Influencer Marketing Strategy: How We Build Effective Plans

The Importance of Strategy in Producing Effective Influencer Campaigns

With the influencer marketing space constantly changing, trends pop up, evolve and disappear, attention spans shift, and platforms expand. Curating a solid strategy isn’t just a nice-to-have but a foundation for a successful campaign. Many brands are eager to jump into influencer marketing collaborations, but what truly separates an effective campaign with lasting impact to a short term spike in engagement is the strategy behind every single campaign.

By prioritising innovative strategy, brands also create the space to tell compelling stories & share human media that resonate with their audience on a deeper level. It allows for careful consideration of tone, messaging, and creative direction, ensuring that collaborations feel genuine rather than forced. When campaigns are strategically planned, influencers can integrate the brand naturally into their content, resulting in more genuine connections with followers and higher levels of trust. Over time, this thoughtful approach not only drives engagement but also cultivates a loyal community of advocates who continue to support the brand long after a single campaign concludes.

The Goat Agency’s Strategy Team

Innovation has always been at the heart of Goat’s journey, and our Strategy Team is the driving force behind it. They combine deep industry knowledge with forward-thinking approaches to ensure every campaign not only meets client objectives but also pushes the boundaries of what influencer marketing can achieve. From identifying emerging trends to testing new platforms, formats, and creative concepts, the team works to anticipate shifts in the digital landscape, helping brands stay ahead of the curve.

By embedding strategy at every stage – from ideation to execution – they ensure every collaboration delivers meaningful impact while setting the stage for long-term growth. 

So, what do our strategy team get up to on their day to day? Let’s see what Goat’s Senior Strategy Manager Ajalin Williamson, Senior Strategy Executive Molly Taylor-Prevett & Strategy Manager Setty Napier have to say…

Why is Influencer Strategy so Important?

At the heart of any influencer campaign is the strategy. The strategy team is the architect, problem solver, and innovator of each campaign. The strategy guides the campaigns, providing the best solutions to clients challenges, and pushes the boundaries of what we can do with influencers. Many brands see influencers as a short term strategy, but Goat’s influencer strategy goes beyond what brands ‘think’ they can do with influencers, and ensures that our clients don’t skip the longterm step.

Jago Sherman, Head of Strategy (North America EMEA):

”Our creative & strategy team at Goat are a driving force, not only in our company, but our industry – proven by a history of world firsts backed by a suite of truly unique solutions & capabilities. 

With one foot in the culture that drives our creative, the other in the data that backs our strategies. We tackle client challenges with more than example influencers – digging deep into audiences, and even deeper into social, to uncover “the edge”. Then piece together the tactics, fine-tune the funnel and select the solutions to leverage and move their business forward.”

4 Steps for Building an Influencer Strategy

What makes our strategy team so effective? Our 4 step process outlines how we continuously produce disruptive client work:

Discovery

We work closely with our clients to uncover and outline their key objectives, challenges, and opportunities, taking both a short and long-term perspective. This phase goes beyond simply understanding the brief – it’s about diving deep into the brand’s identity, target audience, competitive landscape, and market trends. By gaining these insights, we can identify the most impactful ways influencer marketing can support broader business goals and ensure that every campaign is rooted in a clear understanding of what success looks like.

Strategy Building

We craft bespoke influencer and creator-led approaches designed to not just meet, but exceed the key outcomes. Our strategic plans are tailored to each client, combining creativity with data-driven insights to maximise reach, engagement, and ROI. How do we do this? By collaborating closely with the client and cross-functional teams across the business, we ensure that every element – from messaging to influencer selection – aligns with the original brief and broader business objectives. The result is a strategy that is both ambitious and achievable, designed to deliver measurable impact.

Implementation

Our involvement doesn’t stop once the strategy is agreed upon. Our strategy “Goats”, quite literally experts in their field, stay actively engaged, working hand-in-hand with our client services, campaigns, and paid media teams to bring the brief to life. This includes monitoring progress, addressing challenges, and making real-time adjustments to ensure the campaign runs smoothly and effectively. By staying embedded throughout the execution phase, we make sure that strategy translates into tangible results without losing momentum or focus.

Learnings

We work closely with our Data and Insights team to continuously analyse campaign performance, uncovering what worked, what could be improved, and why. These learnings not only inform the next campaign but also feed into the client’s long-term marketing vision, creating a cycle of continuous improvement. By leveraging data-driven insights, we refine our approach, optimise performance, and ensure that each subsequent campaign is smarter, more targeted, and more effective than the last.

Radia Jarjis, Senior Strategy Manager:

“You should treat your influencer strategy as your elevator pitch, it should be easy to explain and even easier to understand. As strategists, there’s a temptation to overintellectualise, throw buzzwords and add a million components to a strategy to make it sound fancy. The reality is, you don’t want something fancy, you want something that works. Your strategy needs to tell your client what they’re going to do.

There’s that famous monologue in Fleabag, where she breaks down and admits she just wants someone to “tell me what to eat… what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to love, what to buy tickets for…” That’s our clients. They’re not looking for complication, they’re looking for clarity and direction.

Influencer strategy should connect brands to the right creators who will produce the right content and nudge them to take the right action.

Of course, every influencer strategy is bespoke, tailored to a client’s unique needs and goals. But in practice, the process often comes down to five key steps:

1. WHO: Selecting the right influencers or creators whose audiences and values align with the brand.

2. WHAT: Defining what they’ll do: the type of content, the creative direction, and the brand message they’ll bring to life.

3. WHERE: Choosing the right platforms and formats to reach audiences where the content will resonate.

4. WHEN: Deciding on timing: that could like always-on activity, tactical bursts, or even a big PR splash.

5. WHY: Providing the rationale: grounding the approach in insight, research, and a clear reason for every decision.”

Delving Into IBEX

IBEX is Goat’s proprietary AI-powered data analytics and discovery tool, built by Goat and exclusive to Goat. In order to create campaigns that truly resonate, we utilise IBEX to widen the scope of our campaigns and dive into the ‘why’ behind the numbers.

With high-powered benchmarking capabilities, we are able to monitor progress, optimise media spend and process an expansive network of creators, platforms, and content formats. 

Supported by our dedicated strategy and insights teams, we translate large scale data into clear direction that informs every stage of the campaign journey. We learn what motivates, and resonates with our clients’ audiences, and how those insights can be used to continually refine and enhance our campaigns for the long term.

How Have We Leveraged Strategy For Clients?

At Goat, we believe that influencer marketing is most effective when built on long-term, data-driven strategy rather than quick wins. Our approach focuses on understanding a brand’s goals, audiences, and challenges, and then creating a framework that can evolve over time. We don’t just plan campaigns; we craft scalable strategies that allow brands to grow, adapt, and maintain relevance in a constantly changing digital landscape. By embedding ourselves in the client’s business, collaborating across teams, and continuously analysing results, we ensure every campaign contributes to a larger, sustainable vision.

A prime example of this approach is our long-term partnership with NIVEA. NIVEA wanted to increase its brand relevance and it was our job to combine deep audience insights with a multi-year strategy, to position the brand to connect with younger generations while staying true to its heritage. Influencer collaborations, platform-specific content, and ongoing engagement were all aligned to this strategy, allowing for consistent growth and adaptability over time. Over five years, we delivered more than 3,000 pieces of content, generating 65 million engagements, and supported record-breaking sales of €5.2 billion in 2024. This partnership demonstrates how a carefully planned, long-term strategy can drive both cultural relevance and measurable business impact.

How Is Influencer Strategy Evolving?

At The Goat Agency we are constantly looking to improve what we offer clients. From leveraging the latest trends, testing our clients on new platforms and formats, and constantly expanding how far we can go with influencers. Our approach combines a centralised strategy with a localised approach, allowing us to think long-term while adapting campaigns to specific markets and audiences. By doing this, we can place influencers in new and diverse areas, spanning the entirety of the marketing mix – from paid media and experiential campaigns to retail and brand partnerships – making influencer activity go further than ever before. 

We are constantly trying and testing our approaches to understand what works, refine our methods, and ensure that every campaign is smarter, more impactful, and positioned for sustained success over time. We want to make our clients go further and Influence Everywhere: getting the right people to create the right content and putting it in the right places. When you combine human media with connected media, you get scalable storytelling, more accurate targeting, and exceedingly more measurable performance. 

But most importantly, real impact.

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How can Goat help you curate a meaningful strategy? Get in touch to find out.

The leading creators and influencers are building strategies that move the needle. View our dedicated Insights Hub & Substack ‘Raised on Social’ to discover what you can takeaway for your own.