As Director of Strategy at Linqia and co-host of the Creator Economic Live podcast, Keith Bendes is a leading voice in influencer marketing.
Each year, Linqia surveys corporate marketers on the state of influencer marketing. And every year, one conclusion remains the same: proving ROI remains the number one challenge before finding the right creators, scaling programs, and managing content rights combined.
This is not a budget issue. This is a measurement problem.
Most brands still measure influencer marketing the same way they did five years ago, through impressions, likes, and perhaps clicks. But the channel has matured significantly. Brands spend seven, eight, and even nine figures annually on creator partnerships. CMOs are aligning influencer spend alongside traditional media, but measurement systems are lagging behind.
This is what the modern approach actually looks like. It is built on five pillars that give you a complete picture of what influencer marketing actually does for your brand.
1. Social conversation
Yes, experiences and activities still matter, but not in isolation. A metric that is consistently underutilized is share of voice, which is how your brand shows up in social conversations compared to competitors before, during, and after your creators activate.
An author’s post may generate high engagement numbers in a vacuum, but if your competitors dominate the cultural moment you’re trying to capture, those numbers don’t tell you much. Tracking share of voice gives you competitive context that raw engagement data simply cannot provide.
2. Media effectiveness
This is where many brands leave money on the table. Creator content doesn’t have to live and die on organic social media. When you promote influencer posts as paid social ads (what the industry calls “whitelisting” or “whitelisting”), you can measure performance in the same way as any paid advertising (cost per thousand impressions, CTR, and cost per acquisition versus your benchmarks).
We consistently find that creator content outperforms brand-created paid media creative, often by a significant margin. This performance data is one of the most compelling arguments you can make to a CFO questioning your influencer investments, especially since most brands spend 50-100 times more on paid media than on influencer marketing as a channel.
3. Content effectiveness
This tends to be completely ignored. Creator-generated content isn’t just a distribution game, it’s a content production model. When you compare the cost of influencer content per asset to what you’d spend on a traditional production shoot, the math tends to be amazing.
Brands working with creator ecosystems at scale are effectively creating a cost-effective, always-fresh library of content that extends far beyond social media. Think paid advertising, email, retail, connected TV. Measuring and reporting the value of the content created, not just the value of the campaign, changes the way stakeholders view investments.
It’s worth noting that your content budget may not decrease year over year, despite its effectiveness. But that’s because you need many times more content than ever before, so creators are the only way to create that content effectively.
I love the interview the Virgin Voyages CMO did with AdAge where he talked about how the lifespan of branded content has dramatically shortened for their brand, so much so that a year ago Virgin could run the same ads for a month, but now they have a four-day wear-out cycle. Additionally, their content pipeline would need to be six times larger than before to deliver the same level of results.
4. Increasing the main KPI
This is where the measurements get serious. Whatever the goal of your campaign (brand awareness, purchase intent, traffic, online conversion), there should be a mechanism to measure whether the influencer influenced movement on that metric.
Brand performance studies, third-party sales measurements, geographic lift tests, and pixel-based attribution each have their place depending on your category and goals. The main thing is to develop a methodology to the campaign begins without attempting to prove its effectiveness after the fact. If you can’t measure it, you’ve already lost the argument.
I would also include MMM reporting in this basket. Most large corporate brands use some sort of mix modeling, and ensuring that “influencer” is a separate line item in this reporting structure is critical. I always view “influencer” as the number one or number two channel for ROI, even though it is the lowest cost channel. There is no better proof that you should invest more money in author partnerships than the compelling reading of MMM.
5. Training and ideas
The fifth pillar is one that gets worse over time and is chronically underappreciated by management. Every influencer campaign generates a wealth of information: which creative formats resonated the most, which audience segments were over-indexed, which product messages resonated.
These ideas should feed into your broader creative strategy, media planning and product development. Brands that view influencers as an ongoing learning mechanism consistently outperform those that run one-off campaigns. Measuring learning isn’t just about what worked, it’s about what it will make you do differently next quarter.
Social search and AEO could fall into this category, but to be honest, we may have to create a sixth pillar given the rise in popularity of AI search. Understanding the top queries and creators that social platforms and LLMs link to when consumers intentionally search provides a treasure trove of valuable data, and creating content with these creators to answer these top consumer questions is one of the most valuable ways to intensify partnerships with creators right now.
Bottom line
Influencer marketing has earned its place at the table, but with that seat comes an expectation of responsibility. The brands that will continue to increase their investment in creators are those that can begin to review budgets and articulate impact across multiple fronts, rather than just showing the highlights of creator posts.
The five pillars above are not a perfect measurement solution (nor is there a single system), but they are a starting point for having a more honest and complete conversation about what influencer marketing delivers and building an internal case for investing in it correctly.
The Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for leaders of successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Am I eligible?