How can you balance short-term and long-term influencer marketing goals?

Balancing short-term and long-term influencer marketing goals starts with clearly defining your objectives and the metrics you'll use to measure success. Short-term goals might include immediate sales or engagement boosts, while long-term goals could involve brand awareness or customer loyalty. By establishing these goals upfront and setting corresponding metrics, you can tailor your influencer campaigns to align with both short-term gains and long-term brand growth. This strategic approach ensures that your influencer marketing efforts contribute to both immediate results and sustainable, lasting impact.

In my experience working with a B2B software company, we faced the challenge of balancing short-term results with long-term brand building. Our short-term goal was to increase website traffic and generate leads through influencer collaborations. However, we also wanted to establish our brand as a thought leader in the industry, which required a more long-term approach. To strike the right balance, we divided our influencer marketing efforts into two strategies. In the short term, we collaborated with micro-influencers who had highly engaged audiences within our target market. Simultaneously, we worked on building relationships with industry experts and influencers who could help us establish credibility in the long run.

First of all, clubhouse is dead (coming up next is… threads, but that’s a debate for another time). Please don’t waste your resources on that app. For influencers: Choose creators who’s target audience is in synergy with your ideal buyer. For platform: Choose a platform where your target audience hangs out. Choosing the right influencer and platform are extremely critical and can make or break your influencer campaign.

Think about it like this: How an influencer creates a long term relationship with their audience, you as a brand need to create the same relationship with the influencer and in turn with their audience. This only happens if you work with the influencer regularly over a period of many months instead of a one-off basis. For example: Hello Fresh has been collaborating with influencers on YouTube for years now. They have long term contracts (yes, years long) with the influencers that help them build brand recall and trust with their audience in a long term.

?? the key is to have a well-defined influencer marketing strategy that integrates both short-term and long-term goals to ensure your brand gains both immediate results and sustained growth and trust within your target audience.

Two things I've found helpful in developing influencer relationships 1. As relationships are built get clear on expectations from both sides (communication schedule, paid vs. sponsorship, expected results, accommodations, etc.) and the performance indicators that point to that influencer's/content creator's success. 2. A well-defined strategy can help stop ineffective, unprofitable, or meaningless influencer campaigns. If they're not profitable for the bottom line, the continual communications that naturally happen through well-developed relationships should create ease in any applicable necessary terminations. Don't draw things out longer than necessary. Be clear about respectfully letting them move on.

It's all good to say there will be a balance between long term and short term goals. Fact is, almost the entire ecosystem has a muddled way of operating with creator marketing. Most often we end up treating this as just another channel. Panic investments happen. Trying to get more bottom funnel outcomes out of the campaigns. If a marketer is lucky, she will manage to manoeuvre past the internal constraints and execute a campaign which is organic. Genuinely engaging. That does move the needle for the brand. All other KPIs measure outputs. Outcomes from such investments is still a brave, irrational investment. Only the luckiest marketers have the luxury to be irrational in their experiments on these.