If you’re a marketer looking to reach new audiences, partnering with influencers can be a great way to do that. It’s an incredibly effective strategy -- in fact, nearly 49% of consumers look to influencers for product recommendations.

As target markets get younger and more digitally connected, influencers can help organizations connect with consumers where they are: online. According to analysts at Twitter, organizations that used both brand and influencer Tweets saw a 5.2x increase in conversions.

Influencer Marketing Strategy An excellent influencer marketing strategy targets key influencers that could relay an organization’s messaging or product to their target market, or to an influencer’s engaged audience. By building real, productive influencer relationships, brands can leverage an influencer’s reach to achieve their marketing goals.

But if you're considering hiring an influencer for your brand, where do you even begin? It can be tricky to narrow down your goals, what type of influencer you want, and what goals you hope to meet with an influencer strategy.

To help you narrow down your search and ensure your influencer strategy is as effective as possible, we've created a template and guidelines to help get you started.

Influencer Marketing Strategy Checklist

Take a look at the following 6 steps you'll want to take when first creating and implementing an influencer strategy:

1. Define your goals.

Are you trying to increase brand awareness or drive engagement? Do you want to spruce up your lead generation method or do you want to build on the loyalty and goodwill of your existing audience? By clearly defining the end goal of your strategy, you can work your way backwards to determine the steps needed to get there. Using your goals as guiding lights will also define your strategy’s metrics for success -- these will help keep your campaign on track.

2. Identify and define your audience.

Properly segmenting and identifying your audience can determine the effectiveness and success of your influencer campaign. Depending on your organization’s target personas or ideal buyer, you should group consumers by demographics, psychographics, buyer lifecycle stage, or preferred channel. After establishing your marketing goals, it’s easier to identify which audiences would best help you achieve them.

3. Choose a type of campaign.

Guest posting, sponsored content, re-targeting, co-creation, competitions, mentions on social, discount codes, and more are terrific examples of influencer marketing campaigns. The method by which you promote your brand through an influencer depends on your goals and target audience’s preferences.

For example, Audible partnered with best-selling author Tim Ferriss on his podcast, where his listeners could use his custom link to get a discount on Audible content. This partnership delivered a relevant offer to the target audience, benefitting Audible, Tim Ferriss, and all of his podcast listeners.

After you’ve decided the medium and campaign type, it’s time to create compelling content. Even if you have the most exciting campaign or best product-market fit, consumers will lose interest if your messaging or content doesn’t captivate them. Make it as easy as possible for your influencer to share your stuff -- the better your messaging fits with their audience and is drafted and ready to go, the sooner your influencer will push your brand out to their audience.

4. Find your brand influencers.

If you were to reach out to random people to promote your offering, odds are that you wouldn’t get the results and value you were looking for. The partnership becomes extremely transactional -- the organization is only interested in the influencer’s follower count and the influencer takes on a product endorsement role. Instead, an ideal influencer partnership is more of a brand ambassadorship -- by putting the relationship with the influencer first and prioritizing influencer-brand fit over followers, it’s more likely your messaging will resonate.

When researching influencers, your can search through relevant hashtags, see Instagram’s suggested users based on profiles you follow, or check out influencers your competitors are using to get ideas on where to look.

5. Promote!

Once you’ve successfully identified your target market, found your ideal influencer, and created compelling content, all that’s left is promoting your new partnership! Go to your favorite social channels or draft a blog post to generate some buzz.

6. Track your success.

It’s critical to track the performance of your partnership -- track the traffic, engagement, conversions or the other metrics of success you decided when you determined your marketing goals. The is a lot of potential for high ROI from influencer partnerships, but it’s critical to see if and or how your influencer content performs better than your non-influencer content. Check in with your original goals to analyze your success and how to repeat them.

Influencer Strategy Template

Are you ready to try these influencer marketing strategies with your organization? Download our free strategy template and achieve your marketing goals today.