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• EMV: What is Earned Media Value & Does it Matter?

  15 Aug 2022 · 3 min read

  EMV can allow marketers to assign a numerical value to their efforts, helping them to more fully understand the ROI of their campaigns.

  Trevor Souki

  EMV: What is Earned Media Value & Does it Matter?

  

  Earned Media Value (EMV) is a formula used by marketers to measure the success of their PR and earned media efforts. While it’s helpful for marketers to understand the monetary value of digital word of mouth, EMV is a nuanced calculation and marketers should be wary of technology partners who lack transparency on how they calculate EMV. You want to make sure you’re basing your investment decisions on insights that drive true value. That’s why it’s imperative you know exactly what inputs are being used to calculate EMV in order to best determine whether or not EMV is a formula you’d like to use in your business. ### **Here’s how we define and calculate EMV at Tagger:** **Earned media** is any content that mentions your brand that was not paid for or promoted through advertising and did not come from your own media channel. In simple terms, your digital word of mouth was earned, not bought. **Earned Media Value**, or **EMV**, is a means to assign a dollar value to the various engagement actions – like comments, ‘likes’, shares, and mentions – associated with different social media content types. These actions are then projected to be worth a numerical dollar value to your business. The dollar values assigned to each action can be increased or decreased depending on how conservative or liberal marketers want to be with EMV calculations. They also vary based on the benchmarks of the social platform on which the content is posted. So, for example, if a creator receives 1,000 likes on an Instagram Photo, using a customized EMV benchmark of $.10 per like, that post would provide an estimated value of $100. In essence, **you are assigning a monetary value to a specific action, then multiplying by how many times that action was taken in your campaigns**. ### **Be transparent & intentional about how you’re calculating EMV** Now that you understand exactly what is going into EMV, let’s talk about **the importance of customization**. Just as your business objectives are tailored to your unique situation, EMV should be too. With Tagger, you have the ability to leverage your own benchmarks relative to media buying, create custom audience size tiers, or further segment benchmarks by content or platform type. **Controlling what goes into this metric based on your needs is a game changer!** You’ll always know that your data is reliable, and custom to your interests. If EMV is a valued metric in your organization, you’ll want to pay special attention to the methodology when choosing an influencer platform partner. It is important to ensure their calculations are aligned with your team’s internal valuation. There are many platform partners who are deliberately vague, or will even go as far as to say their EMV methodology is a “proprietary algorithm” or a “trade secret.” You should be weary of this lack of transparency. Platforms who take this approach often deliver suspiciously high EMV figures as a tactic for client retention. The thought beyond which is if the client sees significant ROI in their influencer campaigns, they can more easily justify a continuation of what appears to be yielding excellent results. ### **Does EMV matter?** EMV can be used as a benchmark allowing marketers to assign a numerical value to their efforts, helping them to more fully understand the ROI of their campaigns. However, EMV can also be subjective; there is no one, standardized way to calculate EMV across the entire industry. EMV is a metric that was created in a time where we didn’t have quantifiable insights and accurate attribution models that we have today. So, it should be considered a guiding metric in an arsenal of more quantifiable indicators. It’s advisable to include EMV along with other metrics designed to measure ROI rather than relying on EMV alone. ### **Refine your business’ definition of EMV** If you do decide that EMV is a formula you’d like to use, it’s important that everyone on your team clearly understands the numbers that are going into your overall EMV number. EMV is not a “one size fits all” metric. At Tagger, we believe that the **value attributed to content should closely align with market values found in digital media** (i.e. “media value”), whether media buying or what creators have been paid historically. Because of how subjective- and even controversial! - EMV can be, Tagger offers a robust set of additional metrics that our clients can use to calculate ROI. Many of our users feel that raw data like Impressions, Reach, and/or # of hard engagements (likes + comments + shares) are more valuable pieces of data that they can tell their own story with as opposed to relying on EMV alone. What do you think? Is EMV a good metric for marketers to have in their arsenal? Or is it too subjective to be truly valuable? *** If you'd like a demonstration of how Tagger calculates EMV for our clients, [request a demo here](http://www.taggermedia.com/request-demo) and we'll give you a tour of the platform.

• Tagger Media Integrates Shopify

  08 Aug 2022 · 1 min read

  Tagger's best-in-class social intelligence platform uplevels ecommerce offerings

  Dave Dickman

  Tagger Media Integrates Shopify

  

  **Announcing Tagger's official integration with eCommerce giant** [**Shopify**](https://www.shopify.com/)! This exciting move allows for seamless creator product fulfillment and sales attribution, serving to scale influencer marketing campaigns and cementing Tagger as the go-to resource for brands, agencies, and creators. > “At Tagger, we’re laser focused on providing our clients with a powerhouse of data and analytical tools to drive strategic campaign research, planning and execution at scale,” said Christopher Gesualdi, Head of Product at Tagger. “We’re thrilled to team up with Shopify to optimize the product fulfillment experience between brands and creators, streamlining workflows and, ultimately, strengthening business outcomes.” The Shopify integration will serve as a seamless UI where **creators can review proposals, make product selections, confirm delivery information, and understand campaign requirements**. Brands can also develop unique discount codes or imported codes from Shopify for **attribution tracking**. ### Additional product developments This announcement marks the latest in a series of developments Tagger launched in June geared towards a focus in providing users with the most accurate, tangible data situated on a platform designed by marketers for workflow efficiency. These enhancements include: * **Affinity** – an advancement in Tagger’s proprietary algorithm that uses machine learning and audience psychographics to determine the correlation, or similarity between thousands of Profiles across social platforms. * **Funds** – a fully embedded payment solution, designed to alleviate manual in-house payment processing, pay creators quickly in any global currency, as well as provide year end tax documentation. * **Signals** – Tagger’s social intelligence engine, which allows marketers to research industry trends, access competitor performance metrics, establish benchmarks, confirm audience demographic assumptions, visualize best performing creative content, and report campaign performance metrics in real-time. To learn more about Tagger's product developments, Shopify integration, or to see how the platform can inform your marketing strategies, [**request a demo here**](http://www.taggermedia.com/request-demo).

• The 5 data points that move the needle most during the influencer discovery and hiring process

  29 Jul 2022 · 5 min read

  The 5 data points marketers should track to ensure the highest-possible ROI from influencer campaigns...

  Kelsey Formost

  The 5 data points that move the needle most during the influencer discovery and hiring process

  

  Gone are the days when choosing the best creators and measuring the success of an influencer marketing campaign were difficult tasks that took hours of manual work. With the right technology, it’s easy to choose and track the data points that matter most to your brand or agency so you can calculate and improve ROI. But with so much information available, how can marketers prioritize which data points they should track? After looking at the industry as a whole, plus thousands of examples from a wide variety of brands, agencies, and media companies, we’ve honed in on the data points that truly make a difference and move the needle in influencer marketing campaigns. **Here are the five data points marketers should pay attention to during the discovery process to ensure the highest-possible ROI…** ### **Audience First, Always** First, let’s take a moment to think about what influencer marketing is, at its core: digital word of mouth. Once we truly understand that influencers are simply trusted experts with an engaged audience who cares about what they have to say, we can begin to tap into that audience’s state of mind when they look to consume content from their favorite creators. The goal of any influencer campaign isn’t just to hire influencers you _think_ are a good fit for your brand based on their aesthetic and surface-level social profile insights. **The goal is to connect with the right audience; those who are predisposed to have a positive reaction to your brand, product, or message.** With that in mind… ### **The 5 Influencer Data Points That Move the Needle Most** 1. Content Health & Category benchmarks 2. Affinities (Brand & Audience) 3. Audience Demographics 4. Length of Partnership 5. Past Conversion Rates ### **Content Health & Category Benchmarks** Content health = how well a creator’s content is performing compared to other, similar or “look-alike” creators. In the Tagger platform, users can simply run an analysis and compare influencers side by side to see how similar they are and how well their content is performing. If you don’t have a technology partner where you can easily see this data, look at data from past campaigns you may have run and see how well the influencer you’re thinking of hiring measures up in terms of all the various forms of engagement across different platforms. Similar to content health, Category Benchmarks are based on the average engagement rate (ER) in a particular category, taking into account the influencer's tier. This data point is extremely helpful because average engagement rates vary by platform (Twitter is significantly lower than Instagram, for example). **It’s not just about the creator’s ER, it’s about how that ER compares to others in their same niche.** This data point can also inform what type of content you ask for in your campaigns. For example, a particular creator might have content that performs better in video versus carousel formats, or they may be much higher than the industry benchmarks on YouTube, but average on Instagram which could influence where you ask them to post. ### **Affinity** * Affinity = How much a given profile overlaps with another. If there is a high overlap between two profiles, it’s determined that these profiles talk about the same topics and therefore are considered to have an affinity to one another. Affinity data lets you reach people based on their lifestyle, passions, and habits. There are two ways to calculate affinity… * **Brand Affinity:** How much a creator’s profile overlaps with a certain brand’s profile. If the creator talks about similar subjects and mentions similar accounts, they are found to have a high affinity for that brand. * **Audience Affinity:** How much a creator’s audience behavior overlaps with a certain brand or creator’s profile. If a creator’s audience talks about similar subjects and mentions similar accounts, they are found to have a high affinity for that creator or brand. ### **Audience Demographics** A common mistake we see marketers make is focusing only on a creator’s individual demographics. If you want your campaign to have any real impact, it’s imperative you analyze a creator’s audience (not just the creator themselves) for relevant info like… * Primary Location * Gender * Language * Age range, etc. When you approach influencer discovery in this way, there’s a higher probability your branded content will be relevant to the audience, not just to the creator. ### **Proposed Length of Partnership** Over the past couple of years, we’ve observed an interesting Industry Trend: Long-Term Creator Partnerships. **We believe marketers should jump on this bandwagon and invest in long-term influencer partnerships**. First, when you take your time selecting a creator you plan to partner with over a long period of time, you’re tapping into the element of “know, like, trust”; that creator’s audience already knows them, likes them, and trusts their opinion. You’re now part of that trusted community. Second, Repetition= Recognition. **The more you show up in a certain influencer’s feed, the more ROI you’ll drive over time as you become more recognizable by their audience.** After all, it takes us an average of being exposed to something seven times before we purchase a product or service. It follows that marketers can use frequency of posts with influencers to increase their odds of being shown to the same eyes multiple times to increase the likelihood of purchase or engagement. The data indicates there will be higher engagement with higher brand awareness. Finally, **audiences react more favorably to branded content when it shows up as part of the user’s preferred social media experience.** With more than 50% of consumers using Ad Blockers on their browsers, many of the ads marketers are paying for are simply going unseen. Add to that the ever-changing privacy laws and iOS updates and it’s even less likely digital ads will be seen by your target audience. By partnering with influencers, you’re meeting your target demographic where they already are: on social media. ### **Past Conversion Rates** Before signing on the dotted line, it can be helpful to ask, “How effective has this creator been at driving follower action in past partnerships?” During the hiring process, ask the creator you’re thinking of hiring about any alternative or “out of the box” methods they’ve used to drive conversions; email and blog, for example. Creators may not have all the data as far as their past conversion rates, but if they do it’s extremely helpful to see how your campaign could potentially stack up. Regardless of whether the influencers you work with have data about past campaigns, you can be sure to **utilize affiliate links, UTM parameters, promo codes, dedicated landing pages and link tracking.** This ensures you see accurate reporting data so you can make informed investment decisions about any future partnerships. ### **Go Beyond the “Obvious” Data Points** There’s a huge trap in the influencer marketing industry to get distracted by vanity metrics like follower count and likes. What really matters is focusing on the audience of a giver influencer, not so much the influencer themselves. The whole point of working with creators is to access untapped markets and drive awareness and engagement with new audiences. Next time you’re going through the influencer discovery and hiring process, remember these five data points and watch your ROI climb! _Want to see how Tagger helps the top global brands, agencies, and media companies discover the perfect influencers for their campaigns?_ [_Book a live demo here_](http://www.taggermedia.com/request-demo) _and we’ll show you exactly how to find creators for your specific industry and goals!_