How To Set And Achieve Your Influencer Marketing Goals

Whether you’re just getting started with influencer marketing, or you've been doing so for some time, creating effective influencer marketing campaigns requires time and planning. 

While it can be tempting (especially at the beginning) to dive straight into making connections with potential creators and brainstorming exciting ideas for content, a pivotal first step is setting your influencer marketing goals. 

What do you really want to achieve from each campaign? Where does influencer marketing fit into your marketing strategy? How can it support your wider business objectives? 

There are now a multitude of ways that influencers can help marketers achieve their goals – from supporting performance marketers to achieve better targeting and content for paid ads and product marketers gain more feedback and input on new products. 

At Aspire, we work alongside marketing teams from all industries to help them discover all of the possible ways influencer marketing can help elevate their brands. In this post, we highlight the three most crucial and the accompanying strategies to help you to smash your influencer campaigns in 2022.

Brand Awareness

The key to almost every influencer marketing campaign must be the desire to build, grow or expand your business’ brand awareness. It forms the basis of virtually every online and offline brand marketing strategy and is vital when focusing on your influencer marketing goals.

Why? Because if potential customers don’t know who or where you are, they won’t be able to engage or, even worse… buy from you.

Companies who believe it’s critical to only focus on sales tend to have very short-lived influencer marketing campaigns. That’s because sales-only focused revenue streams tend to fall flat quickly without factoring in brand awareness growth.

In online marketing, building brand awareness has proven to shape longer-lasting relationships with followers who repeatedly purchase a product or service. There are several ways influencers can generate increased brand awareness, with successful companies often combining a number of these strategies together.

Brand Mentions

Brand mentions are an excellent way for influencers to subtly build brand awareness by organically talking or posting about you on their social media accounts and blogs. Carefully yet consistently referencing brands during social media posts promotes your brand name naturally and is often more impactful than targeted branded ads.

Product Reviews

Product Reviews provide first-hand social proof of the value of your brand’s product or service. Here influencers help you generate brand awareness by offering visual demonstrations and product reviews directly to your specific target markets.

Product Giveaways 

As an influencer marketing strategy, product giveaways provide two incredible opportunities to build brand awareness. Firstly, the product promotion automatically highlights your brand. Second, and most importantly, it actively places your product directly into the hands of your target audience to try out and fall in love with it themselves.

Follower Engagement

Did you know that in our recent Aspire Survey, we discovered that 70% of brands with an influencer marketing strategy choose to work with smaller creators (usually less than 60,000 followers)?

There is a simple reason for this. That’s because Micro and Nano-Influencers provide far greater follower engagement levels than Macros and Mega-Influencers can possibly achieve. For brands like yours, this can drastically reduce your Cost Per Engagement (CPE), dramatically increasing your marketing Return on Investment (ROI).

Follower engagement is an absolute hero metric when determining your influencer marketing goals and can be achieved using several different strategies.

Account Takeovers

Account takeovers involve allowing an influencer or content creator to temporarily post content on your brand’s social media account. Social media takeovers offer a fantastic opportunity for an influencer to make your brand instantly relatable, generating genuine engagement with your desired target market.

Brand Ambassadors 

A brand ambassador program encourages companies to partner with one or more influencers to make them the face of their brand. Building a long-term partnership with a key influencer can deliver you consistent, long-term follower engagement with your ideal customer base.

Influencer Challenges

Influencer challenges and contests are a proactive influencer marketing strategy that actively encourages follower engagement. Offering an incentive or reward not only initiates followers to interact with your brand, but it also creates a buzz that draws further attention to the levels of engagement being generated.

Follower engagement has various metrics, including ‘Likes’, ‘Retweets’, and ‘Comments’, to help calculate follower growth, ROI and CPE returns. However, Brand Awareness and Follower Engagement ultimately lead to the third priority when setting your influencer marketing goals… Driving Sales.

Driving Sales

Of course, when you think of influencer marketing goals, you instinctively think about sales targets… which is why it also makes it onto our list! However, without brand awareness and follower engagement, focusing just on sales generation can often lead to short-lived marketing campaigns.

That’s because brand awareness and follower engagement work hand-in-hand with driving your brand’s online sales. When done well, these influencer marketing goals can provide maximum exposure for your brand, adding visibility and driving sales directly from your desired target market.

Using Promo Codes and Affiliate Links offers brands a chance to accurately monitor the success of an individual influencer’s sales generation. Performance indicators such as these allow you to use analytics to tweak your marketing campaigns to generate improved revenue streams each time.

As a result, this allows you to focus on the influencers who consistently drive followers to buy from your brand.

Promo Codes

Offering influencers the chance to include promo codes in their content posts actively encourages followers to try your brand out for size. For centuries, offering customers discounts has been a proven and potent way to energize sales – even more so when applied online.Additionally, promo codes are ideal for seasonal sales promotions. For example, brands often target an influencer’s followers in the run-up to specific events, including Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Black Friday promotions (psst… you can check out our guide to planning ahead for the holidays here).

Affiliate links

Affiliate links are a brand’s ultimate tool in converting an influencer from just a marketer into a genuine salesperson for your brand. Influencers can earn commission through traffic driven from their content posts directly to your sales landing pages.

With thousands of followers, content creators can use their sphere of influence to generate incredible revenue streams – both for your brand and for themselves!

Influencer Allowlisting

Influencer Allowlisting has proven to be a highly successful marketing strategy for brands to organically advertise to a specific targeted market of an influencer's followers. It allows brands to edit and post under an influencer’s handle and promote a product or service more naturally than branded posts or ads.

While Brand Awareness is top of the list of influencer marketing goals, the next priority has to be Follower Engagement.

So that summarizes our three key influencer marketing goals and the strategies used by global brands to achieve them. If you’re looking for any additional help getting started, our Strategic Services team can help you get the ball rolling! Check out our packages and get in touch today. 

Inspired by these influencer marketing strategies and ready to get started for yourself? Take the next step in your influencer marketing journey and learn how to find influencers the easy way in 2022.