The 7 Types of Influencer Marketing Objectives (And How We Hit Each One)

Hi SushiVidFam,

The single most important question in any influencer campaign gets asked before a brief is written, before a KOL is booked, before a single video goes live: what are you actually trying to achieve?

It sounds obvious, yet it's the step most brands rush. "We want to do influencer marketing" is not an objective — it's a channel. The objective is the outcome you're paying for: awareness, engagement, a product launch, sales, app installs, followers, footfall. And here's the part that matters most: each of those goals is won with a different playbook. The creators you pick, the platforms you use, the content format, the call to action, and the metric you report all change depending on the goal.

Below are the seven objectives we run most often at SushiVid — and a real campaign behind each one, with the numbers to back it up. Consider it a menu. The first job of any good campaign is knowing which dish you actually ordered.

1. Brand awareness and reach

The goal: get in front of as many relevant people as possible. You're buying attention and memory, not clicks. Success looks like reach, impressions, and views — the sheer number of eyeballs that now know you exist.

How we achieve it with influencers: volume and spread. We assemble larger rosters of creators, often mixing macro influencers (for scale) with micro creators (for credibility), and we spread them across the platforms where your audience actually scrolls. Multi-market rollouts widen the net further. The creative leans toward memorable, shareable storytelling rather than hard selling.

Proof: For Touch 'n Go Digital's #EverydayCashback campaign, we deployed 84 influencers (each with 50K–1M followers) to explain the perks — landing 16.4M reach and 2.6M views. When a heritage sportswear brand wanted its athleisure identity to land with Gen Z, our Athleisure Brand campaign sent 25 KOLs across Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam to 3.37M views and 153K engagements. And Lazada's 11.11 Supershow turned a mix of mid-tier to alpha influencers into 6M reach at an 11.38% engagement rate.

2. Engagement and community

The goal: don't just get seen — get people to react. Comments, saves, shares, votes, participation. Engagement is the clearest signal that content actually resonated rather than just flickering past.

How we achieve it with influencers: this is where creator fit beats follower count every time. Smaller, highly-aligned creators consistently out-engage big names, so we often go nano and micro. We also build in a reason to interact — a question, a challenge, a vote, a debate.

Proof: For the Sony ZV KOL activation, just 12 nano and micro-influencers on Xiao Hong Shu delivered a 7.03% engagement rate — 3.5x the platform average — alongside 183,011 views. The G-Shock GA-2200 campaign paired 10 stylish creators with transition-style content to hit a remarkable 23% average engagement. And Mirinda's #MIXIT campaign gave people a side to pick — #TeamGrape or #TeamMelon — rallying followers to vote and reaching 290K along the way.

3. New product launches

The goal: introduce something new and make the market understand what it is, who it's for, and why they should care. Launches blend awareness with early trial and consideration.

How we achieve it with influencers: we lead with demonstration and education. Creators show the product in use, explain the hook, and often carry a promo code so you can see the first wave of interest convert. Launches usually run over several weeks so the message compounds rather than spikes and vanishes.

Proof: VitaHealth's Asta-Glutathione launch ran 10 influencers with promo codes over three months to 1.8M reach and 221K views. SOFY's Maxi launch sent 25 influencers to Lazada and beat expectations across a two-month push (421K reach). Binti's Beauty launched three new products and a 'Spend and Win' contest with 100 influencers for 1.6M reach. And when a global cosmetics brand wanted its Fit Me line to land in Singapore and Malaysia, our International Skincare Brand campaign leaned on authentic, locally-led content to reach 381K views and 19K engagements.

4. Sales and conversions

The goal: the bottom of the funnel — orders, revenue, units moved. This is where influencer marketing stops being "nice to have" and starts showing up in the sales dashboard.

How we achieve it with influencers: we tie creators directly to a buying moment. That means shoppable formats — TikTok Shop videos and livestreams, affiliate links, trackable promo codes — usually timed to a mega-sale (8.8, 9.9, 11.11) when purchase intent is already high. For always-on commerce, we pair content with full shop management so the storefront can actually handle the demand.

Proof: Our 8.8 Sales on TikTok Shop engagement is the clearest example: full TikTok Shop management drove orders from 241 to 1,690 in two months, then doubled that again during the 8.8 sale. For SHEIN's 8.8 campaign, 12 KOLs with 1.5M combined followers shared a 15% promo code and drove 4,000 link clicks. And the ASEAN Online Sale proved you don't need a huge roster to sell — 14 seeder and micro-influencers generated 149+ sales over a two-day event.

5. Traffic, clicks and redemptions

The goal: move people from feed to a specific destination and get them to act — click a link, visit a landing page, redeem an offer, join a live session. The metric is the action, not the impression.

How we achieve it with influencers: clear, urgent calls to action plus low-friction paths to click. We use link-in-bio mini-webpages, limited-time offers, and countdown-style urgency. When the offer is genuinely good and the deadline is real, redemption rates can be extraordinary.

Proof: YSL Beauty's Raya TikTok campaign engaged 50 TikTokers in under two weeks and fully redeemed a Raya gift promotion within two days, off the back of 5.8M reach. For Lazada's 9.9 campaign, we built 173 IGLinks mini-webpages for influencers and drove 27,830 link clicks. And the Taiwan Select livestream campaign turned four creators on IG and Facebook into 4,000+ clicks straight to live shopping sessions.

6. App installs and sign-ups

The goal: a specific, trackable performance action — download the app, install the wallet, register the account. There's no ambiguity here: either the install happened or it didn't.

How we achieve it with influencers: we remove every reason not to act. That usually means an incentive (a reload pin, a member perk, a first-order reward) plus creators walking through the exact steps so the process feels effortless. Longer campaigns keep the reminder in front of people until they finally tap "install".

Proof: Touch 'n Go Digital's Project Santa used 63 influencers and a free RM8 reload pin to drive eWallet installs across a three-month campaign — 990K reach and 1.3M views. Watsons' Jauh Di Mata, Tetap Beraya campaign put 18 micro and macro influencers to work driving member sales and app installs (422K reach). And Digi's Capture App campaign used influencer reviews of the free cloud-storage perk to reach 520K at a 3% engagement rate.

7. Follower and account growth

The goal: build the brand's own audience so you own the relationship long after the campaign ends. Every new follower is a person you can reach again for free.

How we achieve it with influencers: we point the creators' audiences at your account, not just your product — through collaborative content, tagged takeovers, contests that require a follow, and consistent posting under a campaign hashtag so the momentum carries the handle upward.

Proof: For Tourism Perak 2024, 92 TikTok videos under #VisitPerakYear2024 grew the state tourism account from 11,788 to 19,200 followers while racking up 5.6M views. Our Lazada Raya TikTok campaign similarly used 10 macro and alpha influencers to grow Lazada's TikTok following off a Raya contest (946K reach).

A bonus objective: launching a physical store

Not every goal lives online. When ZCOVA opened its first retail store, the objective was footfall and buzz around a physical location. We themed 14 KOLs around love and commitment — perfectly on-brand for a diamond retailer — to drive 1M+ reach and 1.2M+ views toward the launch. Same channel, completely different objective, completely different playbook.

The takeaway: pick the goal first

Look back across those seven objectives and one pattern jumps out — the "best" influencer strategy doesn't exist in the abstract. A 12-creator nano roster that smashes engagement records for Sony would be the wrong answer for a mega-sale. The 84-influencer blast that built awareness for Touch 'n Go would be overkill for a two-day flash sale. Great campaigns aren't the ones with the most followers or the biggest budget. They're the ones where every decision — creators, platform, format, call to action, and the metric on the report — ladders back to a single, clearly-stated objective.

So before you brief your next campaign, answer the question we started with: what are you actually trying to achieve? Get that right, and the rest of the plan almost writes itself.

If you're not sure which objective fits your brand right now — or you want a campaign built around it end-to-end — tell us what you're trying to achieve and we'll take it from there.