The only influencer marketing strategy guide you need (plus a free template)

Your step-by-step guide to building a successful influencer marketing strategy.

If you’re looking to create (or improve) your brand’s influencer marketing strategy, you’re in the right place.

We’ll run through the dos and don’ts, explain the different types of influencers you’ll want to consider, take a closer look at TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube strategies, and give you a handy template to get you started.  But first off…

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is when brands use well-known creators and influencers across different social media platforms to promote their products, services or brand identity. When a brand works with an influencer to create a campaign or endorse a product or service, then they’re using that person’s influence to reach a community of loyal followers. 

Now this is where it gets interesting. At first, influencer marketing was all about brands connecting with the big name influencers to reach large numbers of people, but this has slowly evolved to include niche influencers that talk to smaller communities. The audiences might be smaller, but they’re more targeted. 

Which influencers to work with

The types of influencer you choose to work with will depend on multiple factors, such as audience size, credibility, audience niche, quality of leads, and authenticity. You don’t need an influencer to have a massive following if they connect with their audience on an authentic level and deliver quality leads to your brand. 

Top tip: Our CAST tool makes it a lot easier to find the right influencers for your brand. 

Types of influencers

There are several different types of influencer that you can include in a truly engaging and relevant influencer marketing strategy: 

• Celebrity or high-end influencers. These influencers usually have more than a million followers and are expensive to use in influencer marketing campaigns. Also known as mega influencers, they’re the big names that catch big audiences.
• Macro influencers. These influencers have anything from 100,000 to 1 million followers and can be anything from social media stars to bloggers or podcasters. They tend to have closer relationships with their followers than the mega influencers but are still expensive to work with because of their reach.
• Micro influencers. These influencers tend to have follower numbers ranging from 10,000 to 100,000, which is, all things considered, an impressive following, but not the scale of the mega or macro influencer. The value they add is that they engage more closely with their followers who are loyal and engaged themselves, so you can build really focused and relevant influencer marketing campaigns.
• Niche influencers. Also known as the nano influencer, these influencers have around 1,000 to 10,000 followers but they connect with them on a very personal level. They tend to be niche in their passions, very engaged with the brands they work with, and love what they do. 

What’s the best influencer marketing strategy?

In terms of delivering results, an always-on strategy is the best influencer marketing strategy. This doesn’t need to mean you have creator content going live every day, or even every week, but it does mean you have a regular and consistent flow of activations across the year. 

The reason for this is it means your brand is being repeated to potential customers, improving brand recall, but also as it means you can iteratively improve your performance by making amends and adjustments to your approach campaign to campaign. 

An always on approach is the opposite to a short-term or campaign-only approach. These short bursts of activity don’t provide consistency, and means you’re relying on that one or two campaigns per year to drive value. You wouldn’t do this with any other channel, so why would you with this one?

Your first and most important consideration when it comes to creating an influencer marketing strategy, however, is to acknowledge that there’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all. 

When it comes to creating the best influencer marketing strategy, you need to tick six key boxes: 

1. Have clearly defined goals that unpack exactly what you expect your influencer marketing strategy to achieve. Are you wanting to increase sales? Or do you want to drive engagement? Or are you focused on brand awareness? Not only will these goals help you decide your tactics, but they’ll refine what type of social media influencer best works for your strategy. 
2. Know your target market. If you want to talk to the right people, then you need to know who they are, what they love, and which influencers talk to them. If you’re a mega brand wanting to drive mega awareness, then you’re probably going to want that celebrity or mega influencer on your team. If you’re wanting to talk to women aged 50+ about an eco-friendly face mask, then you’ll want to look at micro or nano influencers. 
3. Make it relevant. You need to ensure that your influencer marketing strategy is relevant to your influencer and their market (as well as to your own), that the reach of this campaign is what you need to achieve your goals, and that the tactics of your chosen influencer resonate with your target market. 
4. Research your influencer. This means ticking off the boxes above – do they resonate with your market, do they have the reach you need, are they relevant to your market – as well as ensuring that they’re aligned with your brand. An influencer may look good on paper, but they may not behave or communicate in a way that sits comfortably with your brand. Or, they may be too expensive, too big, or too small for your influencer marketing strategy objectives. Research finds the gaps and the perfect fit. 
5. Connect with your influencer. You want your influencer to connect to your target market, so take the time to connect with them. This should be a partnership so that they understand what you want to achieve, and you can rely on them to talk about your brand in all the right ways. Once you’ve shortlisted your favourite influencers, take the time to talk to them so you can create campaigns that you’re all proud of. 
6. Build your calendar. Influencer marketing is no different to your other marketing channels, you’ll need a calendar to plan out your activities. An always-on strategy should see you activating with influencers at a regular cadence. Start with key business and industry moments, then think about wider cultural events that are relevant to your business and communities. Make sure you include moments of varying size in terms of complexity and budget, and work with a range of nano – macro creators. 
7. Have clearly defined KPIs. You’re spending money on your influencer marketing strategy, so you need to put metrics in place to ensure it’s working. There are different types of metrics you can use, but it’s important that you and your influencers are on the same page when it comes to achieving them, and that your KPIs are realistic. 

What are the main goals of an influencer marketing strategy? 

As mentioned earlier, it’s important to ensure that your influencer marketing strategy comes with clear goals. These will ensure you choose the right influencer, create the right campaign, talk to the right people, and put the right metrics in place to measure the success of your campaigns. 

Here are a few goals that may resonate with your strategy: 

Brand awareness uses key influencers to put your brand name in front of thousands of people. It helps you build a brand, do a hard launch of a product or service, and use the trusted presence of an influencer to gain traction. 

Build a brand through engaged followers or gain traction in new markets. This is a slow-burn process that uses trusted influencers to put your company name in front of a new audience so you can build market share. 

Drive leads using authenticity and engaged communication with an influencer that talks to your target market.   

Grow your business using lead generation, brand awareness and new market share through clever influencer marketing strategies and tactics. 

Improve sales. You’ll want to use smart tools and metrics to see how well your campaign is working and to constantly refine your approaches and influencers to keep driving sales. 

Achieve a very specific goal for the brand. If you’re launching a new app, service or product and want to get hands and eyes on this fresh new launch, then you need to keep that overall goal front of mind. 

How do you structure an influencer marketing strategy? 

Once you’ve defined your goals, chosen your influencer, defined your audience, and identified your key metrics, you’re already well down the road to structuring the perfect influencer marketing strategy. However, there are a few more steps you need to take:

1. Have a clearly defined budget as this will refine your choice of influencer, the regularity of their posts, the platforms you use and so much more
2. Choose the type of influencer campaigns you want based on your goals and your target audience
3. Choose the social media platform that fits your target audience and brand
4. Create content that’s going to shine on that platform. Often, the best content is created in collaboration with the influencer, but you can also give them sharp and compelling content to use on their platform 
5. Include regular reviews to assess how effective the creators you’re working with are. Optimise your creator squad over time, until you can eventually build a team of all stars that consistently deliver the results you need. 

What should you not do with an influencer marketing strategy?

A lot of the things you shouldn’t do with an influencer marketing strategy are directly connected to the things you should do…

You won’t see much success if you have poor tactics that don’t resonate with your target market or your chosen influencer. If there’s no alignment between your brand and the social media platform you use or the influencer you choose, then you’re not going to see great results. 

You need to align your influencer marketing strategy with your social media strategy to keep everything tight and on track.

If you forget your goals, focus only on one platform (you lose out on so much visibility if you restrict yourself to Instagram alone, for example), have no strategy documentation, and don’t have clearly defined metrics in place, then your campaign has no foundations from which to grow. You can’t assess a campaign’s success if you don’t know what defines that success or what return on investment (ROI) you’re aiming for.

The biggest influencer marketing challenges

Knowing how to measure ROI and the results of an influencer marketing campaign is probably the biggest challenge when creating a campaign. It’s also tough to find the right influencers – people who fit with your brand, resonate with your strategy and who will work with you to create magic – and it’s hard to juggle all the admin that goes with influencer marketing.

You have to ensure deadlines, contracts, content and other similar important factors are always tightly managed so that everyone is on the same page, all the time.

There are several ways you can address these issues. With ROI, you can set clear metrics at the start and ensure you’ve got the right tools to assess them, and then you can collaborate with a trusted partner to find and manage influencers more effectively.  Vamp has a customisable business package that you can use to tick all these boxes, easily. 

Influencer marketing strategy template

Download our free influencer marketing strategy template to get started with creating a winning campaign.