Proven Influencer Marketing Strategy Template For Brands

You’re likely already familiar with the basics of influencer marketing. If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ve probably consumed a good amount of influencer marketing delivered by your favorite creators.

If you run a brand, you probably know you need to start leveraging this growing marketing channel to achieve more growth and success. But getting started can sometimes be difficult.

A brand partnership with an influencer may look simple, but knowing exactly how to get from point A to point B can quickly get confusing once you start getting bogged down in details like contracts, metrics, content schedules, and more.

To help you get started and understand influencer marketing strategy, we’ve developed an influencer marketing strategy template to take you from zero to hero in the fastest way possible.

We’ll take you from ideation all the way through to execution and the tracking of your campaign across each platform you decide to use.

If you’re ready to get started, dive into the article below and we’ll go over everything you need for the perfect influencer marketing strategy template.

Why You Need An Influencer Marketing Template Before Launching A Campaign

One of the most common mistakes newer brands make when launching a new marketing campaign is not having a solid roadmap. A roadmap helps you outline exactly what you want to achieve through your influencer marketing efforts and how you will get there.

Think of it like an itinerary for a two-week vacation across Europe. You could just land and randomly choose where you want to go each day.

This would create a unique experience where you see and discover new things. However, it wouldn’t be the most efficient use of your time and money.

With marketing, efficiency and maximizing the money you spend are everything. So instead of just “winging it”, you want a detailed itinerary of each step along the way so you don’t waste a penny as you move from one goal to the next.

Start By Outlining Your Foundation

Just like if you were planning a vacation, you want to start with what your goals are for the trip. Are you looking for a rugged outdoor adventure in the mountains are do you want a luxurious getaway to unwind and relax?

You need to answer this question before deciding on a destination and buying the tickets.

Your marketing efforts are similar. You need to start by determining your goals and what you want to achieve. Then you can start to plan how you will get there.

A common misstep when brands handle their own marketing is to run this process in reverse. They envision a campaign they want to run and then try to shoehorn in their goals along the way.

This usually creates a poor-performing campaign that never quite achieves the goals the brand wants. 

Even worse, these types of campaigns generally do show some brief signs of success, so the brand decides to extend the campaign further. But the result is wasted money on a mediocre campaign that never really takes off.

Starting with a strong foundation built on the goals you want to achieve helps you create a cohesive campaign that delivers results.

An influencer marketing strategy template is the best way to get off on the right foot and avoid wasted time and money.

Define Your Goals

To lay your foundation, you want to decide on your specific marketing goals. This is the first step when creating your influencer marketing template.

These are going to be your high-level goals, not the specific techniques you need to reach those goals. We’ll decide on those further along in the template creation process.

Below are some common high-level goals that most brands use when creating their influencer marketing strategy.

Increase Brand Awareness

Having a great product that nobody knows about is like having money in the bank that you can’t withdraw. It doesn’t do you much good.

One of the common goals for influencer marketing is brand awareness. Influencers can introduce your product to the marketplace in a way that other marketing methods can’t.

It’s an approachable and organic way to increase brand awareness and one that audiences are very receptive to. Since an influencer’s audience is actively seeking out content, they often feel as though they are discovering a new product along with the influencer.

Drive Website Traffic

This influencer marketing goal is most similar to other more traditional forms of digital marketing. In this case, you already have a product and know your messaging that resonates with your target audience.

The goal now is to send traffic to your storefront or offer page that has been optimized for high conversions.

If this is your goal, make sure your offer page, sales funnel, or storefront is optimized before launching a campaign of this type.

A poorly optimized site can make you think your campaign failed when in reality, it worked great. The problem was your site did a poor job of turning the traffic into sales or leads.

Build Trust And Credibility

You may have a great product, but your market and niche are weary of new entrants that are unproven. In this case, you need to build credibility within your niche to help make the rest of your marketing efforts more effective.

This is a well-known strength of influencer marketing and can be one of your goals before building out the rest of your campaign strategy.

This type of campaign will use different influencers and content types than some other campaigns, so you want to identify if this is your goal before moving forward to the next steps.

Introduce Existing Products To New Audiences

If you already have an existing product you may want to expand your target audience and gain new customers. This type of campaign requires more careful research of both your own customers and the influencer’s audience.

You’re essentially trying to push the boundaries of who will respond to your marketing messaging and product selling points with this campaign goal.

This is one of the more difficult goals but when executed correctly, can grow your brand and create more opportunities for scaling.

Launch A New Product

Launching a new product or an entirely new brand is also a common goal for influencer campaigns. These campaigns are constructed slightly differently based on whether you’re adding a new product to your lineup or introducing an entirely new brand.

When launching a new brand, you’ll need to combine brand awareness along with credibility building, and possibly traffic creation. This creates a complex mix and sometimes each one works better as its own campaign.

This can be dependent on your budget, the price point of the product, and other factors.

Although some overlap between campaign types and goals can occur naturally, you don’t want too much overlap.

If one campaign tries to do too many things, it usually ends up not achieving any measurable or lasting results.

So if you need to achieve more than one goal, consider separate campaigns or focus on the most important goal first and build from there.

Increase Overall Brand Engagement & Mentions Across Platforms

This is sometimes confused with brand awareness, but it can have a different purpose depending on your goal and current market positioning.

For this type of campaign, you specifically want to boost engagement. This can be brand mentions, content creation by users, or hashtag mentions.

Sometimes this is to build excitement for upcoming events or product launches. Other times it can be part of a larger campaign that focuses on a different goal.

Campaigns designed specifically to increase a specific type of engagement will be designed from the ground up to achieve that goal. This is done through giveaways, contests, challenges, or other techniques that drive specific engagement.

Determine Your Budget

The next phase for an influencer marketing strategy template is to consider your budget and determine how much you are willing to spend for the campaign.

In a later section, we’ll discuss the ROI for your spending, so this money should be seen as an investment and not just an expense going out the door.

There are a few areas to consider for the budget.

Influencer Costs

The most significant cost for an influencer marketing campaign will be paying the influencers. However, how much influencers cost and what their rates are can be a mystery.

Most influencers don’t like to make their rates public since they generally charge different rates depending on the partnership. A small brand will likely get a different price than if a large, multinational brand approaches them. Even if it’s for the same type of content and campaign.

But to give you an idea, smaller influencers such as micro-influencers with audiences of less than 100,000 can cost anywhere between $500 to roughly $2,000 per paid post.

Smaller influencers known as nano influencers can charge as low as $100 to $300 for a post targeted at their smaller audience.

At the higher end, mid-tier and larger influencers generally charge $5K and up for paid posts relative to their audience size.

Content Costs

Depending on your campaign, you may have additional costs. These can include delivering products to influencers or setting up special landing pages and discount codes for the campaign.

Additional Costs

For more elaborate campaigns such as those which include live event coverage, you may have travel and booking expenses.

Length of Your Campaign

Decide on the length of your campaign and ensure you can fund it as needed until you reach completion.

One area of concern for newer brands is they generally rely on revenue coming in from the original campaign to fund it further. That doesn’t always work out as planned and can leave you scrambling for funds to pay influencers to continue with your content schedule.

Make sure you have the funds or credit lines needed before starting. Having extra resources on hand to extend a highly successful campaign can make a big difference.

As you likely already know, you have to strike when the iron is hot. If your campaign shows great results, it would be devastating to have to end it due to a lack of resources.

Decide On Your Content Briefs

A content brief is essentially an outline or blueprint for what you want the final content to look like. These are sometimes highly detailed and are accompanied by style guides that outline what language can and can’t be used when describing the brand.

Depending on the content, there may also be a script or a partial script to give the influencer an idea of what you want to be said during the content if it contains a video.

At this stage of creating your strategy, you want to leave a certain amount of wiggle room in your content briefs.

Later on, you’ll decide on specific influencers to contact and partner with. Depending on who you choose and the style of content they make, you may need to tweak your content briefs to match.

Another thing that could cause you to make changes to your brief is if an influencer is uncomfortable with certain aspects of the script. This usually doesn’t come up for standard campaigns or reputable products. 

But in some cases, an influencer may want certain details changed about a brief before they move forward.

Partnership Agreements With No Briefs

Certain product reviews, unboxing videos, and other similar content may have no substantial brief at all.

These are generally for partnerships where there is no payment and only the product is offered in exchange for a review or unboxing. In these cases, the influencers are free to say whatever they want.

Situations like this are case-by-case and the agreement between the brand and influencer can vary.

The key thing to consider during this process is that the outcome of the content being produced aligns with your goal in step one of this process.

If changes need to be made to your content briefs that take the focus away from the campaign goal, then you may need to search for a different influencer who is more comfortable with your original brief.

You want to be flexible but don’t compromise the goal of the campaign, as that’s always paramount.

Content Schedule

Once you have your content briefs ready, you can start to create your content schedule. This will outline how much content you are planning to have your partners create.

For simple campaigns with only one influencer, this is likely an easy step and a simple calendar app is all you need.

More complex influencer marketing campaigns can span weeks and involve many different influencers.

For these, you’ll need to spend more time on your content schedule to ensure there are no bottlenecks or overlaps that will cause content to miss a publishing deadline.

Large influencer marketing campaigns are about building momentum and buzz. If your content schedule hits a snag, it really derails any momentum you’ve built up.

If you’re using multiple influencers, make sure to spend extra time creating your schedule and confirming publishing dates with each influencer. This may require you to add more lead time to your campaign, so be aware of that.

Define Your Audience

Established brands with marketing experience will usually have a deep understanding of their customers and their target audience. For those brands, they can generally skip this step as they’ve already performed it.

However, many newer brands or brands without a dedicated marketing department will want to take extra time to understand their core customer demographic.

Performing this step allows you to more accurately choose influencers that match your campaign goals. Choosing influencers is one of the most important steps when creating an influencer marketing strategy. 

If you lack the information needed to choose the right influencers, it makes it very difficult to get a return on your efforts.

Identifying Your Target Customer

You start identifying your target customers by using broad categories and then slowly narrowing those down until you have a clearly defined target.

Broad categories include simple demographics such as gender, income, education level, and other factors. 

Depending on your niche, not all of these broad categories will matter. For example, a cosmetic brand will be interested in finding mostly female audiences. But a business SaaS brand likely won’t place much importance on that distinction when choosing an audience.

Those are obvious examples, but carefully study your brand and your customers to find which broad demographic categories they fall into.

Outlining Pain Points or Aspirations

The next step to narrow down your customer audience is deciding what pain points your product solves. This is usually done by creating personas that represent core customers and why they need your product.

Personas embody all of your customer research and you can have several personas that each represent a different type of customer.

Some of these personas may overlap, but distinct personas will generally require their own specific targeting to get the best marketing results.

Below is an example of a typical persona. In this example, a fashion brand that focuses on business casual clothing for women is identifying one of its core customers.

Persona: Alexandra

Demographics

• Age: 34
• Location: Major metropolitan area (e.g., New York City, San Francisco, Chicago)
• Education: MBA
• Income: $120,000 per year
• Marital Status: Single

Career

• Occupation: Senior Marketing Manager at a growing tech startup
• Work Environment: Fast-paced, innovative office with a business casual dress code
• Career Goals: Chief Marketing Officer position within the next 5 years

Lifestyle

• Values work-life balance but often works long hours
• Frequents upscale restaurants and bars for networking and socializing
• Enjoys yoga and fitness classes for stress relief
• Travels frequently for both work and pleasure
• Active on social media, particularly LinkedIn and Instagram

Fashion Preferences

• Seeks polished, versatile pieces that transition from work to social events
• Favors classic styles with modern twists
• Prioritizes quality and fit over quantity
• Willing to invest in key wardrobe pieces
• Interested in sustainable and ethical fashion options

Shopping Habits

• Shops primarily online due to time constraints
• Loyal to brands that offer consistent quality and fit
• Enjoys personalized shopping suggestions
• Influenced by Instagram influencers and industry peers

Pain Points

• Limited time for shopping and outfit planning
• Difficulty finding clothes that are both professional and stylish
• Needs versatile pieces that can be dressed up or down
• Struggles with maintaining a current wardrobe while adhering to a reasonable budget

Goals

• Project confidence and competence in the workplace
• Express personal style while maintaining a professional image
• Build a versatile wardrobe that simplifies daily dressing decisions
• Support brands that align with her values of sustainability and women’s empowerment

Using this persona, the brand can start to seek out influencers who have a similar audience to “Alexandra” as described in this persona.

Brands can have many different personas or only a few, it depends on the niche and products they offer.

You can create your personas through personal insights, customer surveys, and data collected during your normal sales and business interactions.

You can also seek out who competitors are targeting to see if they have identified personas you may have overlooked. These personas may be receptive to your brand’s messaging and provide a new marketing opportunity.

Although personas are fictional characters, you want to give them real names and even a photo to humanize them as much as possible.

This helps when having discussions or planning with your marketing team. 

Personas are also helpful for product development and many other areas of business besides marketing and targeting customers.

Decide On Which Personas To Target

Once you have your personas, you can decide which ones can be targeted with your current campaign. Based on your goals and budget, you may not be able to target every persona or customer segment.

Don’t try to stretch these categories too much and hope that messaging designed for one persona will resonate with another persona.

This usually doesn’t work and will harm the overall campaign performance even if everything else is done correctly.

Instead, focus on your core persona to reach your campaign goals. If you need additional campaigns to focus on more personas, you can create those campaigns separately.

You’re better off focusing on one persona and getting a higher ROI than trying a reach a larger audience that drains the ROI. There can be few exceptions, but successful brands generally place targeting quality above other metrics.

Search For Influencers

You should have your campaign blueprint put together by now along with an exact idea of the audience you want to reach.

The next step in your influencer marketing strategy is to start finding influencers that have audiences that overlap with the personas you’ve created in the previous step.

Below are some things to keep in mind while performing your search.

Follower Count Isn’t Everything

The total follower count an influencer has isn’t always the key metric to measure the value of that influencer. Bigger isn’t always better and this is especially true if they create generalized content.

One of the advantages of influencer marketing is how it allows you to precisely target audiences. This aspect is more important than the overall number of people who see your message.

Carefully analyze influencers in your niche to determine their audience makeup and demographics. Some of this data is available online via public sources or analytic tools.

Other times you can directly ask influencers for this information if you’re reaching out for a possible brand partnership.

Finally, individual social media platforms have their own internal analytics that you can access via their advertising platform. These are usually free and you just need to sign up or opt-in to the program.

Budget

In a previous step, you already determined your overall budget for the campaign. That will impact how many and what kind of influencers you can partner with.

If you have to target smaller influencers such as nano or micro influencers, don’t worry. These smaller influencers generally have far better targeting and provide higher engagement rates for influencer marketing.

Their overall reach may be lower, but the ROI can be higher. For a new brand on a tight budget, ROI is the most important thing since startup brands can’t afford to run a campaign at a loss for too long while momentum or brand awareness grows.

For higher budgets, you can start to look into more popular influencers such as mid-tier and mega influencers.

Just be sure your personas align well with their audiences. Engagement and other metrics generally start to fall as the audience size grows larger.

This can exacerbate any issues with poor targeting or a mismatch of personas with the influencer’s audience.

Style & Tone

After audience demographics, you want to narrow down your list of potential influencers based on their style and tone.

You want influencers that match your own brand’s attributes, style, and voice.

This won’t always be a perfect fit as each influencer will have their unique personality and way of interacting with the audience they’ve cultivated.

But you want a close alignment here and to also be on the lookout for disqualifiers. For example, if the influencer discusses certain controversial topics that you don’t want associated with your brand.

Some brands may specifically target controversy, so there are exceptions to this rule depending on your niche and how you reach an audience.

But overall, most brands err on the side of caution when dealing with this aspect of influencers.

Contracts

Influencer contracts are important to ensure both parties agree on all terms and that there is some recourse if certain obligations aren’t met.

Contracts can be complicated but below are some important areas that should be covered in any brand influencer contract.

• Payment terms
• Content ownership and usage rights after the campaign
• Approval and editing process
• Confidentiality clauses or NDAs
• Deliverables
• Termination details
• Exclusivity
• Disclosure policies (FTC, platform TOS, etc.)

Analyzing Your Campaign

The final step in your influencer marketing strategy is to set up your analytics to track the campaign and monitor its success.

Depending on your goals, what you track will vary. For brand awareness, you may track things like engagement, reach, and brand mentions.

For campaigns geared toward driving sales and traffic, you’ll monitor traffic sources and conversions more closely, while still keeping an eye on engagement to ensure your messaging resonates.

Common metrics to follow:

• Engagement rate (likes, comments, shares)
• Reach and impressions
• Website traffic from influencer links
• Conversions and sales attributed to influencers
• Brand mention frequency
• Follower growth to your own social media channels
• Cost per engagement
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Sentiment analysis of audience reactions
• Click-through rate (CTR) on influencer content
• User-generated content inspired by the campaign (specific to certain campaigns such as challenges or giveaways)

Analyzing a campaign is crucial for optimizing subsequent campaigns or deciding whether to proceed and scale your current campaign.

Common Mistakes To Avoid When Creating An Influencer Marketing Strategy

Poor planning: this is the most common mistake and it’s made often by brands of all sizes. The truth is that the right product put in front of the right audience will virtually always succeed. If it doesn’t, it means some part of your campaign lacked the planning to achieve that goal.

Using an influencer marketing strategy template like we’ve outlined here helps you avoid this problem.

Not vetting influencers: Not fully vetting influencers or not fully understanding their audience leads to mismatches between the influencer’s audience and your target customer. The result is a poor-performing campaign.

Vague or incomplete content briefs: A vague content brief can cause your campaign not to deliver the message you intended. This leads to poor engagement and overall poor performance.

Underfunding: Lacking the funds to run the campaign your planning generally leads to underperformance or stopping the campaign early. Have realistic goals and plan your campaign around your budget to get the best ROI.

Using The wrong metrics: Make sure you focus on the right metrics based on your campaign goals. Focusing on the wrong metrics will cause you to choose the wrong influencers.

Influencer Marketing Template Quick-Start Guide

Here’s a quick-start guide for creating an influencer marketing strategy based on our template:

1. Define Your Goals

Choose from:

•   Increase brand awareness
•   Drive website traffic
•   Build trust and credibility
•   Introduce existing products to new audiences
•   Launch a new product
•   Increase brand engagement and mentions

2. Determine Your Budget

 Consider:

•   Influencer costs
•   Content costs
•   Additional costs (e.g., travel, events)
•   Campaign length

3. Create Content Briefs

• Outline desired content

• Leave room for influencer input

• Align with campaign goals

4. Develop Content Schedule

• Plan content distribution

• Coordinate with multiple influencers if necessary

5. Define Your Audience

• Create customer personas

• Identify demographics, pain points, and aspirations

• Choose which personas to target

6. Search for Influencers

• Look beyond follower count

• Match influencers to your budget

• Ensure alignment with brand style and tone

7. Establish Contracts

Include:

•   Payment terms
•   Content ownership
•   Approval process
•   Deliverables
•   Exclusivity
•   Disclosure policies

8. Set Up Analytics

Track these metrics based on goals:

•   Engagement rate
•   Reach and impressions
•   Website traffic
•   Conversions and sales
•   Brand mentions
•   ROI

Conclusion

While influencer marketing can appear casual and rather simple, highly successful campaigns are the result of careful behind-the-scenes planning to ensure everything works together.

Following this influencer marketing strategy template should help you develop, implement, and track a strong campaign from start to finish.