Brand Lift – The New Way to Measure Influencer Marketing Success

In just a few years, influencer marketing has gone from a fledgling industry to one predicted to surpass $3 billion in the U.S. alone in 2021. This sizeable investment and secure place in the marketing toolbox has practitioners’ intent on proving the impact of their efforts.

As with all things marketing, more investment necessitates better proof of performance. The ROI Holy Grail is, of course, direct sales conversions. However, for so many programs, that type of attribution simply isn’t possible. And for many others, the immediate sale isn’t even the intended goal of their influencer campaigns.

What’s left for marketers is a lot of grey area that can’t be colored in by fallback metrics such as engagement, reach, cost per thousand or earned media value. To ascertain what’s moving the needle and justify their investment, marketers are now turning to more thorough and goal-aligned metrics — ones produced by brand lift studies.

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What Is Brand Lift?

Brand lift studies measure the impact of a campaign on the brand — more specifically, how consumers think, feel and intend to engage with a brand because of a certain marketing effort. The output from these studies is lift metrics that show impact against specific goals. For example, we recently conducted a brand lift study of an influencer-led campaign for Kraft. The results showed a 40-point lift in brand favorability among non-users and a 15-point lift in purchase intent with that same audience.

These studies have long been a staple of large digital advertising programs and are a commonplace value-add for large advertisers, courtesy of the social platforms. But, with influencer marketing programs now cutting across a variety of specific goals and an overreliance on vanity metrics, custom brand lift studies have become an increasingly important measurement tool for influencer practitioners looking for greater insight. Since brand lift studies are somewhat new to the organic side of influencer marketing, here are three things to keep in mind when commissioning one of these studies.

1. Audience(s) Are Everything

Any brand lift research worth its salt is conducted by administering the exact same online survey to two audiences — a control and an exposed group. The lift metrics are reached by analyzing the differences in the survey answers between these groups. As the name suggests, the exposed group comprises individuals who have been exposed to the campaign either naturally or in a simulated environment. The control group is a lookalike group in that they are similar to the exposed group in terms of demographics, psychographics and more. A best practice is to include a minimum of 200 survey completes, including 100 from the exposed group and 100 from the control group.

There are two main things to remember as it relates to the audience. First, do not fall into the trap of just surveying the exposed group. Too many marketers will run a study with just the exposed group that seemingly produces great results, such as 75% of people who saw the influencer’s post were favorable to their brand. While that’s all well and good, what if 75% of people who never saw the post were also favorable to the brand? Even though that 75% is a big number in a vacuum, in that instance, the campaign produced no lift at all. So, when it comes to brand lift, you always need an audience or control group to measure against.

Secondly, whenever possible, individuals in the exposed group should be followers of the influencer. Ensuring this means the connection point between influencer and respondent is present. Therefore, the research takes into account the all-important relationship aspect of influencer marketing, not just the impact of the creative itself. While it isn’t possible to get insights from followers in every instance, the opportunity does exist on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, and marketers should embrace it.

2. Ask What You Want To Know

Especially in the world of boosted or amplified programs, brand lift studies provided by social channels like Instagram and YouTube are pre-packaged with a few questions that are always asked, and they’re typically taking the space of questions that should be asked. The beauty of brand lift surveys is that they can align with your specific goals and don’t have to conform to the “big three”— awareness, favorability, and purchase intent. We work with many brands that are universally recognizable. In those instances, a general brand awareness question is often a throwaway. What possible lift can be expected from the initiative if the brand is ubiquitous?

Focus on what matters to you. For example, many of the financial services companies we support care about trust above all else. Other brands are aimed at Gen Z often want to be seen as a “modern brand,” so that’s where we’re looking for lift. Not surprisingly, consumer perceptions around taste and quality are typically most important to the food and beverage brands we conduct studies for.

The influencer programs they are running are designed to shift perceptions, position their brand in a certain way or evoke a specific emotion, so our survey questions are designed to tease that out. Never default to standard questions. Ask the things you want to know, the things that align with your goals.

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3. You Can Have Your Proof With a Nice Side of Strategy

Often brand lift research is done, so there is a nice, tidy scoresheet at the end of the program that wraps everything up and gives marketers a clear sense of the impact. However, in influencer marketing, the brand lift can be used to set strategy and optimize efforts too. With new channels popping up and countless influencers to choose from, this strategic guidance is especially helpful to marketers in this space.

The influencer leaders we work with are always trying to figure out how to optimize their investment. Should they run everything on Instagram or give TikTok some love? Should they use that celebrity influencer to get the word out or a large squad of small-but-mighty brand loyalists? There are data-driven answers to these questions, and getting them can be as simple as demanding more from your brand lift study.

Measuring the overall impact of a program is table stakes. It’s possible to look at results by channel (say IG vs. TikTok) or performance by influencer or content piece. These breakouts and the granularity they offer can reveal exactly what combination of pieces, people and platforms are working. To that end, we’ve seen these studies do much more than just prove success. They’ve helped brands trim underperforming influencer partners, right-size their efforts and focus exclusively on the channels that make sense for them.