In this week’s In-Ear Insights, Katie and Chris talk about the declining impact and availability of social media metrics when it comes to influencer marketing. As data becomes harder to get ahold of, what are our options? The answer: SEO. Using SEO and traffic metrics along with rigorous analytics tracking is the path to demonstrating impact and even ROI in influencer marketing. Listen now to hear useful tips for configuring your own influencer analytics.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.

Christopher Penn

In this week’s in In-Ear Insights, we are back from the marketingprofs b2b forum. And one of the topics that came up now granted this is is b2b to some degree, but I think will be possibly more than just that, if more on the b2c side as well is influencer marketing for a long time has been all about who’s got the biggest audience who’s got the biggest mouth, how many likes did you get? Which is fine, sort of. But when companies are asked now for attribution for impact for results for ROI, it’s awfully hard to tell what the ROI of a like is, it’s a lot easier to understand what is the ROI of the traffic that has come to your company’s website. And so one of the topics we started discussing as a community is what would it look like if we started using SEO and search and traffic data as a proxy for influence rather than the social media vanity metrics. So Katie, what are your thoughts in terms of being able to look at an influencer or a campaign or an always on campaign and saying, I need it as an executive as a marketing executive to I need to see some real impact? How do you feel about the way we’re we’re currently measuring influencers and the way that we could be.

Katie Robbert

I think it’s terrible. No, you know, what, it’s interesting, because as you’re describing it, it’s really making me think like, you know, there are so many different kinds of influencers, but we tend to immediately think social media influencer. And, you know, as we’ve talked about in our social 2020 paper, and as we’ve sort of talked about a lot in our public communities, social media is something that you cannot rely on. You can Move into next year and assume that it’s a channel that’s going to strongly work for you. It might. It might not, it will probably not. And so, you know, Chris, as you’re talking about the different metrics for an influencer, you know, think about the people that you have guest blogging or people that you have on a podcast or some other kind of content asset that you might share on social media, but doesn’t originate on social media. And I think that that’s where, you know, we’ve started looking at some of those social media, I mean, SEO, domain authority, importance metrics that are really going to help you demonstrate that ROI, because that’s a tangible thing. I had this person guest on my blog, or they did a link back to my site. And I saw traffic from that, you know, those are things that are trackable, because you’re right, you can’t really measure the ROI of others. Like it doesn’t do anything, it’s awareness. Awareness is important. But it’s the beginning of the funnel, not the end of the funnel.

Christopher Penn

You bring up a really good point that a lot of these metrics like SEO metrics like traffic and clicks are closer to the bottom of the funnel right that’s that you’re absolutely right that the closer you can get to the bottom of the funnel, but better we