Influencer marketing has a mixed reputation inside consumer brands. Marketing teams can treat it as a relationship-driven function while finance sees it as a money pit. But influencer marketing can be measured and managed with the same investment discipline as any other marketing channel.

To illustrate this, let’s talk about a hypothetical $150 million consumer brand. The influencer team has a $5 million annual budget and generated $40 million in earned media value (EMV) last year.

$40M in EMV on $5M in spend sounds pretty good, but how much should the brand invest next year?

If the team can’t tell you how much EMV came from paid partnerships, seeding, events and organic creator activity, then the $40M EMV is a useful headline number, but it doesn’t tell you where to allocate your marketing budget.

The first thing I’d want to understand is how the program is measuring performance and the effectiveness of each investment.

Understand what you’re actually spending

Let’s say the $5 million breaks down into $2 million for paid partnerships, $1.5 million for gifting, $1 million for events and $500k for agencies and software.

I’d want to go a layer deeper and understand who each paid partner was, what posts were paid and how each post performed.

Next, I’d ask for the fully loaded cost of the gifting program, including freight, shipping, packaging, COGS and any other expenses.

For events, I’d want to understand the cost of the venue, food and production, and also how much of the team’s time went into planning.

The immediate goal isn’t to eliminate expensive activities. It’s to understand what you’re actually paying for and how much EMV each investment generates.

Understand where the EMV is coming from

Once you understand the costs, you need to know which activities are generating results.

This requires some operational discipline. Every creator should exist in a central influencer platform. You should know who’s receiving mailers, who’s being paid, which specific posts were sponsored, which creators attended events and what content should be attributed to each of those activities.

Ideally, you’re also tracking interactions outside formal campaigns like one-off product sends or surprise and delight gifting.

Some of this might be manual and time-consuming at first. But it’s better to start measuring something and improve the process over time than keep putting it off.

Without that data, you’re left with an overall EMV number and very little understanding of what’s driving it.

ROI doesn’t necessarily end when the campaign does

Each EMV generating marketing function shouldn’t be measured in isolation. For instance, if you spend $2M on paid partnerships and the paid posts generated $3M in EMV that may seem like a lousy return at $3M / $2M = 1.5x. But do you know organic activity for your paid partners? Do they tend to post more frequently after their paid campaign? Do they tend to post more mailers than non paid partners?

The opposite can also be true. You might be investing in creators who would have posted organically regardless.

You need to look at the relationship between all activities before deciding where you’ll make cuts and increases.

This data will also inform day to day operations. For example, if you learn that posting rates tend to decline when creators receive more than six mailers in six months, you can start setting rules around mailing frequency rather than sending everyone every new product.

Maybe creators who attend events tend to post more frequently over the following year. That might justify allocating some event invitations to valuable creators who haven’t posted as often recently.

Neither observation automatically proves causation. But both give you something specific to investigate and test.

Data doesn’t replace judgment

Once you start measuring EMV by source, you still need to account for the qualitative side of influencer marketing.

Let’s say you’re launching a contour stick. It’s a product that requires some education because not everyone knows how to apply contour correctly.

You might have a creator who generates modest EMV but is exceptionally good at contour tutorials. Her audience trusts her recommendations and she knows how to explain the product.

That creator could be a better investment than someone generating five times as much EMV from content that isn’t as relevant to your product launch.

Use the data to inform your decisions, but leave room for your own judgment about your products, audience and customers.

Build a program that gets smarter every month

You don’t need a perfect attribution model to start making better decisions.

Once you consistently measure costs, campaign participation, posting behavior and creator retention, you can start establishing your own benchmarks.

You’ll have a clearer understanding of what a successful paid partnership looks like, what percent of mailer recipients post and which activities lead to sustained organic posting.

It’ll also become easier to see what isn’t working.

Maybe you’re sending PR packages to creators who haven’t posted about your brand in months. Maybe events have little impact on creator retention.

Maybe a paid partnership that looks inefficient on paper is actually generating an unusually valuable long-term relationship.

The point is to start measuring these things now so you have the information necessary to make those decisions.

If something didn’t work in February, you shouldn’t automatically keep doing it in March.

Influencer marketing will never be perfectly attributable to retail sales. EMV is useful for measuring earned media activity, but it isn’t the same as incremental revenue or profit.

That doesn’t mean influencer investment decisions need to be based on vibes alone.

The sooner you understand where your EMV comes from and what it costs to generate, the sooner you can make smarter decisions about where to invest your next dollar.