Clear campaign goals determine strategy, metrics, and how influencers create content. Awareness, consideration, leads, or sales each need different approaches. Align your metrics to business KPIs, not generic benchmarks, and make sure influencers know what you're actually trying to achieve.
Hey everybody, welcome to this next episode of Influence Unpacked. I hope you're enjoying the series. I certainly am in terms of making these videos. I, I really kind of started to enjoy this whole process. Anyway, what I want to talk to you about today is setting up goals for your influencer campaigns and how critical this is to making sure, to ensuring that your campaign is going to be successful. The reason I say this is that I can't tell you how many times I've encountered with clients or just talking to peers and hearing about it through them how midway through a campaign or a program some executive there might be some turnover or change or something like that, or maybe there's just a change of mind, or maybe they even forgot what the hell the campaign was all about. But all of a sudden they want to know, well, how many leads are being driven by this campaign, this influencer campaign? Well, if you've set up the campaign program to drive awareness, that's a whole different set of metrics and measurement that you're going to look at as opposed to driving consideration or driving leads or even making sales. So you've got to keep that in mind from the very beginning. What is the purpose of your influencer campaign? Is it to drive awareness? Is it to drive consideration? Is it to drive leads? Is it to drive sales? What is it? Make sure you're very, very clear about that because the strategy that you put together is going to march towards achieving that goal. So if you don't do that and it's muddled, then the campaign's going to be muddled, the purpose is going to be muddled, the measurement's going to be muddled, everything's going to be— nothing's going to be great about it. In fact, it'll probably flop, and that's not what you want. So make sure that the goal is crystal clear. Make sure that everybody that you're working with on behalf of the campaign or about the campaign getting the campaign going understands what the goal is, and that includes the influencers. Make sure they understand it as well. If you tell them, look, the purpose of this campaign is to drive awareness about a product or the brand or a service, they're going to understand that, and then they can structure their content to reflect that because they understand their audience and their followers better than you do. They interact with them every day. Remember, there's the whole dark social thing going on too. Plenty followers contact the influencers dark social and have these offline conversations with them, which you can't track. So that's something to keep in mind. They understand the audience really, really well. Leverage that, make that work for you when you set up your campaign. And so again, communicate really well with the influencers. The metrics that you're using are going to be specific to that goal, like I said before. Now, one added thing to that to consider is what are the business metrics that your company, your brand uses? Consider taking some of those metrics and incorporating them into how you're going to measure success for your influencer campaign. Don't just rely upon or use generic measurements and tools and things like that, metrics that everybody sort of talks about online. That's great for a starting point, but get specific. What matters to your business? And then look to how you're going to measure the impact of the campaign according to that. Because really what it comes down to is, does the campaign really help move your business forward? Does it help move your marketing forward? That's what you really want to consider here. So goals are really, really important. Make sure you stick to them. Make sure everybody understands them. Make sure you set up your strategy and the tools that you're going to use to measure the success of your campaign based upon the goals. Okay, one last thing I want to say about goals: awareness. Awareness gets short shrift today. A lot of people I hear about are like, wow, awareness, we don't need to do awareness, we're looking for leads, you know, we want to drive sales, all that kind of stuff. Well, don't underestimate awareness. Every single company out there needs to be building awareness or driving awareness at all times. If you're not driving some awareness, people are going to start to wonder where the heck you are. And if you look at some of the biggest brands in the world, they are constantly doing things to stay top of mind with their consumers. If they weren't, people would start to wonder what the heck is going on. Think of Coca-Cola, something like that. If Coca-Cola stopped doing all the advertising marketing they were doing just to stay top of mind, to build awareness or continue awareness with their consumers, people would start to wonder what's going on. Is there something wrong with the company? Maybe we shouldn't buy Coke anymore, or whatever is going to go through their mind. So keep that in mind. Awareness is very important as a goal as well. Influencer marketing is very effective at Driving awareness for any brand doesn't matter what you do. But again, the goals are critical, and that's really what I wanted to say today. So look, let me know what you think in the comments. If you've got other things you want to add, I'd love to hear them. I love the conversations we have online, especially on LinkedIn. So let me know, people, and I will see you and talk to you soon. Bye.
