The creator posted. The numbers came in. The marketing team had plenty of impressions, views, and engagements to report.
Then the CMO asked what any of it did for the business.
Keith Bendes , Chief Strategy Officer at influencer marketing agency Linqia, has spent the past 7 years helping some of the world’s largest brands answer that question.
B2B companies are doing increasingly ambitious things with creators, from LinkedIn partnerships to events to content that gets repurposed across paid media. As the investment grows, so does the pressure to prove what it’s doing for the business.
Keith says that Linqia uses a three-part framework to measure the full value of creator marketing: the attention creators captured, what their content did for the rest of the media plan, and how well the measurement reflects the way buyers actually buy.
Here’s how it works.
Key takeaways:
Find where the idea will get stuck. Executive approval and organizational adoption require different kinds of buy-in. Learn leadership’s definition of business health. Use the numbers they already rely on instead of expecting them to translate marketing metrics. Make the investment legible to finance. Clarify what marketing headcount provides, what additional dollars activate, and the risk attached to the bet. Decide what success unlocks before you run the pilot. Every small bet should create evidence for a specific next ask. Pillar 1: Measure your share of the conversation Keith calls the first pillar social conversation: impressions, video views, engagements, clicks, and other measures of the attention a creator campaign generates.
It’s also, he says, “the most obvious of the pillars,” and where most marketers already default when measuring creator campaigns.
The opportunity is to go one step further with share of voice: Did the campaign increase your brand’s share of the category conversation relative to your competitors?
That’s a much more meaningful number to bring to leadership.
“It’s very different to go to a CMO and say, ‘I drove 18 million impressions’ or ‘I drove 10 million video views,’” Keith says. “It’s much easier or more effective to say, ‘Hey, we grew our share of voice against our top three competitors eight percentage points during the time that we had this creator campaign live.’”
How to do it Keith’s team uses Linqia’s Resonate platform, which integrates with social listening tools, to look at the total category conversation and calculate what percentage belongs to each brand.
Then they compare that share before, during, and after the creator campaign.
Did your share of the conversation grow while creators were active? Did it hold afterward? Did competitors lose ground?
Pillar 2: Make your paid media work harder For Keith, creator marketing is part of the larger media plan.
“For every dollar they spend on influencer marketing as a channel, they are probably spending between 50 to 100 or more on paid media,” Keith says.
So he wants to know what that creator dollar did to the $50 to $100 being spent around it.
“How much more efficient did my 50 to 100 dollars get?”
Keith considers that media effectiveness metric “almost more important” than the organic performance of the creator content itself.
Plan for paid from the start There’s a step between a creator posting content and a brand putting media dollars behind it: getting that content ready for everywhere else it needs to run.
The creators you choose, the way you brief them, the formats you ask them to capture, the usage rights you negotiate, and the post-production you plan should all reflect where you want that content to run.
Keith’s team starts making those decisions before a creator has even been contacted.
“Design with the end in mind,” he says.
Pillar 3: Account for the B2B attribution gap Keith starts with the job of the campaign. For upper-funnel work, that could mean measuring changes in awareness, perception, or intent through a brand lift study. Lower-funnel campaigns can use affiliate links, direct links, app downloads, or other trackable conversions.
But direct attribution has limits, especially in B2B.
“For most categories, especially B2B, this [influencers] is not an immediate attribution channel,” Keith says.
A creator might introduce a buyer to your brand long before that buyer is ready to act.
By the time the buyer converts, the creator who first put the brand on their radar may be invisible in the attribution.
That leaves B2B marketers with a harder measurement problem: how do you capture creator impact when immediate conversion isn’t how your buyers behave?
Keith doesn’t pretend there’s an easy answer.
“It’s a billion-dollar question,” he says. “I think we need to figure that out as an industry.”
Your measurement has to account for that gap. A model built for an immediately attributable purchase won’t necessarily tell you whether a B2B creator partnership worked.
The move that gets creator marketing more budget For large enterprise brands, proving creator ROI also means getting it into the measurement system the company already uses to allocate marketing dollars.
Keith points to marketing mix modeling (MMM), which companies use to understand how different marketing investments contribute to business results.
“We spend a lot of time working to get influencer to be a line item on those MMM reads,” Keith says. “That is the source of truth for most large enterprise brands.”
“If influencer’s not part of that measurement structure, you’ll never be able to justify more budget Smaller challenger brands may have more room to experiment while the business is growing. At large enterprise companies, Keith says, “the data is everything.”
Find the source of truth your company already uses to decide where marketing dollars go. Then make sure creator marketing is represented in it.
FAQ What should I measure beyond impressions and engagement? Look at what changed while the campaign was in market. Depending on the goal, that could be share of voice, brand lift, purchase intent, paid-media efficiency, or trackable conversions.
How do I get creator marketing included in MMM? Make sure creator marketing is represented in the model your company uses to evaluate marketing spend, rather than disappearing into another channel. As Keith puts it: “If influencer’s not part of that measurement structure, you’ll never be able to justify more budget.”
How do I make the case for more creator budget? Bring the numbers that show what creator changed. That could be an increase in share of voice or evidence that creator content made your larger paid-media investment more efficient.
