Online marketing is a ever-evolving space with different channels, methods and tools becoming available at a rapid pace, so how do we determine if a certain method works, or works for us?

So does social media influencer advertising work in Bahrain?

There is no doubt, that social media influencers have a instant effect on your brand awareness, as they have a large number of followers which they have worked hard to achieve, and so when they post about your brand, you can get a large reach.

However as with every tool, there isn’t a one size fits all.

A few points to consider when hiring a influencer

1. What are the demographics of the influencers followers.  Do they represent your target market or potential customers?  For example, if you had a corporate product, you wouldn’t want to market this to teenagers.
2. What are the geographic locations of their followers?  Are they mainly based in the country you are targeting?
3. What is your objective?  Is it awareness, or are you looking for a specific ROI?  For example, are you looking for app downloads, sales or simply to make people aware of your product?  Depending on your target you will evaluate the influencers differently.
4. Depending on the channel you use, will your content be available forever, or just for a day.  For example a snapchat post, instagram story vs a timeline post, youtube post.
5. Are their followers bought or real? Normally you give the benefit of the doubt to this, but you can measure a average based on engagement on their account – Likes, Comments, Views etc
6. Request access to their follower demographics, which is normally available in their analytics, to measure the audience – Male vs Female, Age Range, Country Location, City Location, Views etc.  Especially since story views are not public, it is always good to ask for the snap and story views.
7. You should make an actionable post, swipe or click to a link or phone number, where customers can take action, book or buy in order to get your return on investment.

How to measure the ROI and if it is cost effective?

Okay so how can we determine if we should be hiring an influencer for our campaign?

1. A basic way would be to Total Cost of Influencer Divided by Total Actions (Downloads / Sales/ Bookings, Followers).    For example if the influencer cost you 1000 BHD and you got 1000 new downloads, cost per downloads would be 1000 / 1000, which is 1 BHD per download.  Now here you would ask yourself, if this is a good price, or it would be cheaper to do a facebook, instagram, snapchat, google ad directly.
2. Another way to measure this would be Total Cost of Influencer Divided by Total Views . This would give you the cost per view.  For example 1000 BHD / 100,000 Views = 10 Fils per View . You can then compare this to a direct ad with platforms for their cost of view.

One thing worth mentioning, is that a influencer would give you extra value since their followers trust them more for purchasing, which is a intangible value, yet you could measure this with method 1 above.

So in conclusion it does work, but you should select your influencer, and measure the result numerically, in order to decide if your campaign worked.

And another question is, how viable it would be to use the same influencer multiple times vs hiring different ones, since each influencer has its following, and you would end up advertising to the same group, it might make sense to re-hire if you are launching a new product / service each time.