As influencer marketing continues to mature and become more widespread, knowing and understanding the granular details before, during, and after a campaign is incredibly important. After all, a badly managed influencer campaign can have long-lasting detrimental effects on everyone involved.

When selecting which influencers to work with, marketers should ask themselves: do they have genuine authority within their niche, does their content style align with our brand, and how relevant is their audience? You can’t answer any of those questions without data.

Relying on follower count and engagement stats to establish someone’s influence will more often than not lead to diluted results. That’s why so many brands have tried, failed and given up. Genuine ‘Influence’ is only established with genuine authority within a subject or community, and you can’t establish that by simply looking at followers and engagement numbers (AKA the vanity metrics).

When selecting influencers to work with, our process at Fourth Floor is to get a much deeper understanding of a content creator’s position, voice, and the shape of the ecosystem around them. To do this, we dig into a lot of different data. We look at their audience demographic (age, location, gender, language), the relevance and suitability of their content style, and their other interests and wider areas of authority and expertise. We also look at which brands they’ve worked with before, and the sentiment toward the most popular hashtags and most mentioned brands within their community. This information is useful both in the planning stage of a campaign or programme, and in its execution, and makes smart influencer selection even easier by way of having provable facts and figures early on.

Data for campaign success

But using data to select the right influencers is just the first step. Good data will also allow you to determine the platforms that will be most relevant to your brand, the right time to post, the exact types of content to create, how long a video should be, and the best times to deliver your key messages over the course of a campaign calendar. In short, data is the language that lets you translate a good instinctive idea into a precision-optimised success. With the right understanding of the data at your fingertips, campaign efforts are consistently robust, convincing, and evidence-based.

At Fourth Floor, we use data to research and discover new angles of audience connection, finding new in-roads to relevant demographics that allow us to uncover new, valuable audiences for our clients. Data is also a great way to keep ourselves on top of the evolving shape of the creator landscape. Channel growth and emergence, changes in content and strategy, and shifting audiences are all vital knowledge to keeping our insight sharp and relevant.

Just getting things right once isn’t enough. The landscape is always changing, and it does so fast. Influencer marketing is a constantly evolving medium. New platforms like TikTok can appear out of nowhere and rapidly become highly relevant. The Advertising Standards Agency is always leading the way in terms of new governance and regulation, and new formats and content trends are bursting out all the time, as brands assign increasing percentages of their marketing budgets to working with influencers as the value of the model becomes ever more clear. Without the ability and resources to blend insightful, carefully curated data with creative instincts, it’s easy to lose track and slip behind the curve.

We work with brands to create high-impact influencer marketing campaigns using hard data. We help you to get under the skin of your audiences, understand where they are, and collaborate with respected influencers to get your message to them. If you’d like to chat about working together, get in touch.