Let’s start this off with a thought experiment.
You work in the marketing department of a large company, and have been tasked with taking it into the 21st century using influencer marketing. Your boss has been reading about this new form of digital marketing, and she’s gotten pretty excited by all the articles she’s come across that declare “Influencer Marketing delivers 11x ROI over all other forms of digital media.”
Before you go full-fledged into this new marketing frontier, you start researching different influencer platforms to find out which will be the best choice to manage everything. Reading software reviews at the internet’s best resource for such things, you narrow your choice down to two of the leading solutions for companies like yours: NeoReach and TapInfluence. The former’s website presents their best case study, showing a 5x Influencer Marketing ROI for a campaign launched by FanDuel using the NeoReach platform. The latter’s website boasts about achieving 11x ROI using their platform.
So who gets your business?
They both look like great solutions on paper, but TapInfluence clearly outperforms NeoReach in practice, right? Plus, their statistic looks a lot like the one your boss has been telling you about. You do a quick Google search and find several articles supporting what your boss has told you.
Bill Carmody over at Inc.com said it. It’s actually the headline of his article. Louis Foong at business2community.com wrote a piece called “Influencer Marketing Drives 11x More ROI.” Jay Baer at convinceandconvert.com called the 11x figure “the shocking ROI of influencer marketing.” Nielsen Catalina Solutions delivered a webinar, archived over at brighttalk.com, that promises to help you “Improve Marketing ROI by 11x with Influencer Marketing Automation.”
Suddenly, the choice looks like a no-brainer. Influencer marketing is on record as delivering an 11x return on your money, and Tapinfluence is the platform that can actually reach those heights. Unfortunately, this decision actually turns out to be much more complicated.
In-Depth Analysis of Influencer Marketing ROI:
Beware of “No-Brainers”
While the idea of making a choice that doesn’t require any critical discernment is appealing, it’s just not the best way to make decisions. Stepping in front of a speeding truck is also a no-brainer, so maybe you’ll want to put more thought into how you spend your seven figure marketing budget. And if you do that, you’ll see the claims of IM’s “shocking ROI” start to fall apart. They just don’t hold up when you dig a little deeper.
As it turns out, no: influencer marketing, as a practice, does NOT deliver 11x ROI. TapInfluence does. Or, at least, they did for that one case study they published.