Free Influencer Strategy Template for 2023

Table of Contents

• Why Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy?
• What to Include in an Influencer Marketing Strategy
• How to Create an Influencer Strategy Template

By the end of 2022, the influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth an impressive $16.4 billion – up from $13.8 billion in 2021. There’s no doubt about influencer marketing’s role in today’s digital marketing ecosystem. To grab a slice of this market, brands need to think and act strategically. That’s where our free influencer strategy template can come in handy.

Understanding the intricacies of what makes influencer marketing work will become more important as the market grows. To do this, it’s helpful to examine all of the moving parts of influencer marketing and how they connect to each other to form a complete strategy.

Let’s explore the inner workings of influencer marketing in detail so you can develop a winning strategy. Let’s go!

Why Create an Influencer Marketing Strategy?

As with any type of marketing, diving headfirst into influencer marketing without a strategy isn’t your best option. It takes careful planning to find a leading voice in your niche, vet their credentials, agree on payment terms, and collaborate on content. You’ll also want to come up with a set of success metrics to track the impact of each influencer.

Developing an influencer strategy separately from your marketing strategy offers a range of benefits. Here are some things to think about as you develop your strategy.

Know What a Great Influencer Looks Like

Developing an influencer strategy starts with understanding what you want to accomplish with influencers. With your goals in mind, you can flesh out the criteria your influencers need to have.

Part of successful influencer marketing is being able to qualify influencers before working with them. You’ll want to choose partners who align with your brand values and voice. You want your influencers to appear credible so they can help you reach your goals.

Taking the time to build a strategy first helps you spot great-fit influencers more easily than if you didn’t have a strategy. This strategy serves as a blueprint for your decision making, making it easier and faster to say yes or no to important choices.

Answer Big Questions Early in the Process

You can better target your efforts once you answer bigger questions, such as budgets and goals.

For example, your goals will determine which types of influencers you will work with, the type of content they will create, how you will track their success, and where your brand will be promoted.

Budget is also a big part of an influencer strategy. It could be the difference between choosing an influencer with 10K followers (nano-influencer or micro-influencer) or 100K followers (macro-influencer). Or it could mean the difference between working with 10 influencers or just one influencer. Deciding on budget early in the process will help to guide these and other key decisions.

What to Include in an Influencer Marketing Strategy

Using an influencer strategy template (like the one we provide below) ensures you check every box. You can skip right to the template, or follow this guide step by step to create your own.

Identify Your Target Audience

As with most marketing campaigns, you’ll need to decide who you’re talking to with your influencer marketing. Influencers tend to have very niche audiences; that’s part of what makes them so effective in marketing. They’re speaking to a large group of people who share a particular interest. The influencer is seen as someone who is credible and authoritative on that topic.

Your job is to figure out what type of audience you want to speak to in your campaign. Once you know your audience, you can start searching for influencers whose audience aligns with your needs.

Set Your Campaign Goals

Every influencer marketing campaign should have a goal. Maybe it’s to grow your brand awareness, or maybe you want to spur one-off sales. No matter your goal, make sure you define it before reaching out to influencers. Setting goals first allows you to work backward and fill in the gaps of what needs to happen to achieve your desired outcome.

Setting goals will also help you determine how to measure success. We’ll cover KPIs and metrics in another section.

Decide on a Budget

Another big decision, budgeting will help to set the tone for the rest of your influencer marketing campaign. Budget will determine who you partner with, how many influencers you use in a campaign, and how you compensate your influencers (e.g., cash payment, commissions, free product).

Keep in mind that all influencers are different. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to payment. Some are perfectly fine receiving free products and services in exchange for a piece of content. Others work strictly on a cash payment basis. You may want to add some flexibility in your budget in case you find an influencer you’d love to work with who won’t accept a trade for services.

Determine Your Social Media Channels

When we speak of influencer marketing, we’re typically referring to social media influencers. Influencers on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are among the most common for social media purposes. However, you might also want to include bloggers in the mix, depending on your product or service.

Part of your strategy should include the social media channels you’d like to be featured on. You’ll also want to take into account the various features of each social media network (e.g., IGTV on Instagram) to ensure you’re appearing in relevant places.

Choose a Campaign Type

Influencer marketing spans a huge range of campaign types. For instance, your TikTok influencers might launch a hashtag challenge or short dance video. Instagram influencers might prefer beautiful product shots or live product demos. Bloggers may write a blog post and backlink to your website as well as offer a special discount to their readers.

Competitions, giveaways, discount codes, and brand mentions on social media can also come into play. You’ll need to decide what type of campaign will work best for your goals and prepare to work with your influencers to bring your campaign ideas to life.

Start Searching for the Right Influencers

With a better idea of your goals and objectives in mind, you can start conducting influencer outreach to find relevant influencers.

Using a platform like Klear gives you an easy way to filter your search by niche and demographics. You can also look at how we “score” influencers based on engagement, audience size, and other metrics that allow you to avoid the potential of influencer fraud while maximizing your budget.

Collaborate on Campaign Content

In most cases, influencers are left to create their own content for brands. They know their audience best and know the types of content they will respond to. 

However, this is also your opportunity to share any messaging guidelines, brand do’s and don’ts, or other specifics with your content creator. They’re an extension of your brand and need to know how you want to be portrayed to their audience. It truly is a team effort in order to create a win-win scenario.

Track the Influencer Campaign

After your content creators launch their end of the campaign, you’ll want to track its progress every step of the way. From the approval process to monitoring engagement, you’ll want to be part of the content journey to see the impact on your brand.

One way to do this is to use Klear for campaign measurement. Klear tracks the entire campaign journey to measure ROI and aggregates all related content, such as mentions, comments, likes, hashtags, and keywords. You’ll also be able to generate reports on each influencer and each campaign to demonstrate its short-term and long-term value to your organization.

Define How to Track Your Influencers’ Success

Choosing the right metrics and KPIs is of the utmost importance when defining influencer success. These metrics should tie back to your original objectives. You’ll also need a way to set up attribution so that your influencers will get credit for sending new customers your way.

Using an all-in-one influencer platform like Klear can simplify this process. Whether you want to increase followership, engagement rate, or sales, Klear can track your successes so you can build on them in the next campaign.

How to Create an Influencer Strategy Template

You can easily turn the above steps into your own influencer strategy template. Having a template is a huge time saver because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time. The foundation is already made for you — all you have to do is fill in the blanks.

That’s why we’re sharing our free influencer marketing plan. This template is ready for you to fill with your own metrics and goals and present to your team.

This free influencer marketing plan template is the perfect resource for setting brand goals for 2023 and beyond. It will help you determine how to benchmark against your competitors, and most importantly, how to win and nurture new influencers.

Get ready to rock influencer marketing in 2023! Check out our Free Influencer Marketing Plan Template.