5 Winning Strategies Used By Top Influencer Marketing Agencies

We’ve all seen our favorite creators on social media mention products or brands that align with their audience. On the surface, these may look like simple partnerships that easily generate brand awareness and boost sales. But for an influencer campaign to be successful, it takes careful planning, strategy, and execution to ensure the results are positive.

While influencer marketing can have enormous upsides and benefits that other marketing channels don’t offer, not all campaigns are successful.

When campaigns fail to deliver the expected return or miss the mark in some way, it can almost always be traced back to poor initial planning that ignored key areas.

Whether you’re new to social media influencer campaigns or want to improve your campaigns for a higher ROI, we’ve compiled 5 key strategies used by the top influencer marketing agencies to build successful campaigns.

These strategies can work as a roadmap to help you build campaigns that are authentic, engaging, and most of all, deliver the results your business needs to grow.

Strategy #1: Clearly Define Your Influencer Marketing Goals

This one trips up many brands and even some influencer agencies when planning their campaigns. Usually, it involves the mindset that if they can just partner with the influencer who has the largest audience they can budget for, that will be enough to reach their goals.

Chasing high follower counts is usually the result of poorly defined goals during the planning process. While follower numbers are crucial in certain circumstances, high numbers can’t overcome a lack of planning and will generally result in a poor-performing campaign.

Below are the most common goals and campaign types for influencer marketing along with a brief description of each one. There may be some overlap between these different types, but you always want a clearly defined main objective.

Goal: Brand Awareness

If brand awareness is your goal, this will influence the partnerships you seek and the type of content required for your campaign.

Brand awareness campaigns are usually also part of a larger campaign incorporating other channels, such as paid advertisements. 

Brand awareness is less about flashing your product in front of the largest audience and more about telling the story of your brand. This means explaining why your brand is different and the values and motivations that set you apart from the competition.

This type of campaign generally requires partnerships with influencers who have a tighter relationship with their audience within a specific niche. Brand awareness strategies are often more subtle as well. For example, bringing attention to a cause or situation your company cares about.

To see some real-world campaigns like this, visit our list of the top influencer marketing examples that showcase successful brand awareness campaigns across a variety of industries.

Goal: Increase Sales

For this type of campaign, you want to directly increase sales (not indirectly like with brand awareness). This type of campaign has a simpler, more straightforward messaging than brand awareness campaigns.
It’s also generally easier to track the results using internal data and KPIs without the need for surveying or other external tracking.

Goal: Loyalty Building

Influencer marketing is highly effective for building brand loyalty. The engagement and connection the influencer has with their audience lends itself to this type of campaign success.

For loyalty building, the campaigns may require longer partnerships and ongoing sponsorships with certain influencers, so this makes choosing the right influencers more important than shorter or one-off campaigns designed to drive immediate sales.

Goal: Increase Website Traffic

Some campaigns are designed to drive website traffic where you capture leads or expose customers to your offer. For these campaigns, it’s important to consider the social media platform you choose along with the influencer.

Some platforms make it cumbersome to link to external websites in a way that’s easy for consumers to navigate. You can sometimes work around this obstacle using QR codes or other methods. But carefully consider the platform and the typical user experience when setting up this type of campaign.

For campaigns designed to drive traffic, heading off technical issues like this is critical during the planning phase.

Goal: Build Brand Authority

Due to the relationship that influencers have with their audience, influencer marketing campaigns can work extremely well for building your brand’s authority within a market.

Building authority is when you want to position your brand as a subject matter expert within your industry.

Similar to brand awareness and brand loyalty campaigns, these require a tight relationship with influencers who are seen as leaders in their niche.

Securing influencers with smaller, but highly engaged niche audiences will deliver the best results when your goal is to build brand authority.

Strategy #2: Identify Your Audience

Identifying and segmenting your audience is important for all types of marketing, and influencer marketing is no different.

Segmenting your audience allows you to find partnerships with influencers who match your target customers perfectly. You can also tailor your overall message with each influencer to better resonate with each segment of your audience.

You likely already have some idea of your audience, but this is a good time to clearly define and update each segment and build personas.

A persona is a fictional character that embodies the key traits of each segment of your audience.

For example, if you operate a meal-prep service, one of your customer personas could be a woman named “Kaitlyn”. Kaitlyn is a young professional who is finding it difficult to incorporate healthy meals into her lifestyle. She has tried other meal-prep services but was disappointed with the variety and quality of the food.

This persona helps describe the demographics, pain points, and motivation of one of your customer segments.

With personas matching your core audience and customers you want to attract, you can then partner with the influencers who most closely align with those personas.

This type of matching really takes advantage of the niche opportunities within influencer marketing and is a key part of maximizing ROI on campaign spending.

Strategy 3: Craft Your Messaging With Intent

By following the previous strategies, your marketing messaging should develop organically from those insights. Based on your goals, campaign types, personas, and influencer partnership choices, the messaging you’ll need will start to come into focus.

Where many campaigns fail is that they try to start with the messaging and then try to build the campaign from there. 

For example, if you’re creating a script or sales copy for an influencer but you haven’t applied the previous strategies yet, your message will likely fall flat and not resonate with the influencer’s audience. You may still get some benefit and exposure, but you’re not optimizing the connection that could be made with the audience.

The next key area when crafting your messaging is to carefully align it with the influencer and their style.

You likely already have brand guidelines that may set certain boundaries but don’t be afraid to move outside of your comfort zone to better align with the influencer’s style.

When a casual and free-spirited influencer suddenly jumps into a rigid sales pitch, it can be jarring for the audience and feel awkward. This is true for both video content and written content posts on platforms like Twitter.

Authenticity is key in influencer marketing and the wrong messaging can betray that goal.

Strategy #4: Carefully Track Results

Having a goal but no plan to measure progress toward that goal is like taking shots in the dark and hoping for the best.

With the rest of your campaign goals and criteria set up, you want to decide on the metrics you plan on tracking that will tell you how successful the campaign is.

In marketing, there are dozens of metrics and KPIs to choose from. You want to decide on the core metrics that will best measure your desired change.

Metrics and KPIs will generally include your own internal data such as traffic, sales, and other figures. But you’ll also want to include metrics related to the influencer such as engagement and other factors. These can be obtained through the social media platform’s API and other sources such as social listening tools.

For more detailed information about metrics, make sure to read our guide on essential influencer KPIs and which KPIs to use for each campaign type.

Strategy #5: Implement A Comprehensive Post-Campaign Analysis

When the campaign is over, you’ll want to perform an analysis to determine what went right and what can be improved. This is similar to project management methodologies used after the completion of a company project or initiative.

Much of the analysis will be based on your analytics from the earlier strategy regarding tracking success. You want to focus on what worked so you can either scale your campaign across other similar influencers or duplicate the success with a new campaign and objective.

If the campaign didn’t live up to expectations, you want to identify why things didn’t work out as intended.

With influencer marketing, poor results are generally the result of some sort of mismatch. For example, your marketing message was good, but it was matched with the wrong audience or influencer. On the other hand, you may have found the right audience, but your message was wrong.

Dissecting a campaign that didn’t perform well involves identifying these mismatches and then making the appropriate changes moving forward.

Finally, there may be technical issues that hampered the campaign. Things like posts not being made on schedule or other issues that can easily be fixed through better communication, clearer briefs, or technical preparations.

When it comes to constant improvement, it’s just as important to understand why things went right as it is to understand why things went wrong.

Create An Influencer Campaign In-House Or Work With An Agency?

Influencer marketing campaigns can look deceptively simple on the surface. But behind the scenes, it’s the careful planning that creates campaigns that generate the stellar results brands expect from influencer marketing.

Following the strategies in this guide will help you build a foundation for successful campaigns that look effortless on the surface, but resonate with the core audience you need to attract and engage.

For some businesses, choosing an influencer marketing agency to partner with may be a wise choice. A successful influencer agency can work with your business to develop and implement a campaign utilizing their experience and network of trusted influencers.

They can help you create a full campaign or help with specific aspects you may need assistance with.

Whichever route you choose, the key to success with influencer marketing is the same as with any critical business initiative.

Careful planning, precise execution, and consistent improvement over time will always sway the odds of success in your favor.