Though there is no industry standard for measuring blogger outreach, there are still many metrics at our fingertips that tell us whether or not our campaign was a flop or a success. And it all starts with defining a measurable goal.
First and foremost your blogger outreach goal is to form relationships with influencers in the form of bloggers. Hopefully these relationships are ongoing and the brand mentions more than a onetime thing. (Read actual campaign examples here)
Past that, what do you hope to achieve with these mentions? What is your goal, your call to action for this entire campaign?
Once a goal is established, figuring out which metrics define success and then achievement of that goal becomes actually tangible.
Check out the following goals and different ways you can optimize them for more accurate campaign measurement:
Gain New Customers/Product Purchases
Tactic: Contact bloggers for product reviews. These tend to be sincere and authentic posts that convey a full brand or product experience with recommendations that speak to potential customers.
Measurement: When this is the goal, decide what is considered a conversion. Whether it's a purchase from an e-commerce store after reading the post or filling out a form to register for a software demo. Set this up on Google Analytics and see what posts are converting at a target percent that you set up before the campaign runs.
For bigger purchase decisions take in to consideration traffic back to your site and how long they stay on your site. For these decisions, a customer won't often convert immediately so these metrics are good to take in to consideration as well.
If you're trying to gain new customers offline, give the blogger a printable coupon that you can track.
Lead Generation
Tactic: Blogger outreach is proving to be a successful tactic for B2B companies to generate new leads. Find bloggers that your target consumer would follow to stay up to date with their industry and work with the bloggers to use your product to solve a common pain point.
Measurement: Instead of asking the blogger to link to your homepage, give them a landing page where interested customers can sign up for more information, a trial, etc. This way you can track the actual conversions (people who take action at the landing page) as well as traffic to your landing page.
Brand Awareness
Tactic: Tactics like guest posting to sponsored posts to product reviews all contribute to brand awareness. Just make sure you reach out to bloggers in your niche and don't exclude the smaller bloggers because they too have a very engaged audience of your target consumers.
Measurement: Track the number of social media shares the post gets and traffic to your site. These are all soft metrics but brand awareness isn't a super targeted goal.
Increase Thought Leadership
Tactic: Reaching out to bloggers to guest post on their blog is the most popular tactic to increase thought leadership for your brand. Offer advice, show why you are an authority on your industry's topic and make sure you provide social follow information in your bio for your brand.
Measurement: Measure sentiment-were the comments on the post positive or negative?
Also track social media shares. People don't want to share a piece of content that is poorly written or doesn't have something to say as it would reflect poorly on them.
Lastly track how many new followers you got on your social media channels after posting.
Move Potential Customers Through the Funnel
Tactic: Provide the bloggers with downloadable resources that help customers get to the next level in the stage funnel such as an ebook, white paper or case study.
Measurement: Simply track the number of downloads. The lead generation form makes it easy to track these efforts and keep the potential consumers information using future email drips.
What do you measure to determine the success of your own blogger outreach campaigns?