A global haircare brand engaged Xtage Labs to measure the RoI on influencer spends

The haircare brand was running aggressive always on campaigns across social platforms like Facebook, Insta, Tiktok. They had engaged global as well as local influencers to boost awareness, engagement and consequently the sales of different products and the variants. They wanted to look at metrics beyond likes, comments and shares and measure the impact of these campaigns against other investments on digital marketing on make a more effective campaign plan.

Right insights. Better campaign outcomes

Through our impact analysis study by measuring the correlation of influencers’ reach, engagement and post attributes, we generated following insights:

• Global influencers generate ~ 2.4x more (brand) awareness than local influencers
• Global influencers generate ~1.7x brand engagement, but with about 63% lower purchase intent
• The RoI on local influencers is 1.8 times that of global influencers

The insights from our study surprised the campaign team. They have reaped the rewards through better marketing performance using those insights

Proactive use of MMM to plan future spends

Our client was allocating campaign spend on influencers based on general gut, and mis-aligned KPIs of likes, shares and comments. They were spending more on more expensive global influencers, who were generating more likes and equivalent metrics. The implicit driver being more fans because of global reach. The local ones, having lower fan base were being less favoured.

What they needed was better KPIs to measure if the More expensive global influencers were driving the KPIs that mattered i.e. brand awareness, brand engagement and consequently higher sales in the long term. With the custom analysis, Xtage Labs team was able to overlay the impact each influencer type (global vs. local) and each influencer was having on the branding attributes and the return on investment (RoI) being generated

Influencers’ impact is more than just likes, shares and comments

If you were to ask a person whether celebrity endorsement nudged them to buy a product – the popular answer would be a resounding ‘No’.

And that is what we discovered in the study we executed for our client. While being able to generate lower numbers on the vanity metrics – likes, shares and comments – they were more effective in driving brand awareness, brand engagement and ultimately sales.

The icing on the cake is – global influencers are more expensive to onboard. In the case of our client, they could onboard more than 20 local influencers on the onboarding one global influencer.

The client has used the insights well, realigning their influencer budget and focus, thereby generating better RoI and lower investment on influencers and more on other digital marketing avenues.