- Brand lift studies benefit creators and brands alike.
- Providing the access to the data required for a brand lift study is required of creators.
- Granting access doesn’t give BENlabs or anyone else access to social accounts. It only gives us the data we need to conduct a brand lift study.
Follower count, views, likes and similar leading metrics are great at showing how many people a creator can reach, but that’s only half the story. Marketers need to know how content impacts people.
What marketers ultimately care about is gaining new customers. This can cause an overcorrection where content performance and content creators are judged on a single metric. Typically, that single metric is direct sales.
But that’s not good for anyone.
By judging performance on a single metric, the full story is lost, along with the less tangible benefits creator content drives. And while direct sales are often the main outcome brands want to see, they also care deeply about influencing perception.
To tell that important part of the creator content performance story, we conduct brand lift studies. To do that, we require creators in the BENlabs Creator Community to share some data. For creators, granting the access we need takes less than a minute. It doesn’t give BENlabs or our partners access to your social accounts. It only gives our AI tools access to the relevant data for a brand lift study.
Why Brand Lift Studies are Important
A brand lift study helps to tell a more complete story. Instead of focusing on a single metric, like sales, it looks at awareness, perception, and affinity for a brand. In other words, how likely audiences that saw sponsored creator content are to buy from a brand in the future.
BENlabs work with Turo is a great example.
Turo is an innovative car rental company where instead of choosing from a fleet of owned vehicles, people can rent from Turo vehicle “hosts,” similar to the Airbnb model.
The thing is, the odds of catching audiences with organic creator content right at the moment they’re thinking of renting a vehicle (intent) are not great.
Instead, the goal for this campaign was to influence audience perception so that the next time they thought about renting a vehicle, Turo would spring to mind as the best option to do so.
After creators in the BENlabs Creator Community shared sponsored organic content, BENlabs conducted a brand lift study to measure how creator content had influenced audiences and helped shape brand perception for Turo.
That brand lift study showed a 305% awareness lift and 44 awareness points “stolen” from the big names in traditional vehicle rental. 46% of respondents said they would consider Turo the next time they wanted to rent a car and 39% clearly remembered Turo four weeks after the campaign wrapped.
The campaign was a major success for Turo.
Had the campaign been measured on direct sales alone, which were outside the content creator’s power to control, it might have appeared otherwise. The value and influence that content creators brought to the campaign wouldn’t have been understood or appreciated.
How Brand Lift Studies Work
After a creator’s audience sees brand sponsored content, we will invite a portion of that audience to take a survey. We do this by targeting that audience segment with a follow-up ad.
The surveys are designed to be quick and fun. Audiences answer several questions about the brand or product they saw in the content. Questions like “do you know about this product or brand?” “How about its competitors?” “How do you feel about the product or brand relative to those competitors?”
For example:
The same survey is targeted to a control group of audiences who didn’t see the content. non-exposed audiences. The difference in responses speaks to how the people who saw the creator’s organic content were impacted or influenced by it. It adds context to the overall performance metrics for the campaign, and it gives creators more credit for the impact of their content, beyond just whether or not audiences made a purchase in the moment.
Providing Data for Brand Lift Studies
For campaigns with a brand lift study component, creators are required to provide access to the data we need.
As we said, it’s a simple process and doesn’t give BENlabs or its clients access to your accounts. For example, here’s how to authorize data sharing for a brand lift study on Meta:
1. Go to business.facebook.com
2. Select Pages in the left nav. If you have multiple pages, select the appropriate page.
3. Select Assign Partners then choose Business ID.
4. Enter the Business ID provided to you by BENlabs.
5. Toggle Ads and Insights to On and click Next.
That’s it! We’re now able to tell the full impact story for your sponsored content.
Measure What Matters
A brand lift study can help brand marketers hone in on the metrics that matter to improve their influencer marketing outcomes and, with BENlabs AI, drive and scale their influencer marketing efforts to new heights of success.
