Data enables marketers to confidently invest in influencer marketing, predict campaign performance and prove ROI
BOULDER, Colo. – TapInfluence, the only influencer marketing SaaS platform uniquely combined with a high-performing marketplace and a services offering, announced that it has surpassed $1M in monthly payouts to influencers in its marketplace for their work helping Fortune 1000 brands get heard by consumers across the web. The volume of influencer marketing campaigns being run via the SaaS platform each month enables unprecedented insight into Cost Per Engagement (CPE) and variability across individual influencers, verticals and digital channels. For more information on success metrics for influencer marketing download The Three Minute Guide to Influencer Marketing here.
.@TapInfluence Monthly Influencer Payouts > $1M, Benchmarks Cost Per Engagement for industry #InfluencerMarketing
Top Five Verticals Investing in Influencer Marketing Automation
Within TapInfluence’s platform, the top verticals investing in influencer marketing campaigns and the correlating channels, listed by popularity within contract agreements, are:
- CPG: Blog, Pinterest, Facebook
- Food: Blog, Instagram, Pinterest
- Fashion: Instagram, YouTube, Blog
- Technology: Blog, YouTube, Twitter
- Travel: Instagram, Blog, Facebook
Average Influencer Marketing Investments and Volume of Influencers Per Campaign
Investments in influencer marketing campaigns vary greatly, ranging from as little as $90 to as much as $56,000 with an average campaign cost of $5,500. Campaigns, on average, involve 21 influencers, with the smallest campaign working with a single influencer and the largest campaign including 748 individual influencers.
TapInfluence’s data proves just how unique each brand’s influencer marketing program can be with the right software, marketplace and services support. Important variables for every campaign include number of assignments as well as the length of a given campaign.
Within TapInfluence, brands are able to search the marketplace for influencers by CPE and sort from low to high with ease. Influencers are also exposed to their own CPE within the platform so that they get a clear picture of whether they’re undervaluing their work, asking a premium or have their rate set just right in order to maximize the number of brand opportunities they receive. This transparency breeds a self-policing environment within the influencer community that drives greater satisfaction for both parties.
Defining Influencer Engagement
TapInfluence is a channel-agnostic influencer marketing SaaS platform, enabling its analytics to track any engagement taken on influencer content as it’s distributed across the web. In TapInfluence’s benchmarking data, no passive action, such as a video view, is counted as an engagement. Engagements are classified purely as active responses to content such as a like, comment, share, download, or click.
“The days of buying celebrity endorsements across social channels are quickly coming to an end. Reach and views are merely indicators of awareness, their true business impact is insignificant. Influencer marketing has evolved and the rise of micro-influencers means that brands can now truly understand the value of their influencer marketing activities down to the CPE level,” said Promise Phelon, CEO, TapInfluence. “By benchmarking CPE for the industry, we’re helping marketers become more sophisticated as they continue to move budget from traditional advertising to influencer marketing. These are marketers who demand to know what they’ll get before they invest tens of thousands of dollars in any campaign, and TapInfluence is uniquely capable of providing that level of reliability, transparency and value.”
Managing Dynamic Cost Per Engagement Data
TapInfluence’s big data platform is able to calculate dynamically changing CPEs, which vary based on influencers’ rates that the platform suggests, but that they control. As mentioned, within the platform, CPE is visible on every influencer profile and is a searchable criteria in the influencer discovery and selection process (i.e. if a brand only wants to consider influencers with a CPE lower than X). Relative to the median CPE, displayed in black, a high CPE is denoted in red and a lower CPE is shown in green. This visual cue helps brands understand where influencers stack up relative to the rest of the marketplace.
TapInfluence’s CPE calculations are based across all verticals; however, in completing thousands of influencer marketing programs for hundreds of Fortune 1000 brands, it’s clear that premium verticals in which there are fewer powerful influencers can expect to pay a higher CPE.
“For years, marketers have been using reach as a primary indicator of campaign performance. This is counterintuitive when the ultimate goal is to have consumers actually take action, not to mention the pursuit of reach has actually caused some bad behaviors,” said Francesca Cruz, VP, Account Management and Revenue Operations, TapInfluence. “The cost per engagement metric in our platform allows marketers to identify the influencers who will truly engage their audiences to get involved in the conversation and progress them through the buyer journey.”
Engagement Directly Correlates to Sales and Vertical Distribution of CPE
As brands become more sophisticated with influencer marketing, they are ceasing to buy celebrity content as the brand awareness, engagement and ROI per dollar spent is low, meaning the increase in sales isn’t significant enough to warrant further investment.
With TapInfluence, engagement directly correlates to sales. To that end, different verticals have higher CPE ranges. The verticals with highest CPEs include: Pets, Automotive, and Sports and Entertainment. Verticals with the lowest CPEs include: Fashion, Food and Recipe, and Crafts. These make sense as CPEs are variable based on: influencer rates, saturation of influencers in a given category, and engagement trends by vertical (i.e. is something particularly engagement-friendly like a Pin of a recipe or a Like of an outfit). Understanding CPE by vertical is an essential skill marketers today must master to be successful with influencer marketing.
“Brands constantly ask us what they should pay influencers, but the truth is the metric that matters is not outright cost, it’s cost per engagement. This is another example of practitioners’ sophistication lagging behind the solutions available to them. It propagates unwarranted confusion and reticence,” continued Phelon. “As we analyze hundreds of campaigns and millions of engagements each month, our own algorithms are constantly improving. By presenting influencers based on color-coded CPE we’re encouraging a true, self-policing market whereby influencers can change their own rate, which impacts their CPE and makes them more attractive to different brands.”
About TapInfluence
TapInfluence’s complete SaaS platform, coupled with an engaged influencer marketplace and strategic services, is the leading solution facilitating real conversations between consumers and brands. The company enables Fortune 1000 brands to tap into the power of digital influencers and their authentic, trusted voices. With its influencer marketing automation platform, TapInfluence customers increase market share and amplify revenue growth through scalable reach and optimized engagement to achieve unprecedented ROI. In a recent independent study, TapInfluence proved that influencer marketing drives 11x the return on investment annually versus any other form of digital media.
TapInfluence’s Fortune 1000 customers include Kraft, Horizon Organic, Silk, and P&G, as well as top agencies such as Golin, RhythmOne and AMP. TapInfluence is privately held, with headquarters in Boulder, Colo. and Mountain View, Calif. The company is backed by leading venture capital firms Noro-Moseley Partners, Grotech Ventures, Access Venture Partners and Knollwood Investment Advisory. For more information, visit www.tapinfluence.com.
