In a few short months, Traackr will be 10 years old. There have been several defining moments along the way, but today rises to the top as the biggest turning point in influencer marketing technology. Anyone close to me knows I hate fluff so using these words seems almost unnatural; but the truth is that Traackr is introducing something so revolutionary, it will change the course of the influencer marketing landscape forever and for the better.
Until today, no organization has had a way to know if their influencer marketing initiatives are having an impact. There are ad-hoc campaign reports coming from many different sources, or in some industries, black-box metrics like EMV have held out as the stop-gap solution. Yet no one could confidently answer the question, how well is my brand performing among influencers today and what can I do to improve my position?
Influencer Market Benchmark: The New Standard for Measuring the Impact of Influencer Content on Brand Performance
Today, Traackr is releasing Influencer Market Benchmark, the standard for measuring the impact of influencer content on brand performance. For the first time, brands will be able to measure influencer strategies accurately, constantly and most importantly, transparently.
The reason this is a pivotal moment in influencer marketing industry is because until now, there has been no business standard for measuring the impact of influencer investments at scale. The lack of reliable measurement for influencer marketing has been a major hurdle for large organizations.
This is not uncommon for new practices. Brands always begin by experimenting with small scale projects in different pockets across their organization. These teams of change-agents see early signs of success; but as investments increase, so do the requirements for consistent measurement that ties back to business results. In the case of influencer marketing, brands have been running up against a wall for years. No one has been able to measure influencer marketing in a consistent way and it’s prevented the practice from scaling.
Over the last few years, we’ve worked with some of the largest brands in the world as they’ve grown their programs from several hundred influencers to tens of thousands. They started to realize that the data they were getting from the limited panels available to them didn’t align with what they were measuring in their large influencer relationship management (IRM) database.
It was clear they needed a scalable way to objectively and reliably measure a brand's performance in the wider influencer market.
Why Traackr is the Leader in Influencer Marketing Measurement
A decade ago, we started building a product based on a leap of faith that influencer marketing was going to be big, it was going to be relational and it would require sound data. Over the years, we’ve built the most comprehensive influencer database that not only indexes influencers, but also measures all of their publicly published content. This differentiation is what gives Traackr the unique ability to provide brands with a reliable way to measure the impact of influencer strategies and the attention their brand earns in their market.
IMB gives brands a way to assess influencer marketing from a new vantage point. You can see your performance, not just among the influencers you know, but among the entire influencer market. You can compare your brand to your competition, to the market, and over time. Most crucially, you can make decisions based on hard data.
With the introduction of IMB alongside of Traackr’s IRM, we now provide a complete solution for influencer marketing. In IMB you benchmark your brand’s performance; while IRM provides the tools you need to run ongoing influencer campaigns and programs. Together the two enable a virtuous cycle of data-driven influencer marketing: measure your performance; act on insights.
Along with IMB, we are introducing a new metric which alleviates our industry's reliance on legacy indicators like AVE or EMV, which have long been denounced by global professional organizations for their flawed methodology. Our intention is to provide the smartest way to score influencer mentions of your brand and be the best proxy for the impact of that content on your audience.
The appeal of a single metric is that it gives the industry a simple way to measure results and compare against the competition. The challenge with such an approach is that it masks the complexity of marketing and communications and prevents sound data-driven decision making. This is a problem. And today we have the solution.
Introducing the Brand Vitality Score (VIT)
The Brand Vitality Score (VIT) measures the visibility, impact and trust influencer content mentioning your brand earns. What makes VIT so exciting is that it enables transparency and provides simplicity.
Inherent in the Brand Vitality Score are three components: Visibility (reach of content), Impact (engagement generated) and Trust (quality of content on brand image). Each is measured separately and combined to generate a single score. However, each component is accessible to you. By surfacing the levers that impact the score, marketers and communicators get the insights they need to improve where it matters most to them.
Transparency also provides flexibility and control. Within IMB, you can rank your market by VIT, but also dig into the score to reveal not only the influencers, but each piece of content, impacting the score. You can use VIT to measure the success of a post or campaign, create meaningful brand rankings and improve the reliability of your ROI and investment models.
In our creation of VIT, we’ve conducted extensive R&D to ensure the score correlates to drivers of business growth. Tests run on “influencer marketing-led" indie brands in the US proved a correlation between VIT and key indicators of marketing success (engagement on owned social channels, website traffic and organic search). We will continue R&D as the influencer space continues to evolve and welcome collaboration with industry thought-leaders.
VIT is the first metric uniquely created for measuring a brand’s performance among influencers’ content. Our industry no longer needs to rely on legacy KPIs carried over from an analog world.
We believe influencers and influencer marketing are often a catalyst in the transformation of purpose-led brands, and our mission at Traackr is to support brands undergoing transformation by providing them with a solution for scaling data-driven influencer programs. Today, we are living up to our vision.
To learn more and schedule a demo, please contact us.