Measuring the incremental impact of influencers 

Entropy ran a webinar earlier this week in partnership with UK advertising trade body ISBA, which looked at best practice for brands and marketing teams to follow in order to establish a credible view on the ROI of influencer activity with Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM).

For anyone that missed the webinar but would like to discover more, some of the points we covered are below. 

Influencer marketing and the wider creator economy continues to grow at rapid pace

According to Statista, the global influencer market has expanded rapidly from $1.6bn in 2016 to $24bn in 2024, while Harvard Business Review report that 75% of brands now have influencer marketing budgets.

However, measuring the true incrementality of influencer activity can be challenging.  That’s why a good measurement strategy is as important for this still relatively new area as for more traditional media.

A good measurement strategy facilitates 4 main aspects of your media plan

These principles can be applied across influencer marketing:

1. Accountability: a robust evaluation of the business contribution of creators. Creator marketing becomes a considered investment, rather than a discretionary spend.
2. Efficiency: Creator marketing spend and other marketing and brand spend can be optimally allocated, maximising the impact. The decision-making process – from corporate to brand level – can be streamlined.
3. Transferable: Performance of creator marketing can be fairly compared and contrasted across products/brands/markets. Knowledge can be shared across the organisation (across brand teams, marketing & sales & commercial etc).
4. Transparency: Potential to provide client organisations greater visibility and clarity on the decision-making process, thus facilitating agreed actions.

MMM/econometrics can help to optimise your influencer marketing spend

Best practice is to relay on a combination of measurement approaches, for example:

• Experimentation: Structured learning approaches and lift experiments engineered to isolate and quantify performance contribution
• Statistical attribution/MMM: Statistical, holistic and incremental approach to performance attribution.  You can discover more about MMM here.
• Platform solutions: The best of data driven approaches – from ad servers to social platforms and 3^rd party vendors

MMM is able to quantify the impact of all your sales drivers, in a way that standard digital attribution cannot

When consumers purchase, the decision is the result of many factors, not just media.  The graphic below shows how MMM can help to take account of these factors, including seasonality, distribution, non-digital media etc.

If we don’t take account of those factors we risk over attributing to digital media.

Over attributing to media risks generating complacency in marketing and being at risk if market conditions change.

We recommend 4 best practice factors to get the most from MMM

1. Using the right inputs in your model (and testing them) is critical: this is one of the key points. They may vary dependent on your sector and brand. If you want to understand what may be right for your brand get in touch. 
2. Incorporate intermediary metrics:  by setting up the scope of your MMM correctly it can measure and prove the contribution of brand advertising and creator marketing. If it isn’t performance / direct response channels can take credit for the work done higher up the ‘purchase funnel’.
3. Adopt the MMM approach that is right for your business. Some marketers have been ‘locked out’ of using MMM due to various legacy providers’ costs historically. We’ll work with you in a bespoke way to develop an approach that is right for your business. For example, we’ve developed a faster and cheaper approach more suited for digital and ecommerce focussed brands. It makes the methodology and more importantly the business benefits more accessible to many more brands and sectors. 
4. Bring finance on the journey: to help build credibility in the results across the business get them involved as a stakeholder from the start.

How Entropy can help

Entropy offers a range of measurement, marketing and strategic consulting services. For more information, please contact us or read about our work.