If you’re reading this, you probably already know what influencer marketing is. What might not be so clear is how to build a strategy that goes beyond one-off collaborations, inflated metrics, or campaigns that seem to work at first but don’t generate any real impact.

The solution isn’t simply choosing between celebrities or micro-influencers. That’s no longer the real challenge. What actually makes the difference today is how you define your goals, how you choose the right profiles, and how you measure whether a campaign is worth repeating or not.

Let’s be honest for a moment: how many campaigns have you seen with good engagement but no clear results? Or collaborations that work once, but can’t be scaled?

A solid influencer marketing strategy doesn’t start by reaching out to creators. It starts much earlier, with clear objectives, well-defined criteria, and a realistic vision of what influencer marketing can achieve.

In this article, we’ll focus on the key steps to building a strong strategy, designed for brands that want to do things right from the start — or finally stop improvising.

1. Clarify Your Objectives and Audience

Before thinking about creators, formats, or platforms, you need to be very clear about what you’re trying to achieve with your influencer marketing strategy. Not in abstract terms, but in outcomes you can actually evaluate later.

Are you trying to make your brand known in a new market? Drive qualified traffic to a specific landing page? Support a product launch? Or push conversions on an already familiar product?

This distinction matters more than it seems. A campaign designed to build awareness will look very different from one meant to drive sales, even if both involve influencers.

For example, in 2025 Rare Beauty continues to work with creators not just to generate reach, but to reinforce brand values and community. Their campaigns often prioritise consistent exposure and authentic storytelling over direct conversion, measuring success through reach, saves and long-term engagement rather than immediate sales.

On the other hand, Gymshark regularly builds influencer campaigns around very concrete commercial goals. When promoting limited drops or new collections, they focus on creators who can drive traffic and conversions, tracking performance through clicks, assisted conversions and creator-specific discount codes.

The mistake many brands make is trying to do everything at once. If your goal is awareness, don’t judge the campaign by sales alone. And if your goal is conversion, engagement by itself isn’t enough.

Once your goal is clear, define a small set of KPIs that actually reflect that objective. Not everything needs to be measured, but what you measure should make sense:

• Awareness: reach, impressions, frequency, saves
• Consideration: engagement quality, profile visits, traffic
• Conversion: clicks, conversions, cost per action, assisted revenue

The next step is defining your audience — and this goes far beyond age and gender.

Where do they actually spend time? What type of content do they trust? Are they discovering brands on TikTok, validating them on Instagram, or researching on YouTube before buying?

A good example here is Duolingo, which in recent campaigns has leaned heavily into TikTok creators who understand platform-native humour. The brand doesn’t just target “young users”, but people who already consume short-form, entertainment-driven content and are open to discovering products through creators rather than ads.

2. Find Influencers Aligned With Your Goals

Finding influencers isn’t the hard part anymore. The real challenge is choosing the right ones for your specific goal — and for your overall influencer marketing strategy.

Follower count alone won’t help you here. Neither will generic engagement rates. What you’re really looking for is alignment: between the creator, their audience, the platform, and what you want the campaign to achieve.

In 2025, many brands have learned this the hard way. Take Notion. Instead of partnering with massive lifestyle creators, they’ve doubled down on niche productivity, tech and creator-economy profiles. These creators don’t always have huge audiences, but their followers actively trust their recommendations and use similar tools in their day-to-day work. The result: fewer impressions, but far higher-quality traffic and adoption.

You can still find influencers manually, of course. Searching relevant hashtags, analysing who your audience already follows, or looking at creators who mention competitors can give you useful insights. The downside is obvious: it’s slow, hard to scale, and easy to miss patterns across multiple profiles.

That’s why many teams now rely on influencer platforms to speed things up and add structure to the process. Tools like Influencity allow brands to filter creators not just by audience demographics, but by interests, content style, platform performance and historical data — which makes a big difference when you’re building campaigns you want to repeat or scale.

Another reference point here is Glossier, which continues to prioritise creators who already use and talk about similar products, rather than forcing partnerships that feel transactional. Their influencer strategy works because the creators genuinely influence purchase decisions within their communities, not because they have the biggest reach.

When shortlisting influencers, the question shouldn’t be “does this creator look good for our brand?” but:

• Does their audience match our target customer?
• Do they influence decisions or just generate views?
• Does their content feel native to the platform we care about?
• Could this type of collaboration work more than once?

When those answers are clear, influencer selection stops being guesswork and becomes a repeatable part of your strategy — which is exactly where BOFU brands need to be.

3. Review Influencer Metrics

You should look at the basics: follower count, reach, engagement. But taken in isolation, none of these metrics mean much. A large audience doesn’t automatically mean influence, and high engagement doesn’t always translate into impact.

What you want to understand is context. How consistent is their reach across posts? Is engagement driven by real conversations or by generic comments? Does their audience actually react when they recommend a product, or only when they post entertainment-driven content?

A good example of doing this right is Fenty Beauty, which continues to collaborate with creators who actively create beauty-first content and speak to very specific communities. The focus isn’t just on how many people see the content, but on whether those people are already interested in the category and open to product discovery.

It’s also important not to fall into the “bigger is better” trap. As audiences grow, engagement tends to dilute. For highly targeted campaigns, allocating budget across several nano- or micro-influencers often leads to better results than betting everything on one large profile.

When reviewing metrics, ask yourself:

• Are these numbers consistent over time?
• Do they reflect real interest or passive consumption?
• Does this audience look like people who would actually consider our product?

If the metrics answer those questions, you’re not just choosing influencers — you’re building a strategy you can optimise and scale.

4. Engage Influencers and Set Terms

Once you’ve narrowed your shortlist, it’s time to move from analysis to action. This is where many campaigns slow down — not because of strategy, but because execution becomes messy.

Outreach works best when it doesn’t feel transactional. Before jumping straight into numbers, take time to understand how the creator usually collaborates with brands, what formats they’re comfortable with, and where they tend to be flexible. That context makes negotiations faster and avoids unnecessary back-and-forth later.

When you move into the proposal stage, clarity is key. Be explicit about what’s fixed and what’s open to discussion: fees, deliverables, timelines, content usage rights. Negotiations tend to break down not because of price, but because expectations weren’t clearly defined upfront.

This is where having a structured negotiation flow helps. Platforms like Influencity allow brands and creators to review offers, suggest changes, and finalise terms in one shared space, keeping the entire conversation visible and documented. It removes friction and reduces the risk of misunderstandings that usually happen across emails or DMs.

Once both sides are aligned, formalise everything. A clear agreement protects the brand, the creator, and the relationship — and makes it much easier to scale future collaborations.

At this stage, simplicity wins. The smoother the negotiation process, the more energy both sides can focus on what actually matters: creating content that works.

5. Measure Results and Learn From Them

Go back to your original goal and use it as your reference point. Did the influencer deliver what you were actually looking for? Not in abstract terms, but in outcomes that matter: did the campaign help increase qualified traffic, improve brand perception, support conversions, or move the needle where you needed it most?

For example, brands like Huel regularly use influencer campaigns not as one-off activations, but as tests. Performance is reviewed creator by creator to decide who should be reactivated, who needs a different format, and which collaborations are worth scaling long term.

This step is also where many brands uncover blind spots. A campaign might generate strong engagement but fail to drive action — or deliver fewer impressions than expected, but high-quality traffic. Both insights are valuable, as long as you’re measuring the right thing.

What matters is consistency. If you track results the same way across campaigns, patterns start to emerge. You stop asking “did this campaign work?” and start asking “how can we improve the next one?”

Bringing It All Together

A successful influencer marketing strategy isn’t about finding the biggest creators or launching as many campaigns as possible. It’s about making informed decisions at every step — from defining clear goals to choosing the right influencers, evaluating performance, and knowing when to optimise or scale.

When each part of the process is connected, influencer marketing stops being reactive and starts becoming predictable. You gain clarity on what works, confidence in your decisions, and a framework you can build on over time.

And once you reach that point, the focus shifts from running individual campaigns to building long-term, repeatable collaborations that actually support your business goals.