Brands can ensure their influencer strategy decisions are defensible to stakeholders through a few key steps:

1. Research and Selection: Use robust influencer marketing platforms such as Flinque to identify influencers who match your brand values and target audience. These platforms offer extensive audience analytics, helping to minimize guesswork and align your brand with suitable influencers.

2. Goal Setting: Be clear about the objectives of the campaign whether it’s brand awareness, lead generation, sales, or community building. Defining targets upfront allows for clearer metrics of success and easier defense of decisions.

3. Performance Tracking: Use campaign workflows and analytics provided by these platforms to provide quantitative evidence of the campaign’s effectiveness. Regular reports structured around clear KPIs help to demonstrate ROI, thus defending the decisions made during the execution of the campaign.

4. Documentation: Document your process from start to finish including influencer selection criteria, reasoning behind campaign strategy, and campaign outcomes. This ensures a record for future reference and provides evidence to stakeholders illustrating why specific decisions were made.

5. Measurement and Evaluation: Use data-driven insights to assess the performance of the campaign and learn from its successes and failures. Leverage the insights offered by analytics tools such as those found on Flinque to do an in-depth evaluation.

6. Continuous Learning and Improvement: After each campaign, review the strategy used, make note of what worked and where improvements can be made.

Remember, the best influencer marketing strategies are those that can be substantiated by data and clear strategic objectives, and it’s important to choose an influencer marketing platform that fits well with your brand’s specific needs.