If you’re new to influencer marketing, you might have heard that it’s one of the most effective ways to grow a brand and reach new audiences. Or maybe that working with influencers makes you look more trustworthy.

But you still have a bunch of questions, like:

🤔 How does influencer marketing work?

🤔 How do I build an influencer marketing strategy?

🤔 How can I measure influencer marketing ROI?

Read on to answer all those questions (and more)...

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy in which a company works with a social media influencer (or several influencers) to promote their brand or product.

When we say ”influencers”, we’re referring to people with an audience on at least one social media platform. They're commonly categorized by follower count:

Though it's worth noting that follower & subscriber counts aren't the be-all and end-all. Engagement, views, and performance history are increasingly important.

Influencer marketing campaigns look very different depending on the brand’s goals and audience and the type of influencer they’re working with.

For instance, influencer marketing can help you promote a product launch, just like in this collaboration between angling technology brand Deeper Sonar and Dutch nano influencer Jelmer Simmes:

You can use influencer marketing to build brand awareness, like haircare brand Dae did in this campaign featuring TikTok creator inaecakes:

And you can use it to generate conversions, just like YouTuber Taylor Danley does in this campaign for Gear4music:

These are just some of the ways influencer marketing can help you hit your business goals. For more, check out our in-depth roundup of influencer marketing campaign examples.

How does influencer marketing work?

Influencer marketing allows brands to leverage an influencer’s reputation and subject-matter expertise.

(Almost) all influencers have some sort of niche — AKA a reason that people follow them. For instance, they might:

✅ Give incredible makeup tutorials

✅ Help people solve common tech problems

✅ Have their finger on the pulse of the latest fashion trends

Whatever their area of expertise, people trust their opinions on it. So if they recommend your brand or product, their followers will sit up and take notice.

This means that when you partner with influencers, you use their online clout to hit your marketing goals. For example:

💪 A supplements brand might boost sales by teaming up with a fitness influencer

💄 A beauty brand might increase awareness by gifting free products to skincare influencers

🏝️ A travel brand targeting families might work with a mom influencer

(You don't need to stick within your niche like this, but it's the common starting point.)

5 steps to build an influencer marketing strategy

Step 1: Define your influencer marketing goal(s)

The makeup of your influencer strategy will vary widely depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

That’s why the first step in building a strategy is to define your marketing goals. Typically, this will be one of the following:

👀 Build brand awareness

💸 Increase conversions (i.e. sales or leads)

🤳 Generate high-quality content

For best results, focus on just one of these goals — but be aware that (most) influencer campaigns will contribute to multiple goals at once. For example, an influencer gifting campaign might be primarily about growing your brand, but it should also lead to some direct sales.

Step 2: Figure out how you’ll find influencers

As I’ve already noted, there are four basic categories of influencers, from those with the smallest followings to fully fledged celebs.

Unsurprisingly, those with the largest follower counts tend to charge the most for collaborations, so you’ll want to start small. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as smaller accounts typically see higher engagement rates.

So how do you find smaller, niche influencers?

Well, there are two broad methods:

🛬 Inbound involves getting influencers to come to you by building an ambassador program and promoting it through your social channels and/or a dedicated page on your website, like this landing page from apparel brand Happy Earth:

🛫 Outbound is about proactively searching for influencers, either manually or with an influencer search tool like Modash, then reaching out to them to discuss a collaboration (more on this in steps #3 and #4).

Most successful influencer marketing strategies combine both categories.

👉 Further reading: 11 Ways To Find Micro Influencers (Free & Paid Methods!)

Step 3: Decide how you want to collaborate

There are lots of ways to collaborate with influencers, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. I’ve rounded up three of the most popular methods here:

You can even combine multiple collaboration types to generate improved results, such as:

✅ Making sponsored post campaigns more actionable by giving influencers a unique referral code

✅ Building long-term influencer partnerships based on your results from product seeding campaigns

👉 For more collaboration options, check out 9 Ways To Collaborate With Influencers (With Examples).

Step 4: Plan your outreach strategy

All the work you’ve put in up to this point will be wasted if you don’t get any responses to your outreach messages.

Outreach doesn’t come naturally to a lot of marketers. But there are some tried-and-trusted techniques you can use to improve your results:

✅ Start by reaching out via email (rather than DMs). Email just feels more professional. Many influencers share their email address in their social media bio. Or you can use Modash to filter for influencers with publicly available emails.

✅ Personalize your outreach messages. Unless you’re a household name, (most) influencers won’t respond to a generic email. Even if you use an influencer outreach template, take the time to personalize the stuff about the influencer (such as why you like them and why they’re a good fit for your brand).

✅ Follow up multiple times (via multiple platforms). This is the simplest way to boost reply rates. Send 3 – 5 follow-up emails over a couple weeks — and follow up via social media DMs and comments, too.

👉 Learn more in How To Do Influencer Outreach: A Guide For Brands.

Step 5: Execute your strategy and optimize

Now it’s time to put all that planning into practice by launching your first influencer campaign.

However, the strategic work doesn’t stop here. You have to continually comb through your efforts and analyze what’s giving you the best ROI.

For example, if you’re a healthy beverage brand, you might notice that your mom-influencers perform better than your fitness creators. Or you might see better results using Instagram than TikTok.

Eventually, you’ll learn:

✅ What subject lines get the highest response rate

✅ Which influencer briefs produce no-edits-required content

✅ What influencer rates give you the most bang for your buck

Plus you’ll gain brand awareness, which makes everything easier.

👉 We’ve covered the basic steps to building your strategy here, but for a more in-depth walk-through with lots of actionable tips, check out How to Develop Your Influencer Marketing Strategy: A Step-By-Step Guide.

Common challenges faced in influencer marketing (& their solutions)

Challenge 1: Tracking live influencer content

If you’re working with multiple influencers on a single campaign, keeping track of all the content they’re sharing can be a real headache. Here’s how to get it right:

✅ Track influencer content manually by spreadsheet. This method is totally unscalable, but it’s fine for when you’re just getting started. Mike Newton, creator of Building Influence, has a free spreadsheet template that can help.

✅ Automate live content tracking with Modash. Just name your campaign and choose the influencers and content types you want to track (e.g. all posts by a specific influencer, or just posts containing specific hashtags or keywords). Then sit back and let Modash do all the work.

Modash also gives you the following data points:

👍 Number of views, likes, and comments

👍 Estimates for non-publicly-available data (like Story reach)

👍 Total output (e.g. number of live content units)

Challenge 2: Consistently finding relevant influencers

Unless you exclusively work with a handful of long-term influencer partners, you need to find a consistent stream of relevant influencers to support your campaigns. Here’s how to do it:

✅ Think about your ICP. Rather than only working with influencers in your niche, think about the types of influencers who are most likely to reach your target audience. For example, a beauty brand targeting women aged 35 – 44 might find more influencers (and generate better results) by searching for mom influencers rather than sticking to the beauty niche.

✅ Recruit from your existing audience. Simply reach out to your email subscribers and ask if any of them are influencers who want to collaborate with you. Or use Modash to search your existing fans for influencers with 1k+ followers on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube.

✅ Use an influencer search tool. The most efficient solution is to speed up the influencer search process and surface more relevant results by using an influencer search tool like Modash to search and filter every influencer on Earth. For example, in the below screenshot, we’re searching for influencers who live in the US, have 5K – 50K followers, and produce content in the skincare niche:

Challenge 3: Working out influencer fees

Because influencer marketing prices aren’t standardized, figuring out how much to pay influencers can be a real headache. But here are some potential solutions:

✅ Start with product gifting and/or affiliate marketing. That way, you don’t have to worry about paying upfront fees to work with influencers.

✅ Ask for influencer rates upfront. Before you disclose your budget, just ask influencers how much they typically charge for your desired campaign type and negotiate from there. Easy!

✅ Use your customer acquisition cost to set a budget. Figure out how much you can afford to pay to acquire a customer. Then try to forecast an influencer’s sales using whatever data you can get your hands on — Story clicks, average views, past affiliate performance, etc. Use the results to estimate your budget for the collaboration.

👉 For more challenges and solutions, check out 7 Common Influencer Marketing Challenges (& How To Solve Them).

How to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaign

Measuring the results of influencer activity is notoriously difficult. Because not every customer will see an influencer post then immediately click a referral link and purchase the product.

Still, if you don’t at least try, you’ll never know if your campaigns are working.

With that in mind, here are three simple ways to measure influence marketing results:

Method 1: Ask your customers 🗣️

The easiest solution is to ask customers: “Where did you hear about us?”

You could ask them:

✅ During the checkout process

✅ In order confirmation/shipping emails

✅ Through post-purchase satisfaction surveys

Sure, this approach isn’t exactly watertight — customers might click the first option they see, or ignore you completely. But it should give you some idea of how your influencer activity drives revenue.

Method 2: Use personalized discount codes 💲

A more robust method for tracking results is to assign a unique discount code to each influencer.

That way, when a customer enters the code at checkout, you can be sure the revenue came from your influencer campaign.

This method still isn’t 100% accurate, though.

For instance, it doesn’t account for any revenue from customers who forget to give the discount code while purchasing.

Method 3: Look out for traffic increases 🚘

You can also use other data points to assess the impact of your influencer campaign.

For instance, did you see a big spike in traffic and/or brand searches around the launch of a campaign? You can attribute the uplift to influencer marketing.

Again, it’s not totally watertight — but it’s a good indication that your campaign is working.

👉 Learn more in Influencer Marketing ROI: Proving The Impact of Influencers.

Influencer marketing platforms & tools

From finding influencers to sending outreach messages to tracking live content, influencer marketing involves a ton of heavy lifting.

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools to lighten the load:

👉 Find more recommendations in The Top 20 Influencer Marketing Platforms: Find The One For You.

Influencer marketing FAQs:

What are the best social channels for influencer marketing?

The best social channels for influencer marketing depend on your brand, audience, and goals. For B2C brands, the most popular influencer channels are:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• TikTok
• YouTube

Whereas B2B brands are more likely to use LinkedIn and YouTube.

There is also some variation in different regions. For example, Snapchat is popular in the Middle East, and Facebook is more popular in some south-east Asian markets like Vietnam.

Why is influencer marketing used?

Influencer marketing is typically used to accomplish one or more of the following goals:

• Build brand awareness
• Increase conversions (i.e. sales or leads)
• Generate high-quality content

Arguably the best thing about influencer marketing is that it can achieve multiple goals simultaneously. For example, a campaign designed to drive sales of a specific product might also lead to more branded search.

What are the four types of influencer?

There are four main types of influencers:

• Nano influencers: 1K – 10K followers
• Micro influencers: 10K – 100K followers
• Macro influencers: 100K – 1M followers
• Celebrities: 1M+ followers

Typically, the bigger the influencer, the more they charge for collaborations.

Next steps

Wish you could speak to successful influencer marketers to learn the tips, tricks, and strategies they use to generate real results?

Our newsletter, Return on Influence, is the next best thing.

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