You're a marketing leader. How can you use strategy to make your influencer campaigns more effective?

Beyond the typical goals of reach and engagement, consider setting objectives around audience education, community building, and advocacy (in other words how to increase lower funnel!). This broader perspective can guide more nuanced and impactful campaign strategies.

An influencer marketing campaign that will have a good result depends on some factors that you, as a leader, must be aware of: - Choose the right influencers, based on the audience you need to reach with your product/service - creation of a briefing adaptable to the influencer’s content - Release co-creation with the influencer before recording the campaign Furthermore, being alongside a team with diverse skills, and using AI to help in all processes, will certainly have a sensational result.

Start by clearly defining the objectives of your influencer campaign. - Understand your audience. - Identify the Right Influencers & offer Value to Influencers. - Develop a Creative Strategy. - Stay Compliant and Transparent. - Track and Measure Performance.

As a marketing leader, I prioritize aligning influencer campaigns with our overarching business goals. By thoroughly researching and selecting influencers whose audience matches our target demographic, crafting authentic and engaging content, and fostering genuine relationships with influencers, we can ensure our campaigns resonate deeply with our audience, resulting in increased brand awareness, engagement, and ultimately, conversions.

Ensure that your key performance indicators (KPIs) are directly linked to your objectives. For example, if your goal is to increase online donations for NGOs, track metrics like the percentage increase in donations and analyze the campaign's effectiveness. This approach will aim at ensuring resources are allocated efficiently and influencer partnerships align with the bigger marketing picture.

Understand your audience- where they consume from, what they like, their pain points and preferences. This will help you target the right influencers that the audience can connect with.

One thing I have found helpful is that understanding your market audience is crucial. Typically for NGOs, the target market to increase donation inflows comprises of institutional and individual donors. Institutional donors often prioritize relationships, and seek evidence of the NGO's track record in achieving results, rather than engaging on social media platforms. Knowing these characteristics of your audience and organization enables you to refine your influencer selection process effectively.

Based on my experience, its advisable to utilize one or more platforms for your influencer campaigns, focusing more on those that yield higher engagement rates. Direct efforts towards creating content that resonates well with your audience on the most engaged platform. By enhancing the strength of this platform, you can simultaneously work on boosting engagement across other platforms in your campaign strategy.

Seek out influencers who are already genuine fans of your brand or products, even if they have a smaller following. Their authentic enthusiasm can translate into more convincing and effective promotions that even bigger influencers can use as reference. Pro Tip: You are going to need a software platform for this!

Some influencers may have inflated follower counts due to fake followers or purchasing the entire social media page which can skew their numbers. As a result, these followers may lack genuine engagement or meaningful relationship with the influencer. Look for signs of genuine engagement, such as likes, comments, shares, and reviews, rather than just focusing on follower counts.

Finding the balance between brand objectives and influencer authenticity is a tricky thing. But it must be strived for and managed. We've all seen campaigns that are either overly brand heavy or completely off brand, so finding the sweet spot comes to casting, communication, and active collaboration.

This is a necessary step in achieving success in influencer campaigns. Regular communication is important throughout the campaign process to address any concern there may be, provide periodic updates, and celebrate achievements. Both the organization and the influencer should be open for feedback from both sides to help refine and improve the campaign strategy.

Look for ways to repurpose successful content across different platforms and formats to maximize ROI. Based on the data analytics you can identify patterns and insights that can inform future campaigns and repurpose options.

Monitor now just how your campaign performs in terms of engagements, but look at brand sentiment, website traffic, and any relevant sales metrics, to determine the true impact of your team's influencer campaigns.

Adopt an integrated approach. Instead of running IM campaigns in silos, integrate them into your entire marketing mix. This is easier to do once you've established who your audience are and what your key messages would be. This may look like content created by the influencer being used for TV ads, influencer taking over brand's social media page. A brand that does this mix well is footasylum, a UK urban wear brand that runs a podcasts featuring various influencers where they discuss urban culture, while wearing merchandise from the brand. The influencers further share this on their social channels for more reach. This places the products in front of the brand's target audience and ideal buyers. Create value and remain authentic about it.