As we are approaching 2025, it's time for marketers to reflect on their past results, plot their new strategies, and set the wheels in motion with renewed energy. It has been proven time and again that nothing is constant in the world of business and marketing.
Even so, we believe businesses and professionals need a guide, or blueprint, for all the tasks and potential challenges they will face in the coming year so they can eliminate defective methods, embrace new opportunities, smooth out flaws in tactics, and ensure that they continue to grow.
Our post-holiday roadmap covers everything from refreshing your creator roster and content strategy to leveraging technology and predicting trends. So, if you're ready to start the new year armed with our insights and shake up your influencer marketing strategy, keep reading!
1. Set Clear Goals for the Year Ahead
Goals do matter, even if you know in advance that they are likely to change. After all a lot can change in a year, right? Many internal and external factors can affect your annual marketing plan and goals. What's more, all the additional points we've collected in this article can potentially alter your objectives. Despite this, you should define goals every year, and here's why.
They serve as a benchmark: Do you remember what your objectives were at the beginning of last year? You will start the new year by comparing your overall results to your goals. This process will help you identify your key achievements as well as difficulties and obstacles. You can use all this knowledge to shape your goals for the year ahead.
They serve as guidance and motivation: In a large company where the work of hundreds of people must be coordinated, it's easy to get lost in daily tasks. This can’t be accomplished without strategic thinking and objectives. Every business needs annual goals, regardless of its size. You can break them down into smaller milestones or tailor them to the work of different teams within your company. Furthermore, goals reflect the company's values, vision, and mission, which serve as a kind of engine for individuals, teams, and the business.
They build team spirit: As you define goals, you should consider your employees' observations and ideas, since they can contribute something useful to the day-to-day operations. Additionally, they empower individuals to work towards a shared goal and unite the team.
Pro tip!
Be sure to include both short-term and long-term goals. A short-term objective's success provides positive feedback to the teams and motivates them to continue working hard.
Consider market trends, your previous year's results, and your competitors' performance when establishing your objectives!
Determine SMART goals. The acronym stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound!
2. Analyze Holiday Campaign Performance
The following steps will help you analyze your holiday campaign successfully.
To begin with, track the performance of your campaign and the activities of your influencers. You probably set goals before launching Christmas promotions and decided how to measure them.
Monitor sales numbers if you wish to increase purchases. Analytical tools and tracking codes, as well as UTM parameters and discount codes or affiliate links, are all methods for monitoring sales.
Make sure you measure engagement as well because it indicates that your audience likes the content and that the influencers you choose have fans similar to your target audience.
Determine what types of content are most popular and generate the highest number of likes, shares, and comments.
Take a look at the comments to see how the audience reacts to the posts. Using this information, you can find out how they relate to your company and whether your product or service meets their needs.
Monitor the growth in your social media subscribers and followers during and after the campaign. Above all, verify they are real people whose profiles match your target market.
Keep track of your costs and compare them to the campaign's revenue.
As soon as the campaign is over, create a report on critical KPIs, analyze them, and share your key findings with your team. Having this information is crucial to optimizing your future campaigns and strategies.
As a final step, review the results of your previous year's campaign and compare them to the current one. Where did you excel last year and where did you fail? Did your last year's campaign meet your goals, but not this year's? Or was it the other way around?
3. Reconnect with Influencers
Later on, we will discuss the benefits of forming long-term relationships with influencers. Engaging with creators' content, updating them on new products and services, and inviting them to events are all key components of it.
However, if you haven't been in touch with them, it might be time to dust off those one-off partnerships and reconnect.
Send a personalized message to thank them for their work.
Take a moment to acknowledge their newest social media post.
Propose new cooperation opportunities or long-term partnerships.
You should highlight your former collaboration's success in your feed and mention their contribution to it.
Consider inviting them to your company's event or offering them a behind-the-scenes tour.
Provide discounts, gifts, or free services to creators. Don't forget about their followers! Offer their followers discounts and limited-time offers.
Provide them with valuable industry information and insights so that they can grow their own brand and follower base.
In addition to a flat fee, you could offer them performance-based compensation.
4. Forecast Trends for the New Year
Trust and authenticity continue to dominate influencer marketing. With this in mind, focus on creating relatable and authentic content over highly polished, made-up ads.
The popularity of video content, especially short-form video, continues to rise. The format fits the short attention span of younger generations and the busy lifestyle of young adults. Include this content format as well as platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube in your marketing strategy.
Due to their high engagement rates and specific audiences, micro- and nano-influencers have become extremely popular in recent years. No matter what size the brand is, lower-tier influencers are essential to establishing authenticity and bridging the gap between the brand and its audience.
Despite our advice in the next section to update your influencer list regularly, you can still use regular faces in your campaigns. A long-term creator partnership ensures your credibility in your industry and positions you as an authority in the field.
Be supportive of social causes, but don't use them as publicity stunts. Each brand has a vision and mission and can easily find an initiative that fits its philosophy. Taking a stand for important environmental and social causes can strengthen your connection with your audience.
If you’re an e-commerce business, take advantage of social platforms’ shoppable posts and AR and VR features to improve the customer experience.
As Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s President, Antonio Neri said, "Data is the new currency". Data-based decision-making is breaking ground in influencer marketing, and for this, you need sophisticated analytics and reporting tools that provide in-depth insights into your performance.
5. Update Influencer Lists and Databases
A new year, new goals, and new campaigns are all good reasons to refresh your influencer database. You might just have revised last year's marketing strategy, but new faces would bring you a new perspective that would fit your newly established objectives better.
Another aspect to consider when reviewing your influencer list is their performance. For instance, an analysis of your previous campaign can reveal creators who underperformed. Don't stop there, though! Keep an eye on the others throughout the year. Has their audience's interest declined, or are their posts still generating high engagement? Is the quality of their content still the same and do they post on the same topics? Or has the quality of the posts dropped or has the subject matter changed? Did their audience demographics change? Is their number of followers decreasing or increasing? Is there a large number of suspicious accounts among their fans?
When launching a new product or service, it may make sense to target a different demographic. Therefore, you might want to look for new influencers.
When an influencer collaboration turns out well, companies are more confident to start another campaign. While they may have limited their advertising to one or two channels in the first campaign, they want to expand to several platforms in the following campaigns. When you scale your campaign to several different social platforms, you will eventually have to look for new faces.
Keeping up with seasonal and impending trends, as well as emerging trendsetters, is another reason to update your influencer list regularly.
Finally, your budget can also determine who you work with in the new year. If your previous campaigns were successful, you will have more resources and can hire mid or higher-tier creators.
6. Refresh Your Content Strategies
You should reconsider your content strategy in light of your new objectives and the results of your previous marketing campaigns. The content and formats that didn’t perform well need to be reworked. Moreover, it is not even guaranteed that content that generated high engagement last year will do so again this year. Because influencer partners understand much better what makes their audience's eyes sparkle, they can provide valuable assistance here.
Additional reasons that justify optimizing content:
Technological development: Why don't you use content prompting tools if others do? As AI advances, new tools and software are emerging every day to assist with text ideation and graphic production. To track how people respond to your content and catch trends that are gaining traction, you can use a wide array of social listening tools. All these solutions can help you tailor your messages to your followers and subscribers' tastes, so use them!
Platform features and algorithm changes: Social media channels don't sit idle. Retaining existing users and attracting new ones is challenging. They compete with each other by releasing new features. It follows that today's consumer society is extremely diversified and spread across multiple channels. The key to getting your message seen by as many people as possible is to stand out from the crowd on as many social media sites as possible. In social media channels, a range of features are available for creating posts that engage people. It's also helpful if you keep an eye out for algorithm updates since they affect how your content appears. Inattention can cause your promotions to go unnoticed.
Popular content forms and trends: Audiences always have favorite content forms. Currently, it is all about short-format videos. But who knows how long that will last? Therefore, marketing professionals should always be up-to-date on current trends and formats.
Consumer behavior and preferences: A time has passed when companies used carbon copy advertisements to reach the masses and even followed the same marketing strategy for years. Today, audiences quickly tire of seeing the same stories, jokes, and influencers over and over again. By bringing in new influencers, for example, brands can shine in a new light.
7. Learn from Competitor Campaigns
Let's say you are constantly monitoring market trends, the business and economic environment, your customers' feedback, and social media users' reactions. That way, you can detect innovations and changes to pay attention to in the new year.
Observe what other companies in your industry are doing to prepare for their next big hit. You probably already keep track of the activities of several of your competitors recently, but you should also keep an eye out for any newcomers who could threaten your position. Don't let anything slip by you! Startups and young companies often cause a stir by going against well-established practices. Take note of their strategies and modify your own accordingly to enhance your chances of success.
Studying your competitors' previous campaigns can also provide a lot of useful information. Do you know how frequently and where they post? Are they working with influencers? What types of content do they publish? Who mentions their brand? How do their posts make users feel? How many followers did they gain? By observing the hashtags they use on social media, you can determine whether they have run marketing campaigns, etc.
You should also check their website to see if there have been any changes to management or strategic decision-makers. Have their prices changed? Did they decrease or increase? Are they releasing a new product, service, or feature?
8. Leverage New Social Media Features
Many social media networks have offered new features and services in the last few years in an effort to keep their users - whether they are individuals or companies. Furthermore, each has its own strengths and typical user base. Instagram is popular with women aged 25-34 and is strong when it comes to photo posts. TikTok is primarily used by 17-24-year-olds and is known for its short videos. The undisputed king of long videos is YouTube, which is more popular among men and a favorite of millennials. Aside from HR professionals, job seekers, businessmen, and entrepreneurs, sales and marketing professionals often use LinkedIn. LinkedIn and Facebook are popular communication channels for businesses in the tech, education, creative, and media industries, as well as non-profit organizations.
What platforms you choose to be active on will depend on your industry and what content you publish. Whatever you choose, make sure you know it inside and out, because users do as well. Social channels today offer many features, such as stickers and interactive filters for creating captivating content. Brands that sell online can share shoppable posts. Almost all platforms provide analytics. Additionally, people have the option of expressing their opinions, contacting the company under the post, or using the contact form on the company's social media profile.
By staying on top of the outstanding features of each platform, marketers and brands ensure that their campaigns deliver the expected results. They maintain or increase their share of voice, and brand recall and make their promotions memorable.
9. Collaborate with Cross-Functional Teams
The marketing team itself can be divided into many subgroups, such as social media, content, paid, affiliate, and SEO. All these teams must work together to maintain the company's brand identity and remain true to its values and mission. Team members must understand the product they are promoting and know who their target audience is
Thus, it is not surprising that the marketing team needs to collaborate with several other teams within the organization. Sales representatives have daily contact with customers and know their pain points, purchasing habits, and opinions on products. Sales teams can also provide an accurate picture of the target market, which helps create customized content. When the campaign's goal is to increase sales or generate leads, they can offer valuable help to the marketing team.
Remember that you will collaborate with influencers. You have to prepare yourself to recognize risky situations and handle them smoothly and your PR team is more than happy to help you in this.
Create a crisis plan to mitigate criticism and negative associations caused by an influencer campaign.
They may know industry professionals and key figures in the media with whom you can collaborate in some way.
People today advocate for a cause, whether it's gender equality, fair-trade purchases, or reducing their carbon footprint. Brands see this as an opportunity to connect with potential customers, so they support initiatives that they believe in. In addition, it strengthens the brand image and creates a sense of community. This is another point where the PR team’s expertise can come in handy.
What is the point of a campaign if neither you nor your influencer know what the promoted service is? Meanwhile, R&D teams know every nook and cranny, from technological innovations to special features. The information they provide allows you to emphasize the benefits of your services, which can attract potential customers. With a thorough understanding of the products, your team can develop and implement new, groundbreaking advertising strategies as well.
10. Implement Influencer Marketing Tools
Take full advantage of various tools that can help you propel your influencer marketing campaigns to the next level.
Influencer marketplaces: Using these tools makes networking between brands and influencers easy and seamless. They have a large database of content creators from which brands can select those most suitable for their campaigns.
Influencer relationship management (IRM): In a similar way to customer relationship management services, influencer relationship management services help businesses manage and optimize influencer relationships. Brands can communicate with recruited content creators and manage payments and contracts through them.
Social listening tools: Tools like these have been on the market for some time and have proven to be a great resource for companies looking to identify emerging trends and key opinion leaders. Furthermore, businesses can monitor audience sentiments, mentions, and hashtags on social media, helping them measure their online popularity and that of their competitors.
Analytics and reporting tools: Although social media channels offer influencer performance analytics, they don't provide much insight into campaign performance. Analytics tools, however, enable brands to monitor and measure their active campaigns in real time, making their job easier if they need to intervene. Some advanced tools offer predictive analytics features, which can help companies estimate the campaign's ROI in advance.
Influencer marketing platforms: AI-driven suites offer a variety of tools to help with every phase of your campaign. You can use them for influencer search and analysis, outreach and communication, tracking and evaluation of campaigns, and more. The majority of influencer platforms analyze social media data using machine learning and artificial intelligence to calculate creator metrics and campaign estimates. They offer all the features that all the above-mentioned individual solutions offer but on a single platform. Take HypeAuditor, for example. Its diverse toolkit, in-depth insights, and rich creator database allow businesses to improve their influencer marketing efforts and build more efficient influencer campaigns.
11. Assess and Adjust Budgets
When planning a campaign, a set amount is allocated to cost centers or various activities and areas. When it comes to influencer marketing campaigns, a budget must be set aside for creative fees, product costs, and content production expenses. Influencers must be reimbursed for travel and accommodation if they have to travel. You need to consider subscription fees to platforms and the expenses of using additional tools and software and save some money for unexpected costs related to trying new advertising methods or changes in the market.
At the start of the new year, gather all the documents related to the previous year's budget, including invoices, receipts, contracts, and so on. Obtain campaign KPIs, such as ER, reach, sales, CTR, and total revenue. Next, compare the expenses with the income to determine whether you have met your goals. You must analyze both quantitative and qualitative data to understand both quantifiable and non-quantifiable goals, like conversions and brand awareness.
Identify successful campaigns, including content, creators, and platforms, with your marketing team. Document the unprofitable campaign elements that need to be improved in the future. Talking to stakeholders and other company teams, like sales, will help you gain a holistic view of your campaigns' results.
Make sure that you analyze your competitors' performance before setting a budget for the coming year, and that you compare your campaign to industry benchmarks. Plan your spending for the year ahead and allocate more resources to elements that were effective last year, for example, putting more emphasis on smaller influencers over celebrities.
12. Build Long-Term Relationships with Creators
In today's marketing, it's all about connecting with your audience and potential clients authentically. However, more and more people are showing apathy toward brand ads and trusting those in their closest circle. Most consumers research brands and products online and make a decision based on their online presence and image. Consequently, many businesses partner with influencers because they form a warm relationship with their followers, and their words carry more weight among users than one-sided brand advertisements. However, if brands are truly interested in earning consumers' trust and loyalty, they need to think beyond one-off partnerships.
In fact, short-term relationships and one-time collaborations can also be beneficial to businesses, but with the uncertainty of the economy and the continuous technological advancements that influence buying decisions, brands are better off building long-term relationships with creators. In time, influencers become familiar with the brand's values and ideology, enabling them to produce more resonant content. Companies can gain credibility and establish themselves as trusted businesses, enhancing brand loyalty and eventually resulting in more effective marketing campaigns.
This requires some time and effort from both sides but is well worth it. Here are some tips for brands:
Personalize your messages: Be sure your outreach messages and emails are personalized and not copied and pasted.
Communicate frequently: Always follow up, check in, and update influencers. Make sure they know you are available to answer their questions at any time.
Show respect: Don't treat influencers as money-makers but as partners. Listen to their opinions and trust their knowledge.
Compensate them fairly: Content creators make their living by regularly publishing content catering to their audience. They spend many hours perfecting the text and images, brainstorming, writing, editing, and engaging with their followers. You must pay them adequately if you want to tap into their popularity.
Provide security: Nearly 50% of influencers prefer long-term partnerships and a steady income. They can earn regular income through brand ambassador and advocacy programs, and you can ensure consistency in your marketing campaigns.
13. Explore Niche Markets
Niche markets have their own preferences and necessities, but brands that focus on them face less competition. Take a broad market like the beauty industry. This market can be divided into smaller submarkets, such as skincare, make-up, hair care, nail care, men's cosmetics, fragrances, and beauty accessories. The skin care submarket can be further divided into smaller segments based on skin type, e.g. normal, oily, sensitive, dry, or mature. They can be categorized based on whether they are made for men, women, or children, or based on their ingredients, which can include vegan, organic, eco-friendly, and cruelty-free.
All of these niches have distinct audiences, individual requirements, and unique demands. Due to this feature, mainstream brands may not satisfy or underserve them. And that's where smaller or local companies enter the picture with niche creators.
By combining forces with niche influencers, small businesses can more precisely target people who are very likely to be interested in their services or products. Often, niche influencers are lower-tier creators with smaller but highly dedicated audiences. As a result, they will generate higher engagement rates and conversion rates than influencers of higher tiers. With niche influencers' expertise, people are likely to trust a brand's products and eventually become repeat customers. Due to their small audience, they are affordable. In time, influencers can develop a tight community around a band, and businesses can benefit from their feedback.
14. Create Engaging Campaign Briefs
Your campaign brief serves as a guideline for influencers and a reference point for your team, summarizing the details of the campaign, including the name, the message, the launch and end dates, the budget, and the value proposition. Give a detailed description of the target audience, the primary goal and smaller milestones you hope to achieve, and the KPIs you intend to measure. Add the tone, the visual elements, and your ideas and examples to the campaign brief, along with the preferred platforms and content types.
A brief can include appendices with specific requirements for influencers related to the content. For inspiration, add screenshots, photos, images, and links to posts you liked. You can specify the message they should convey, the hashtags and mentions they should use, and the textual and visual elements that you want them to avoid. Send them your brand style guide if you're concerned about consistent brand presentation. There can also be an appendix with the posting timeline and the content that will be published, and another section for the payment structure and disclosure requirements.
15. Measure and Report
Starting a marketing campaign without goals is like taking an exam without studying. Without measurement and analysis, it would be like studying hard all year long and taking many exams, except that no one would ever grade your performance. It's only natural to want to know what you aced and what you missed after putting so much effort into it, isn't it?
The good news is that when you set your goals, you also specify exactly how you will measure your progress. Predetermined KPIs will allow you to see if something needs to be changed during the active campaign, and after it has finished, you can verify whether your goals and expectations have been met. With measurement, you can look beyond superficial data and see correlations such as which influencer’s content yielded more clicks, what sort of posts generated above-average engagement, etc.
Marketing experts and stakeholders want to see exactly how their efforts are paying off. Some analytical tools and complex influencer platforms can calculate a preliminary ROI. Nevertheless, once the campaign begins, they are constantly calculating the return.
An effective measurement strategy ensures accountability and transparency for the marketing team and influencers. Moreover, your creator partners will also be interested in their role in the project's success. Measuring essential data will determine whether they become your long-term partners or whether they should improve their content.
Wrapping It Up
Keep in mind that this roadmap isn’t a done deal. You should constantly revise and tweak it throughout the year to ensure that all your goals are ticked and your sales numbers are dancing upwards. So plan well, stay agile, be open, and make the most of your decisions!
Let’s crush 2025! 💪
