Influencer marketing spurs 11 times the ROI over traditional tactics: Study

Dive Brief:

TapInfluence and Nielsen Catalina Solutions studied influencer marketing’s impact on WhiteWave Foods' Silk brand beverages last September and found the tactic lifted incremental sales by 10%.
To date the campaign has generated 1.1 million impressions on influencer blog posts, and because the content is evergreen, the cost-per-engagement for the campaign continues to decrease. TapInfluence algorithms show the effort’s CPM is expected to be reduced by half every three months.
The most compelling finding from the joint research was that influencer marketing has the ability to trigger 11 times more ROI than other forms of traditional advertising annually.

Dive Insight:

“Rather than inventing a new measurement approach, we opted to partner with the Nielsen Catalina Solutions,” Rustin Banks, co-founder of TapInfluence, told Marketing Dive. “Now we have the ‘missing link’ in influencer marketing that we always knew was there - that it can be shown to drive sales at a massively efficient rate compared to other forms of digital marketing.”

To choose influencers for the campaign, TapInfluence used detailed performance data on each influencer including cost-per-engagement based on prior campaigns.

Banks added, “A major outcome of this study was that WhiteWave was able to understand the actual in-store sales that were driven by its influencer campaign, and that’s a degree of measurement that hasn’t been seen to date.”

This study puts a dollar figure on the value of an influencer marketing campaign, a measurement metric that makes the tactic an easier sell in term of marketing budget allocation. Banks said TapInfluence spent five years working on scale and automating a large majority of the influencer marketing process explaining, “Our rationale was that you need scale in order to get accurate measurement, and measurement is the key to unlocking large-scale budgets.”

Influencer marketing has emerged in the last few years as a strong tactic, though one that comes with measurement issues. That being said, it is gaining in popularity. According to recent eMarketer research, two-thirds (67%) marketers reported using influencers for content promotion and more than half (59%) reported using influencer marketing tactics for product launches and content creation.

Companies that can provide solutions to the metrics problem, connecting the dots from campaign to ROI, will likely see the rewards.