The Five Pillars Of A Savvy Influencer Marketing Strategy

As Chief Strategy Officer at Linqia and co-host of the Creator Economy Live podcast, Keith Bendes is a top voice in Influencer Marketing.

Influencer marketing has become the hottest channel in marketing, and the industry’s market value is estimated to reach over $30 billion in 2025, according to Statista.

Every major marketing event from Cannes Lions to Advertising Week is now dominated by creator and influencer marketers, with brands trying to understand how they can be social first and part of the cultural zeitgeist.

There’s a lot of talk about how to execute influencer campaigns effectively and case studies on great influencer activations. However, there are not enough frameworks on how to structure influencer marketing as a practice in the broader scheme of marketing and media.

So, let’s take this time to outline the five pillars of a savvy influencer marketing strategy as a blueprint for how CMOs and marketing leaders should be thinking about influencer and the impact it has across pretty much every other channel.

1. Paid Media Fuel

Creators can be an incredibly powerful source of content for your paid media needs. Every brand has many different messages and styles of content that they want to strategically target to different audiences, so let creators be the ones to power that content pipeline.

One valuable strategy is “narrative mapping.” To do this, draw a grid of rows and columns. (You can also use Google Sheets.) On the columns, write down every core message your brand can state; then, on the rows, note all of your key audience segments.

The result is a map of every message and audience combination that you should be testing in paid media. For most brands, there are going to be A LOT of cells in that grid. That’s where creators come in, as they offer a highly efficient way to generate that much content at significantly lower cost than traditional production.

2. Cultural Relevance

The currency of brands in the year 2025 is cultural relevance. If you aren’t relevant, your time is limited.

Right now, culture is primarily dictated by social media, with the result being that all brands want to be social first to be part of the trending conversations that dominate the social discord.

This has led many to chase trends endlessly. While most experts would rightfully tell you that your brand shouldn’t be trend chasing, you should be participating in relevant cultural conversations. Algorithms reward this content, and it keeps your brand in people’s feeds.

Just make sure you actually belong in those conversations. Then, think hard about whether it should be your brand itself showing up, or whether it should be real people who represent or support your brand. The latter is where creators play an incredibly important role, as most marketers who are being honest with themselves know that people do not want to hear from brands; they want to hear from other people.

3. A Discovery Engine

Social search is skyrocketing, especially among younger generations. They are both using the social platforms as a search engine and relying on social videos when conducting traditional searches on Google, which indexes social content.

Every brand should be connecting its search and influencer efforts to ensure they have content that answers consumers’ most common questions. Your social posts should have strong copy that leverages top search keywords, discoverable alt text, strategic text overlays in the first three seconds, etc.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should sacrifice great content in the name of search. In fact, your culturally relevant content is often going to be completely different from your search-optimized content. But too many brands don’t have any influencer search strategy, and that’s a problem.

4. Community Building

Brands need to constantly engage their audiences in a way that’s entertaining and effectively communicates brand values. If you look at brands like Liquid Death, Poppi, Wendy’s, e.l.f., consumers seek out these brands because they want to see what they will say and do next.

Part of that is about building social channels and content that is consistent and, thus, something people want to keep coming back for; part of that is focusing on real-life experiences that develop a much closer connection to the communities the brand serves.

Creators play a crucial role in both: Brands are increasingly turning to creators to attend physical experiences, not only to create a better experience for attendees, but to extend the message to the millions of people at home.

We are also seeing much more episodic content from brands that want to create content that people will continuously tune in for. Mohawk Chevrolet is a great example of this, as is the Converse partnership with Amelia Dimoldenberg.

5. A Trusted Source To Sell Your Product/Service

Every brand wants to skip to this step, which explains the significant growth in affiliate and commerce creator partnerships over the last few years. While finding trusted sources should be a core pillar of every influencer strategy, this often involves a very different approach from the other pillars and requires different types of creators and very different messaging goals.

The way to partner with creators to drive sales may look different for every brand, depending on the product/service and brand story. Some may lean heavily into testimonials, others livestreams, others giveaways. For some, the hard sell on social media isn’t right at all because no one is going to immediately buy that product during a scroll session.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to give yourself time to experiment and find what works. If creators can’t successfully drive sales, then they will never sign up for a compensation model that’s based on it.

Find what is successful. Then, creators will want in.

Now What?

The five pillars give you a valuable framework to build an influencer strategy. Now, the important thing is to get leadership alignment. Doing all five effectively requires cross-department collaboration and real budgets for each.

Make sure you have those things. If not, be honest about which of the five you can really tackle successfully.

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