How Cabot Cheese upgraded influencer campaign measurement with InfluenceKit

Overview

Wendy Scherer is the Social Media Strategist at Cabot Cheese — an award winning cheese creamery dishing up rich, buttery products since 1919. With a full plate of researching, monitoring, reporting, and producing strategic direction for campaigns and partners, Wendy can’t run on cheesy processes, time-consuming systems, and vague metrics to produce campaigns that don’t bring in some serious cheddar. That is why she uses the influencer reporting platform, InfluenceKit.

“Working with InfluenceKit has been a pleasure and I am super appreciative. Time is the most valuable thing there is right now, so we appreciate the extra time it’s given us,”

– Wendy Gould, Social Media Strategist at Cabot Cheese.

Challenge

Manually collecting data from influencers is time-consuming and inaccurate.

Before using InfluenceKit, Wendy spent hours and labor pinging her influencers for screenshots and compiling metrics into spreadsheets.

“I knew how much time we were spending doing it manually. And how inaccurate, and how difficult it was to get the screenshots, and to keep up with what everybody was doing. We would say we need screenshots of all of your metrics and stats at the end of a contract, and then we would enter that stuff into these huge spreadsheets, track the data and the promotion budgets, so that we could look at efficiency. We had these monster spreadsheets that were hardly ever one hundred percent up to date, and with pretty unreproducible numbers that didn’t account for change over time,” Wendy explains..

On top of that, it was too time-consuming to reference campaign data and make ROI decisions knowing that their spreadsheets could be inaccurate.

“If somebody did a post on March 15th, and they’re still getting a ton of traffic in April, nobody’s going to go back and pull that extra traffic and the extra engagement from later. So the data always felt incomplete to me, and then there were some influencers who really just never got around to getting data to us. So we had holes, and it was really awkward and time-consuming. The follow up and putting a big report together was a huge amount of work,” Wendy explains.

Since manually crunching numbers wasn’t sustainable, Wendy and her team leaned on an agency to handle their reporting, but it still lacked the exact metrics and the context needed to understand their campaign progress and make ROI decisions.

Our influence program has grown. When we started it, the first year we used an agency. Their reporting was pretty, but it wasn’t really helpful in a lot of ways. We’re a really analytical group and one page showing how great one person is doesn’t really help when you’re looking to try to understand change, segments of context, and comparison between different influencers. That was frustrating, and I wanted to be able to go to my executives and say ‘look how great this is’ while being compared to something. Just saying we got a million impressions doesn’t help someone who doesn’t do reporting all day long. Also, the agency was inaccurate with their numbers a lot,” says Wendy.

Besides lacking context, the agency didn’t save Wendy and her team any time.

“What we learned was that the amount of time that we had to put in to coordinate in between wasn’t that much less than if we just did it ourselves. I really wanted to be able to show not only change over time, but how different kinds of content works, how timing is important, and growth. The reporting was somewhat flat and it didn’t really help us understand anything more about it except that it existed and we seemed to be doing something,” Wendy explains.

After maxing out growing pains and desperate for a new solution, Wendy searched for an efficient way to improve the reporting speed, provide reliable data, and share beautiful reports with collaborators.

Solution

A precision based influencer reporting platform

InfluenceKit is an influencer campaign platform that generates accurate reports in minutes. Wendy was introduced to InfluenceKit by a group of Cabot Cheese influencers.

“We have a couple of influencers who are using InfluenceKit and we love their reports. They’d send the link and the reports were always up-to-date, always wonderful and beautiful, and I didn’t even realize what a thing it was. And then we saw Bruno speak and it all came together,” says Wendy.

Wendy onboarded the influencer reporting platform and adopted them as the official platform for Cabot Cheese’s influencer campaign reporting for the following reasons:

First, InfluenceKit reduces the amount of time that Wendy and her team spent on reporting.

“Instead of spending hours going back and forth with influencers, I can go in monthly or quarterly or as needed and look at what’s going on, pull out some highlights, and present to whoever I need to present to,” Wendy explains.

“My favorite thing is that InfluenceKit isn’t static. If we go ahead and push some content out another time or add in extra promo dollars to it it gets incorporated…”

– Wendy Gould, Social Media Strategist at Cabot Cheese.

Second, because InfluenceKit reports provide the engagement and reach that Wendy and her team need to monitor, they’re able to make better campaign decisions.

“Before, I’d run a lot of reports, but now I use the link which is great so I don’t have to send it to everybody and it’s already nice and beautiful when they see it,” says Wendy.

Overall, the Cabot Cheese team doesn’t have to run reports, hunt down influencers for deliverables, and improves the workflow of every contributor.

“My favorite thing is that InfluenceKit isn’t static. If we go ahead and push some content out another time or add in extra promo dollars to it it gets incorporated, and that really helps because I feel the value of the content and the value of the content over time. We’re able to report to the executive team at the level that they want to see and it also allows us to dig in a whole lot deeper to be able to analyze by platform or by different kinds of content that we want to look at, slice and dice ourselves, and give us the polish and completeness out or data,” Wendy explains.

Results

Improved time and accuracy

Thanks to InfluenceKit’s precise and efficient reporting, Wendy and Cabot Cheese have reduced the amount of time being spent on their reporting.

“Time is the most valuable thing there is right now, so we really appreciate the extra time that InflueceKit has given us back,” Wendy says.

InfluenceKit delivered on their promise to improve efficiency and reporting time management.

“InfluenceKit has solved the problem that I had, which was time and accuracy,” says Wendy.

And to top it all off, InfluenceKit’s approachable support created a supportive relationship that superseded onboarding and product expectations.

“InfluenceKit was so flexible about letting us try it, helping to set it up, and showing us what to do with it. We had a lot of conversations about what we needed and what we were trying to do and they were really willing to talk, listen, and think about changes based on what we needed. Their customer service is incredible and nobody responds as quickly or as caring as they do. They’re fantastic. We’re really happy,”