Boost Your Business: 3 Ways to Track Influencer Marketing

NEW YORK, May 15, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Given that social media has enabled peer recommendations to play a much larger role in purchasing decisions, incorporating influencer engagement as part of your small business growth strategy is an excellent way to increase brand awareness and drive discoverability.  As with all aspects of marketing, tracking your influencer outreach program is vital to every campaign's success in order to determine what is working and what needs to be revisited.

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In his debut article for PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit, Justin Kline, COO of Markerly believes that it's crucial for small businesses to track the return on investment for influencer initiatives. When it comes to gauging the impact of an influencer, start simple by focusing on these three methods:

1. Tracking links. Track traffic through a redirect service such as Bit.ly that offers a shorter link and tracks user data. This option comes in handy when you don't have code installed on the landing page that the link is pointing to. You may also append the URL with tracking parameters that easily saves the data to your database. This option is faster, but does require some initial code installation.
2. Promo codes. If you are tracking offline actions such as purchases and store visits, providing your influencers with unique promo codes is an easy way to accommodate this. Ask your influencers to share that unique code with their followers and then track how many redemptions each influencer generated.
3. Social data. Tracking social data can be daunting, but it's critical to understand your influencer's social impact. Kline suggests the following as important things to monitor: social engagement; total reach of the influencer; and traffic flow to your site from the influencer postings.

For further discussion on influencer marketing best practices, read Kline's article here: http://bit.ly/1AZdjRq.  

PR Newswire's Small Business PR Toolkit is a comprehensive resource that provides small businesses and entrepreneurs the tools to develop an affordable public relations and marketing plan that helps generate interest from potential customers, engage with key audiences and grow their businesses. The toolkit features relevant content such as informative white papers, interactive webinars and how-to articles and premium access to educational resources, as well as the opportunity to take advantage of special offers designed specifically for small businesses. To request information on how PR Newswire can help your small business, click here. You can receive updates on new Small Business PR Toolkit content by following @prnsmallbiz on Twitter.

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