You can tell the future.

Yes, you can crack the uncrackable nut. Break the proverbial 3rd wall. Extract truth from data and… learn to forecast how many acquisitions you’ll get from your CPA driven influencer campaign next month. 

Keep in mind, this is a basic tracking methodology. It will help you to track lot’s of things, and extrapolate forecasts if you like, but it’s not a super advanced influencer monitoring tool like this one. 

We should quickly cover how performance influencer marketing works:
1. Use data to identify influencers who speak to your target audience
2. Recruit them to an ongoing program
3. Pay them monthly some % of each conversion they generate
4. Learn, Optimize, Repeat.

Often, marketers don’t even realize how accessible forecasting is for influencer programs. This template will help you get the job done so you too can tell the future.

Get the template here 

Collecting the data you need to forecast your influencer driven acquisitions:

You’re going to want to use this template for now. 

Later, if you want to get more sophisticated and work in a business intelligence tool or add something you can always adjust the sheet.

This template will help you to understand what’s happening, what will happen in the future and even help you hit your targets. For example, if you need 1000 acquisitions in a new market, you can use an adaptation of this sheet to estimate how many influencers you need to recruit in that market.
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What is currently happening in our ambassador program:

‍First, get your basic stats together:

• How many influencers are currently in your program?
• How many conversions are they generating monthly?
• What is your monthly minimum quota?
• How many influencers are removed from the program monthly?
  

These stats are the foundation of the future and can help us make our first forecast. To go deeper, you can add demographic data and start optimizing for conversion rate. 

‍What might change between now and your forecast dates:

• How many ambassadors do we recruit monthly?
• What’s new?
• What new markets are we targeting?
• What’s different about the product we’ll be promoting?

These points are mostly important to track for later, so you can understand and optimize your ambassador program over time.

If for example your program is mostly targeting Hamburg (Germany) but now you’ll be focusing on Berlin. It might not be possible to anticipate the exact difference in reception in those cities. 

That said, you can at least define their differences so you can build better experiments in the future: If our drink isn’t flying off the digital shelf in Berlin in June, we will know in advance that Berlin based consumers eat out more often, so we can focus on ambassadors content on ordering delivery or dining out vs buying online. 

Moreover, if you’re targeting a new market it might impact your ability to recruit the same number of ambassadors as quickly. These aren’t reasons to quit, just things to note so-as to educate your response to a forecast which isn’t 100% accurate. ‍

‍The final result of our template‍

The screenshot below shows something like what you should have when you’re finished 

As mentioned in the beginning, you can get a much deeper look by breaking things down more thoroughly by audience demographic and adding success metrics that are higher up the funnel.

Why bother tracking and forecasting?

That which is tracked is improved.

By forecasting months ahead, you can get a fully transparent look at your levers for acquisition with influencers. You can set practical goals to hit. You can improve your efforts and strive to do better. You’ll be motivated to do more and more.

Tracking & forecasting gives you control over your future. It will also help you explain to your colleagues why the work you’re doing is valuable, what return it has brought in the past and what returns it will bring in the future.