Background
Nestlé launched a campaign to boost sales of their frozen food brands, DiGiorno and Hot Pockets, partnering with big names like NRG Sports and influencers IamDices, Vincent Marcus and Ross Smith. In parallel, they ran campaigns across their owned social accounts for both brands.
To optimize future campaigns and justify continued budget, the marketing analytics team needed a way to directly measure the impact of social and influencer efforts on sales—moving beyond traditional KPIs like CPM, engagement rates, and follower growth.
Solution
Leveraging StatSocial’s social and influencer marketing attribution capabilities, Nestlé was able to take the following steps to measure sales lift across their campaign.
Step 1
Within the StatSocial platform, Nestlé created audiences made up of those organically exposed to influencer and owned social content across major social platforms like Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube.
Step 2
Nestlé’s analytics team, in partnership with their purchase data provider, matched the exposed audience to point-of-sale purchase data over a 150-day period. They did the same for a control group of non-exposed social users with similar demographics and buyer behaviors to those exposed.
Step 3
Once each audience group was mapped to purchase data, Nestlé’s analytics team compared behavior across the exposed and unexposed groups before, during, and after the campaign in order to measure associated impact.
Outcome
When Nestlé compared the exposed group to the non-exposed group across their own social followings and their influencer partners, they found that the exposed audience across their DiGiorno and Hot Pockets followings spent: 9.3% ($0.38) and 25.3% ($0.35) more than the non-exposed audience. Surprisingly the exposed audiences of their influencer partners showed much less of an impact across sales compared to the non-exposed, with leader Ross Smith demonstrating a .8% lift.
As a result, they had two major findings:
1. The influencers they partnered with targeted their end user (think, the younger ‘consumers’ of the frozen food brands) versus the likely household shoppers– the parents and caregivers actually purchasing the product. Nestlé determined that future influencer campaigns should target more of the household purchasers.
Continuing to leverage the StatSocial platform, Nestlé could then identify existing and new audiences that were more likely to be household purchasers and reach them across influencer, media and retargeting campaigns. For example, influencer audiences similar to those following their owned DiGiorno and Hot Pockets channels.
2. Nestlé previously underestimated the impact of their own social channels and followings, leading them to further leverage these accounts for future campaigns.
Ultimately, had Nestlé been unable to identify those organically exposed to their campaign with StatSocial, they might have incorrectly translated engagement to sales and made lesser informed decisions around future partnerships.
Regardless of their results though, this marked a significant milestone for Nestlé–enabling them to finally attribute real value to their social and influencer programs in the same way their peers in other areas of marketing have done for so long.
“While understanding these results has been hugely impactful for the team, the biggest takeaway from partnering with StatSocial was the ability to finally measure the direct sales impact resulting from our campaign–a capability that other marketing channels have been able to do for years.”
The Importance of Influencer Marketing Attribution
Influencer marketing attribution is critical for helping brands measure the true impact of their campaigns by connecting influencer exposure to actual sales and key performance metrics. Using social audience data, purchase data, and brand lift surveys, companies can assess how both paid and organic influencer campaigns contribute to ROI, in-store traffic, and brand perception, just like paid media. This holistic view of campaign performance enables brands to make data-driven decisions and optimize their influencer strategies for better results.
Learn more about StatSocial’s influencer marketing attribution solution or schedule an introductory call with a member of our team to get started.
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