5 Influencer Marketing Goals Your Brand Should Focus On

Why should you worry about influencer marketing goals?

In fact, why should you use influencer marketing in the first place?

Consumers have always looked up to experts, peers, or friends for guidance and recommendations on their purchases. Clearly, influence is something that has always been an integral part of consumers' buying decisions.

And so, it’s not wrong to say that influencer marketing has been around for ages. Only the platforms or mediums have changed.

People trust social influencers way more than fancy advertising campaigns with celebrities. No wonder why brands prefer to use influencer marketing to boost their brand awareness and connect with larger audiences.

In a study by Linqia, 92% of marketers said they found influencer marketing to be truly effective.

However, one aspect where I’ve seen many young brands falter is goal-setting.

That’s why many brands turn to reputable, award-winning influencer marketing agencies such as HireInfluence or seek help from consultants like me.

If you ask me, goal-setting is the most important part of planning an influencer campaign. To make sure that your campaigns deliver the best results, it’s essential to clearly define your influencer marketing goals.

If you focus on too many goals at once, that won’t help either. So, every influencer campaign should target one (or maybe a couple at most) key business objective.

5 Most Important Influencer Marketing Goals for Your Brand

Only a goal-oriented influencer marketing strategy can bring success. Let’s take a look at 5 of the most important influencer marketing goals your brand should focus on. We’ll also take a look at a few strategies that can work best for each of them.

1. Brand Awareness

One of the most important influencer marketing goals a brand should focus on is to increase their brand awareness. People will only convert into your customers when they begin to recognize and see your brand.

To find the reach and the audience of an influencer, you can leverage influencer marketing platforms like Heepsy. The tool provides a comprehensive influencer report that can help brands ascertain if a particular influencer is suitable for them or not.

Once you find the right influencer, what’s the next step?

You need to focus on influencer marketing strategies that will get you brand mentions, followers, and shares. Influencers can encourage followers to share your branded content using relevant and effective hashtags.

If your influencer marketing goal is to raise brand awareness, the following strategies can help you:

Brand Mentions

You can ask influencers to introduce your brand to their audiences. Most influencers talk about brands they genuinely love. So make sure you connect with the right influencers to meet your influencer marketing goal.

The influencer you collaborate with should have an audience you want to target and a personality that fits your brand.

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Product Reviews

Influencers can feature your brand’s products or services in their posts. However, it needs to be more of a review in which the influencer shares their experience using your products. It must not sound salesy or pushy.

This post where Faith Marie, a beauty addict, shares her love for the skincare brand Caudalie, is a great example.

Image via Instagram

Contests or Giveaways

Collaborating with influencers to host giveaways and contests is a great way to gain more brand exposure. This exposes your brand to a new audience who can be your potential customers. Contests and giveaways can help to engage a large audience.

If your influencer marketing goal is to boost brand awareness, you need to encourage sharing of your content using contests. Use branded hashtags to gain more exposure for your brand.

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2. Traffic

Boosting your website traffic is an important influencer marketing goal that you must not overlook. But not all traffic is created equal. You should focus on getting traffic that is relevant and which can lead to conversions.

To drive traffic to your website consistently, you should focus on creating engaging content. You can do this through:

Sponsored Blog Posts

Take advantage of every opportunity that allows you to engage a crowd. You can connect with bloggers and ask them to write blog posts featuring your brand.
Image via Value Minded Mama

Not only can this be great to boost your visibility among their audience, but also a way to drive traffic to your website. So make sure that your influencers include links to your products or website on their posts. This will help you drive traffic, which is one of the most important marketing goals for a brand.

Guest Posts

You can also write guest posts for high-authority sites with a link back to your website. Respond to every query on the published post to engage readers and drive them to your website.

Leo Widrich, the co-founder of Buffer. wrote about 150 guest posts within the first nine months of their launch. This drove a massive amount of traffic to the app and helped him achieve his influencer marketing goal. It increased their customer base from zero to 100K customers in just nine months.

Sponsored Social Media Content

It’s the age of social media. In fact, 77% of the population in the United States is using it today.
Collaborating with social influencers to co-create high-quality, engaging content can increase traffic to your website manifold.

Klean Plate, a food company, managed to grow their traffic by 204% in four months, primarily using influencer marketing.

The startup collaborated with a number of food bloggers, mom bloggers, and fitness enthusiasts, and used branded hashtags to drive traffic.

Image via Instagram

3. Sales and Lead Generation

The primary goal of all marketing efforts is to generate leads and drive sales and profits.

If your influencer marketing goal is to drive sales, relying only on shoutouts or product reviews won’t work. You need to focus on strategies that can give you conversions.

Affiliate Marketing and Discount Codes

You should come up with campaigns that will benefit both the influencer and their followers (potential customers). The best idea is to meet this influencer marketing goal is to make use of affiliate marketing and discount codes.

This campaign would involve a custom discount code that can encourage consumers to make a purchase. You can also provide your influencers with affiliate links that will help you track sales driven by them. Then, you can offer commissions to the influencers for every sale they drive.

Here is an example of such a collaboration between Effin Shop and Jessica Lo.
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Collective Shoutouts on Instagram

92% of marketers believe Instagram to be the most effective social media platform for influencer marketing.

Collaborating with multiple Instagrammers to promote your products can generate more leads and drive extensive sales in a short span of time. So partner with influencers whose audience resonates with your brand and may buy your products.

New York based retailer Lord & Taylor, collaborated with 50 influencers for a campaign to promote their new Design Lab collection. Each influencer promoted the same dress on Instagram which got sold out the following weekend.

Here are a few of those posts where influencers promoted the dress by Lord & Taylor.
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4. Social Media Followers and Engagement

When you focus on increasing brand awareness, you may also see an increase in your social followers and engagement. It is easy to combine these two influencer marketing goals together as they complement each other.

No matter what your follower count is, I’m sure you’ll always be looking to grow them. To get more followers, you need to focus on building a strong bond with influencers. Establishing strong bonds with your influencers can help to increase brand awareness and follower count.

However, having a large number of followers isn’t enough. It is important that they engage with your content.

This can be possible only through interesting and engaging content that helps you connect with your audience. In fact, 90% of marketers consider engagement to be the most important performance indicator of an influencer campaign.

Image via Linqia

A perfect strategy to increase your follower base to a great extent is to take your influencer collaborations to the next level.

Takeovers

A takeover is an effective influencer campaign where you let an influencer take over your social media profile for a short period of time. It may be for a

This is a great way to strengthen your relationship with your influencers and get their audience to engage with your brand. A successful takeover will help you meet multiple influencer marketing goals.

However, before you attempt a takeover, make sure that you have worked with the influencer for a few campaigns and can trust them. The more trust you build with your influencers, the better results you can expect.

Image via Instagram

Takeovers can be of two types. You can let an influencer take complete access over one or more of your social media profiles. Or, you can ask the influencer to send you the content and you can post them on their behalf.

Brand Ambassadors

Look at your current influencer collaborations to spot the ones who share the same beliefs as you. If you have worked with them on several good campaigns, you should think of establishing a meaningful, long-term partnership.

Make them your brand ambassadors – the faces of your brand. This will help to make them feel more valued. And this will directly reflect on their work too. Brand ambassador programs can drive more followers and increase engagement. They will provide great support to help you achieve your influencer marketing goals.

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5. Reputation

Every brand wants to strengthen their brand image and earn a good reputation among their potential customers. The best way to do this is to build meaningful partnerships with relevant influencers.

Consumers trust their peers, friends, and their favorite influencers. It is important for brands to get their influencers to trust them. These influencers will then help you convert people into loyal customers for your brand.

If building reputation is your influencer marketing goal, you should think of ways to make your influencers and their audience feel valued. This will help you strengthen your bond and thereby, build a good reputation.

However, you need to thoroughly evaluate an influencer’s profile before collaborating with them. After all, your brand’s reputation is linked to theirs when you work together. As mentioned earlier, you can find details for multiple influencers on Heepsy’s influencer marketing platform.

Events

One effective way to make your influencers feel valued is to host an event for them. You can send invites to influencers who have done a good job with campaigns. It will make them feel appreciated and will help you make a stronger connection with them.

Hosting an event can be an opportunity to create more engaging content for your brand. With influencers talking about being a part of the event, your brand will gain greater exposure.

For their launch event in Australia, Marks and Spencer invited lifestyle and fashion bloggers like Rebecca Judd. They then promoted the event on social media.

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You can also share exclusive invites to events that you’re participating in. For example, many brands leverage the popular music festival Coachella, for meeting their influencer marketing goals.

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Gifting

Sending gifts to your favorite influencers can be another way to make them feel valued. Influencers, like normal people, love gifts and often take the time to share a genuine post about how they feel about the gift.

These little efforts can take your influencer collaborations a long way. Such posts by influencers add to the credibility of your brand.
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FAQs

Q1. What is the purpose of influencer marketing?

A. The purpose of influencer marketing is to leverage an individual’s influence and power to promote a brand. When an influential person endorses a brand, their fans are likely to take note and put some trust in it.

Q2. Is influencer marketing effective?

A. Yes, influencer marketing is effective. In fact, 92% of marketers vouched for its effectiveness in a study conducted by Linqia.

Q3. Why is influencer marketing important?

A. Influencer marketing is important because it can help you get more followers, increase your reach, sales, and engagement rate. Along with this, it can help you win audience trust and boost your reputation. All in all, influencer marketing has many benefits.

Q4. What is an influencer marketing strategy?

A. A plan that you create to reach out to influencers and run promotional campaigns is referred to as an influencer marketing strategy. From identifying relevant influencers to planning campaigns, and analyzing them, influencer marketing strategies outline it all.

Q5. How do you measure the effectiveness of influencer marketing?

A. Some of the metrics that you can use to measure the effectiveness of influencer marketing campaigns include:

• Website Traffic
• Likes
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Shares
• Follower Count
• Sales
• Revenue

Q6. What are the goals of influencer marketing?

A. Each influencer marketing campaign can have different goals. These can include boosting brand awareness, increasing engagement, and getting more traffic and sales.

Final Thoughts

Clear and concise influencer marketing goals are the key to a successful influencer campaign.

Never undermine the importance of goal-setting for any campaigns you undertake. In fact, it’s the first thing you should do.

Then look for strategies to launch a full-fledged influencer campaign focused on meeting those defined KPIs.

Can you think of any other influencer marketing goals and how you can meet them? Let me know in the comments below.