1. Define your goals and target audiences

First, outline your objectives to prevent launching collaborations without a clear direction. Influencer marketing is usually not a goal in itself but part of an overarching campaign with goals and KPIs. Is your primary goal brand awareness, lead generation, community growth, or filling your image bank? This is crucial for the next step: strategy.

2. Establish your strategy

Determine the channel selection, budget allocation, quantity, and size of influencer profiles in your influencer strategy.

• Will you opt for a campaign-based collaboration or a long-term partnership? If a campaign-based collaboration is successful, ambassadorship can be considered later.

• Which channels will you use? This depends on the target audience you want to reach. For instance, the age group on TikTok is generally younger than on Facebook.

• What type of content will you employ? The kind of content you brief your influencers on should align with your goals. For example, a video performs better for reach than a photo on Instagram, and a story with a link is practical if you want the audience to land on a specific page.

• How many influencers will you engage? Choose between micro-, meso-, or macro-influencers, or perhaps a combination

3. Select wisely

When selecting an influencer profile, consider the following:

• Does the profile align with your brand values? Does your brand conflict with an ongoing collaboration of a competitor?

• What is the engagement rate of the profile? This is particularly relevant if your primary goal is engagement. The engagement rate measures the level of interaction as a percentage of an influencer's followers. There are various free web tools for this. An Instagram account with more followers isn't always better. On the contrary, micro-influencers often have a more engaged community and therefore a higher engagement rate than macro-influencers.

• What is the quality and specialty of the content the influencer typically posts? If you brief an influencer to create reels while they have little experience with it, there's a significant risk of poor-quality content.

Struggling to find influencers? Platforms like LinkPizza, Join, or Hulc connect brands with influencers. Additionally, tools like Stellar provide quick and easy insights into an influencer's engagement rate and follower quality.

4. Measure, report and compare

Your budget is spent, and the content is posted, but how do you know if a collaboration was valuable? Measure this by requesting the statistics of the collaboration(s) and comparing them to your predefined goals. Calculate the total reach per target audience and determine the engagement rate per post (likes + comments + saves + shares / impressions). The above mentioned tools can assist you in this. Also, compare what the collaboration cost versus what it delivered. How much more or less did the collaboration cost compared to advertising on social media? Don't forget that high-quality influencer content also has media value that isn't always reflected in statistics.

5. Build a database

Last but not least: collect the profiles you've collaborated with in a database. Note how the collaboration went and which partnerships aren't worth repeating (a so-called 'blacklist'). If a collaboration went exceptionally well, there might be opportunities for ambassadorship, and you can consider utilizing that individual across campaigns.