Six Tips to Optimize Your Influencer Strategy

Today, Influencer Marketing is a key element in an overall business strategy. It allows brands to connect with their target audience, spread awareness, and increase sales in a way unlike any other marketing channel. The good news and the bad news is that influencer marketing is constantly evolving, and there’s no “one size fits all” approach that works for every brand. So, you’ll have to invest time and energy to find the secret sauce that works for your brand.  

But before jumping into optimization, you’ll need to build a strategic foundation first. For a refresher on laying the groundwork (and to get a free template!), check out our guide here.  

So, with an initial strategy in place and campaigns running, what’s next? From here, it’s time to start digging into your results and tracking your success. These results will illuminate what is and isn’t working in your current strategy, giving you the opportunity to adjust to produce bigger and better results. 

Not sure how to accurately track and understand your results? Let’s dive in.

1. Accurately Track & Measure 

You’ve worked hard onboarding influencers and managing all deliverables, and you’re finally seeing the content going live! So what’s next? If you, like many other marketers, struggle with campaign reporting and understanding your results- you aren’t alone! 

Tracking results doesn’t have to mean spending hours compiling never-ending screenshots and manually tallying metrics in scattered spreadsheets. Luckily there are end-to-end influencer platforms, like Klear, that not only help you find and manage your collaborations but also report on them. So, if you haven’t invested in a tool yet, now is the time. Without help, you’ll burn yourself out compiling your results, will be behind on real-time updates, and will miss the opportunity to optimize. With Klear’s measurement module, you can easily report key metrics like reach, engagement rate, clicks, and conversions in real time to understand the true ROI behind your efforts. Without having to manually compile all results, this will leave you with plenty of time and brain power to dedicate to analyzing and focusing on your strategy!  

2. Uncover What’s Performing The Best 

So now that you are set up to track your results, it’s time to find the insights in your metrics. This will help you figure out what’s working for your brand. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean you have to get lost in an abyss of data or go cross-eyed figuring out how to create a pivot table. The answer again lies in your trusted influencer tool. While most end-to-end influencer platforms provide measurement dashboards of varying degrees, Klear’s Measurement dashboard pulls out all the stops. With a full tab dedicated to your campaign analytics, you’ll be served up interactive charts and graphs auto-populated with your campaign data. Including:

• Performance over time
• Comparisons across social networks and media types
• Leaderboards for your top influencers, pieces of content, and top products sold 
• Audience Demographics 

With these charts and visualizations at the ready, you can get right to business. You can investigate things like:

• Seeing spikes in engagement, or sales to figure out what’s driving the most success
• Take a closer look at which social channels and types of content resonate best with your audience
• Figure out if videos or images generate better traction
• Discover your most engaging posts to drive your creative direction moving forward 

And if you’re hungry for more data once you get a taste, don’t worry there’s more. You can take it a step further to customize your data and look at things through another lens. We know many campaigns include cross-platform initiatives with different types of influencers. With Klear’s Analytics, you can customize your dashboard to add filters so you can review results from subsets of influencers, on specific channels, during different timeframes.  

So, dig in and uncover what’s working best for your brand. With this knowledge, you’ll then have the opportunity to adjust your strategy to focus on what will keep your results trending upward.

3. Refine Your Strategy 

After you understand what’s driving your success (and have the data to back it up!), you are ready to refine your strategy. Now that you have a better grasp of the impact of your influencers, the types of content, and the best social channels, spend time adjusting your approach. This could be small changes or an overhaul of your original approach based on the results you are seeing. 

This could look like:  

• Shifting your social platform priority to focus on more Instagram or TikTok content
• Dedicating more budget to video creation rather than static imagery
• Re-engaging your top performers for longer-term collaborations (more on this later!) 
• Recruiting more influencers like your top performers 
• Adjusting your creative brief to generate content aligned with your top engaging posts 
• Focusing your editorial calendar on key timeframes that drive the most impact for your brand 

These are just a few examples, but the list could go on. There are endless opportunities to use the insights learned and apply them to make your strategy smarter. Keeping your strategy fluid and adjusting to focus on what’s working well, can have a big payoff down the line. 

4. Don’t Be Afraid To Test

Now, just because you’ve learned what’s working well for your brand doesn’t mean you have to stick to just that forever. Influencer Marketing is an evolving industry with new platforms, creators, and trends on the move daily. So keep an open mind, be innovative, and don’t be afraid to test new things! Your strategy of today could start to get stale next week, so stay up-to-date on what’s happening in the space and be open to adapting. 

If you’ve only tested a few channels and types of content, it might be time to branch out. You won’t truly know what works best until you experiment and see the data for your brand. With the rise of influencers and creators across all channels, there are more close-knit communities to tap into than ever before. So, for example, if you are a travel brand and have only invested in Instagram so far, it could be time to explore reaching new audiences on TikTok or YouTube. You may be surprised to discover the impact your brand can have on other channels you weren’t expecting. And if you do test and see the results aren’t where you want them to be, that’s the beauty of an evolving strategy. You can continue to adjust and iterate as you go! 

5. Think Long-Term 

Last (but very much not least!) is thinking long-term. We’re talking specifically about long-term relationships and extending the success of your campaigns. We went over how you can uncover your top-performing influencers, so it’s time to focus on building lasting relationships. At Klear, we believe in the power of long-term influencer and creator partnerships to propel you forward. While it’s great to activate influencers at scale, don’t get caught up only in the number of influencers you activate. Instead, focus on the impact each influencer is driving. Once you uncover your top influencers, building relationships and activating them again can build continued trust and loyalty from their growing audience. This will end up saving you time and money down the line as you spend less time onboarding and more time generating results! 

Plus, as your relationships grow stronger with your influencers, they will become another great resource to propel your strategy forward. The closer you get, the more open your influencers will be in providing thoughtful feedback. Sharing what they like/don’t like about the partnership, and first-hand commentary on what they thought resonated best with their audience can provide insights that you simply couldn’t get from data alone. Creating this open dialogue will not only help drive your strategy for long-term success but will also strengthen your relationships. Your creators feel heard, and they will be encouraged to continue sharing invaluable first-hand qualitative information you may not get without a foundation of trust. 

6. Repurpose  

We’ll round things out with a reminder to integrate your influencer marketing efforts into your entire brand strategy. Your influencer campaigns and content created shouldn’t be left in a silo. Seeing how the influencer content resonated with their audiences, don’t forget how powerful this can be to repurpose across your social and digital efforts. Extend your influencer content to drive more authenticity on your branded social profiles and in paid ads. Of course, earmark some funds to guarantee usage rights for this approach!  

Build Your Winning Strategy Today

We could talk all day about strategy and relationship building, but we’ll leave you with these tips for now. But most important is finding a tool that can help you throughout your entire influencer marketing journey. Without one, you’ll easily get lost in the data and emails and will sacrifice time better spent on strategy. If you haven’t invested in an influencer marketing platform yet or are looking to make a switch, contact us to learn more about Klear and how we can help build a long-term strategy for success!