Ever wonder how a specific group of individuals might perceive your brand? Especially after running a new social or influencer campaign, or receiving negative press? If so, conducting a brand measurement study might be in your future.

Due to a lack of quality data, marketing professionals are often forced to rely on flawed assumptions or vanity metrics when it comes to measuring the impact of their influencer partnerships and social content. Until now, there hasn’t been a way to connect social content and engagement to verified offline individuals, preventing marketers from accurately measuring the impact of their campaigns. Luckily that’s changed.

In this blog, discover: 
Methods most marketers still leverage for evaluating brand measurement, sentiment, and impact
The new method: Identifying exposed influencer and social audiences
How marketers can leverage Silhouette™ to easily run any brand health or impact study
The ability to gain additional insights and take further action post-campaign

Methods most marketers still leverage for evaluating brand measurement, sentiment, and impact

There are a variety of methods and services that marketers currently leverage to conduct brand measurement studies, but are either problematic or provide a fraction of the data needed for an accurate picture of their performance.  

Conversion tracking
When it comes to measuring the sales impact of influencer campaigns, there are several methods commonly used: promo codes, affiliate links, UTM parameters, and campaign landing pages. While these can be a great start, it’s important to point out that each method can be flawed and leave room for error. As an example, with sites like Honey and RetailMeNot, promo codes can be shared with the more general public, making it difficult to determine how many purchases were actually a result of the influencer campaign.

Forced exposure
Many marketers will invite a subset of their target audience to view a specific piece of content, immediately followed by a survey where they can provide their feedback around the brand’s messaging or its products and services. In tandem, a control group will be surveyed so that an analysis can be run comparing the impact on those who were served the content vs. those who were not. However, this method lacks measurement of organic exposure to content, and is not appropriate for measuring the brand impact of negative press as no marketer will want to expose or re-expose their target audience to less than favorable news.

Pre and post-campaign targeting
Another method that marketers may employ to better understand the impact of their influencer and social media efforts is targeting their ideal audience to take a survey before and after an important campaign. But keep in mind that with this approach, there is no guarantee that those surveyed post-campaign were actually exposed to the social content, skewing results.

Social listening platforms
Frequently, marketers will do their best to measure the impact of their influencer and social campaigns by tracking resulting conversations, brand mentions, and sentiment on social media. While it may be helpful to note the increasing volume of positive or negative mentions post-campaign, or to read through people’s comments on specific content, there is no guarantee that the people whose opinions are being taken into account are representative of your target audience.

Collectively, most brand lift studies require casting a wide net in hopes of reaching your intended audience, spending valuable time and budget purchasing email lists, running generalized ads or hosting your survey on a survey site. The good news is, there’s a more targeted solution to reaching your audience by identifying exposed and engaged audiences.

The new method: Identifying exposed social and influencer audiences

Engagement metrics are key indicators of whether a campaign was successful or not, but as marketers, what if we could actually identify the individuals behind those likes, comments, and shares? For the first time, we have the ability to identify individuals who were exposed to and engaged with our influencer campaigns and social content. And there’s only one social audience insights platform that makes this possible.

At StatSocial, our social audience insights platform, Silhouette™, provides marketers the ability to harness insights across millions of individuals on major social media platforms. Using this data, they can then build audiences based on the followers or engagers of specific social accounts and influencers in order to identify those that have been exposed to or have engaged with their campaign content. Once these audiences are identified, they can then be mapped to real individuals using StatSocial’s patented Identity Graph. With the identity of the exposed audiences known, marketers can take action on these profiles for targeting and more accurate measurement of their campaigns.

How marketers can leverage Silhouette to easily run any brand health or impact study

Let’s look at an example scenario of a brand that was looking to understand which type of influencer category (e.g. tech, lifestyle, food, fashion and fitness) had the greatest impact on brand awareness, perception, and desired purchase behavior for their vitamin supplement.

Using Silhouette they not only validated the influencers prior to campaign launch to ensure they would be reaching their target audience, but were able to measure the impact of each influencer partnership over time. They did so by gaining an aggregate view of the individuals exposed to each influencer in order to run targeted surveys to those exposed as well as an unexposed control group. This allowed them to accurately measure the performance of their campaign across different categories of influencer and measure overall lift for their efforts against the control group.

After the campaign concluded, the brand was able to identify that both the fitness and lifestyle influencers not only generated the greatest awareness but drove the most purchases. These findings held consistent over the 6 month period the brand continued to survey the exposed audience, informing that they double down on lifestyle and fitness influencers for future campaigns.

Ability to gain additional insights and take further action post-campaign

Like the previous example, depending on the results of your brand measurement study, good or bad, you might want to target that same audience with messaging to either change perception or increase the chance of future purchase. By identifying those who engaged with or were exposed to your campaign, marketers can model off of these audiences within Silhouette to deploy highly targeted programmatic ad campaigns. Alternatively, marketers may want to understand more about their panelists based on how they responded to certain questions. For example, for those with a positive brand sentiment vs. negative brand sentiment, how do their interests, other brand affinities, and media preferences differ from one another? This type of data can help marketers determine how to best message various audience cohorts and where they are most likely to reach them.houette can easily create, manage, analyze, and deliver your audience segments to first and third-party systems and datasets.

Ready to start conducting brand measurement studies?

Being able to fully understand how your brand is perceived is key to your overall business and marketing strategy. For the first time, marketers have the ability to go beyond traditional methods to reach those who actually came in contact with their social and influencer campaigns to measure impact. If you’re looking to start identifying exposed audiences for brand measurement studies, schedule a demo with our team.

The post has been updated since it was originally posted in June 2022.