include Google Analytics for web traffic and e-commerce activity, internal Facebook and Instagram analytics, Iconosquare for third-party social media marketing analytics, and UTM for tracking clicks. Again, the specific mix of analytics will depend on your campaign goal and your corresponding KPIs.

All that being said, you probably want to get to the good stuff: what ROI can you expect from your influencer marketing campaign? Unfortunately, marketers aren’t fortune tellers, and we can’t predict the future. However, we can give you some benchmarks based on industry data, so you can compare how your campaign is performing with other brands that have tried influencer marketing in the past.

Earlier this year, Influencer Marketing Hub released a report called “The State of Influencer Marketing 2019 : Benchmark Report”, which provides many eye-opening statistics about influencer marketing ROI. Here are some of the stats I found most relevant and interesting for jewelry marketing:

• 78% of respondents stated that they considered Earned Media Value to be a good measure of ROI on influencer campaigns. What exactly is Earned Media Value or EMV? According to Influencer Marketing Hub, it “calculates the worth you receive from content shared by an influencer.” So, if you calculate that an influencer’s EMV is $100, then the influencer’s post has the same value as a Facebook ad that cost $100.
• Campaigns focused on branding or engagements saw an 8x ROI over paid advertisements with the same goal.
• Direct response ROI was 1.8x per $1. Direct response refers to getting the user to take immediate action like signing up for an email list, downloading a piece of content, or making a purchase.
• Ecommerce ROI returned approximately 80 cents per $1 spent. But don’t let those numbers discourage you! They don’t consider the value of brand awareness and don’t necessarily catch customers who purchase later in the sales funnel.
• “Influencers with 50,000-250,000 followers deliver a 30% better ROI per dollar spent compared to those with 250k-1M followers, and 20% better ROI than influencers with 1m+ followers.” Focusing on influencers with more modest follower counts may turn out to be more profitable for your jewelry brand.

To expect the best results from your influencer marketing campaign, you’ll need to also put your best foot forward in regard to branding. You won’t want to start reaching out to influencers until you have a solid brand foundation in place. That means knowing your customers, performing a Competitive Analysis to understand your competitors and see how they’re using influencer marketing, auditing your branding and potentially upgrading your Look / Tone / Feel, and boosting your social media presence by posting high-quality content on a consistent basis.

Are you surprised by the influencer marketing ROI benchmarks? Do you know the goal you’d like to achieve for an upcoming influencer marketing campaign? We’d love to hear your reactions and thoughts.

In next week’s blog post, we’ll be explaining how you can find the best-fit influencers for your brand, reach out to those influencers, and begin a successful partnership.