The busy shopping holiday season is just around the corner. With e-commerce businesses taking a bigger slice of the holiday shopping pie every year, brands need to take full advantage of this end-of-the-year boon.
Table of Contents
- Why Influencer Marketing Works So Well For Holiday Campaigns
- How To Create An Influencer Marketing Campaign For The Holidays
- Step 1: Planning
- Choosing Your Campaign Type
- Step 2: Create Your Offers & Discounts
- Step 3: Prepare Your Website & Social Media Channels
- Optimize Landing Pages
- Optimize Cross-Sales & Upsells
- Inventory
- Step 4: Choose Your Influencers
- What To Do If You’re Starting Your Planning Late
- Keep It Simple
- Work With Influencers On Holiday Content
- Call On Past Influencers You’ve Worked With
- Consider Using An Influencer Marketing Agency
- Focus on Quality Influencers
- Don’t Overspend
- Holiday Influencer Marketing Strategies
- Custom Holiday Giveaways
- Try Affiliate Relationships
- Give Back To The Community
- Emphasize Black Friday & Cyber Monday
- Holiday-Themed UGC Campaign
- Other Holidays For Themed Influencer Marketing Campaigns
- Final Tips For Holiday Influencer Marketing
One way to do that is to create influencer marketing campaigns for the holidays. Influencer marketing allows for an immediate connection with customers in your target demographic who are actively looking for shopping ideas.
To get the most out of your holiday marketing push, we’ve compiled a guide to help you create an influencer marketing plan for the holidays that gets results and helps you end the year on a high note.
Why Influencer Marketing Works So Well For Holiday Campaigns
The reason influencer marketing can work well for holiday promotions is the same reason it’s so effective in general. Influencer marketing is timely and immediate, which is perfect for seizing on events or special occasions.
Influencers have a conversation with their audience on a daily basis through new posts and other interactions. This means events like holidays fit right into their content and overall narrative.
It allows for a seamless transition into your product or brand mention along with any special holiday promotions or offers you are running at the time.
The results and targeting are also more immediate than other advertising channels such as PPC digital advertising. With these methods, you often need to run test campaigns and monitor the results. You then slowly ramp up and scale as you gather more data from the advertising platform.
This means it’s often harder to put together a custom advertising campaign for the holidays unless you have data from previous years to go by.
With influencer marketing, you can quickly target specific niche audiences who are receptive to your product and are actively looking for holiday shopping ideas.
How To Create An Influencer Marketing Campaign For The Holidays
Below, we’ll go through the steps to get your campaign up and running for the holidays.
Step 1: Planning
Planning is probably the biggest misstep for small brands when it comes to taking advantage of the holiday season and different influencer marketing opportunities.
In reality, you should be planning for your holiday campaign around August. This allows you plenty of time to take things slowly and choose the best influencers to match your campaign. However, if you’re late, you can still put together a last-minute campaign.
If you are running behind in your planning, you’ll likely need to scale back the scope of your campaign. Influencers with larger audiences will likely start to fill up their available holiday slots quickly, so you may need to work with smaller influencers.
However, that’s not necessarily a problem but it may reduce your overall reach.
Smaller influencers generally offer a better ROI for campaigns but at the cost of a smaller total audience size. You can still stack these influencers for a wider reach, but that does add complexity to your campaign.
But despite those minor drawbacks, using micro influencers is a popular strategy with many top brands who want to maintain a high ROI and precise audience targeting with a holiday influencer campaign.
Choosing Your Campaign Type
Since we’re specifically targeting a holiday, that will limit the type of campaigns you will want to use.
Influencer marketing can work for a variety of campaign objectives such as brand awareness or authority building. However, for a holiday campaign, you’re probably going to focus on either increasing sales or increasing web traffic to your online offer.
For newer brands, this is going to be especially true. If you’re an established brand in the space and the audience of an influencer already knows about your products, you can use some brand awareness strategies mixed in.
This brand awareness approach helps with mentions or possible hashtag promotions across different platforms. But for most brands, you want to stick with driving sales or traffic and save your brand awareness strategies for other times of the year.
Step 2: Create Your Offers & Discounts
This step can be a little tricky since you’ll have to decide in advance what your pricing may be. You can always make your holiday offer better after an influencer runs your paid placement. However, you can’t increase the price or reduce the offer. This means if demand is higher than anticipated, you’re sort of leaving money on the table with your lower initial offer.
If you have sales data to use, try to analyze your data and look at how your sales and conversions reacted over the last several holiday seasons. This should give you some insight into a pricing or promotional model for the current year.
If you don’t have enough data to go on, you can look into what your more established competitors are doing. Look back at their previous year’s holiday promotions and use that as a gauge for setting your own prices.
Just be sure not to copy them if it doesn’t make business sense. A larger competitor may have more advantageous pricing power than you. Just use their previous holiday promotion as a guideline and adjust based on your own strengths and business model.
Some common pricing promotions to consider:
- Free shipping
- Free gifts or extended services for orders over a certain amount
- Bundles or BOGO offers
- Tiered discounts
- Exclusive discounts via the influencer
- Different daily discounts to increase traffic and build excitement
- Giveaways to capture emails into your holiday sales funnel
These will depend on the product and service you are offering. But try to be creative and mix and match these offers for the best results.
You’ll also want to consider which offer type will work best with the influencers you choose in the later parts of the campaign planning. For example, if one influencers focus on budget-friendly fashion choices, that audience will be most receptive to certain offers.
Audiences looking for higher-end products or solutions generally aren’t as price-sensitive, so you can consider ways to add value with our offer instead of simply cutting prices.
Step 3: Prepare Your Website & Social Media Channels
This step will depend on how much time you have to prepare and what technical resources you have available to you. But you want to consider some key areas to make sure everything is ready for your marketing campaign on launch.
Optimize Landing Pages
Increasing traffic through your influencer holiday marketing campaign is only half of the equation. Once that traffic lands on your site, you need to convert them into sales or leads.
Optimizing your landing pages takes time and may require hiring outside help for coding, graphic design, or other tasks.
Some things to consider are:
- Updated homepage or product images
- Homepage headers indicating current holiday sales and promotions
- Updated social proof/reviews to help conversions with traffic from social media platforms
- Mentions of your current influencer campaign and the influencers you are working with.
How you customize or optimize your site will be different depending on your industry. But if you’re running a holiday influencer marketing campaign, you want your site to match the promotion.
Optimize Cross-Sales & Upsells
Cross-sales and upsells are a type of personalized shopping recommendation that can drastically boost your average transaction amount. This helps boost the ROI of any influencer marketing campaign.
Customers also welcome personalized offers that help make their shopping experience complete. This is especially true when trying a new product or brand and they may not be sure of exactly what they need to complete a purchase.
Make sure you optimize your cross-selling and upselling strategy before your holiday campaign launches so that it appeals to new customers to your brand and their needs.
Inventory
This one may not be marketing-related, but if your marketing campaign is a success and you run out of product, that’s going to be a problem.
For digital services, this isn’t a problem. But if you’re selling a product, make sure you have the necessary inventory to handle whatever promotion you’re using.
If you’re providing upsells, x-sells, bundles, or BOGOs, this can all put an unexpected strain on inventory as well.
Supply chain disruptions are also the norm in today’s business environment, so don’t always count on last-minute deliveries of needed inventory.
Provide an extra few weeks of lead time for your orders to make sure you’re ready for the holiday rush when you’re influencer marketing campaign is a success.
Step 4: Choose Your Influencers
Once you have your offers and other details in order, you can start to focus on finding the right influencers for your holiday influencer marketing campaign.
Once again, since the main focus is going to be driving sales and traffic to your website or offer page, influencer selection is a key part of finding success.
Targeting is always important when finding influencers, but it’s even more critical when your goal is to drive sales and conversions directly from the campaign or a social media post.
You want to find influencers that are directly related to your product category or industry. Use that as your first criterion for narrowing down your list.
One aspect to be aware of is if your product can be advertised as a gift idea to a specific audience that’s different from your core customers.
For example, a product designed for men can be advertised to an audience of women as a gift idea.
But with this type of audience targeting, the rest of the demographics still need to match your product.
This type of mixed-audience holiday influencer campaign is common for gift box-style subscriptions. They can work by targeting various audiences as a gift idea despite not being targeted directly at the intended end consumer.
Positioning your product as a gift idea can open up a lot of new audiences to target. But it can get tricky if you lack experience or knowledge about the customers you’re trying to target.
One way to make the targeting easier is to try to stay within the same industry. For example, if you’re selling a fitness product, staying within the fitness niche will allow you to maintain targeting while still getting the benefits of promoting your item as a gift idea.
People who are into fitness and wellness generally have friends in the same niche, so the gift idea targeting works.
Just be mindful of the audience as this technique doesn’t translate for every niche and product category.
What To Do If You’re Starting Your Planning Late
You want to start your planning as soon as possible when it comes to a holiday influencer marketing campaign. But what can you do if you’re getting off to a late start?
Well, you can still get your campaign going even with as little as a month’s lead time. It won’t be perfect, but if you follow a few of these tips, you can still get a good ROI and enjoy a strong holiday sales boost.
Keep It Simple
Keeping it simple will help you maximize your messaging with the influencers you choose.
Decide on your product’s strongest sales message and a promotion that best suits that message. Strip away everything else and just focus on generating sales based on that premise.
A complex campaign with unboxing videos or product reviews may work well, but if there’s no time to get those done, just focus on simple product mentions or sponsored posts that outline your unique selling points.
Work With Influencers On Holiday Content
When you approach influencers during your selection process, ask about what type of holiday content they’re planning. They may have a “best of” video coming up or a holiday shopping list-style video they’re producing.
This may be an opportunity for you to find a unique promotional partnership at the last minute without any extra effort.
Call On Past Influencers You’ve Worked With
If you’ve had past relationships with influencers which worked out well, reach out and ask about new opportunities. You’ll be pressed for time so working with influencers you’ve already partnered with can speed up the process.
You’ve already vetted these influencers and you should already know the contract details. So setting everything up should go faster than seeking out new influencers.
Consider Using An Influencer Marketing Agency
Choosing an influencer marketing agency can help you find influencers faster. The agency will have influencers whom they already have relationships with. Although sometimes lead times can be longer with an agency, for simple campaigns, they can often put something together quickly that still performs extremely well.
Outside of that, you can also try influencer marketing platforms. These are marketplaces where influencers and brands can come together to forge partnerships.
In some cases, these platforms can speed up the vetting process if you’re putting together an influencer marketing holiday campaign at the last minute.
Focus on Quality Influencers
If you’re putting together an influencer campaign on a tight timeline, it likely means it’s going to be smaller in scope and overall reach. Because of that, you want to focus on the influencers’ quality and how their audience aligns with your target customer.
This type of alignment is always important. However, with shorter and smaller campaigns, it becomes more critical as there is less of a margin for error compared to larger campaigns.
You can think of it like the difference between a marketing campaign for a huge summer blockbuster and a small independent film only showing in select theaters.
The marketing for the small independent film needs to be far more precise in its targeting. The summer blockbuster can overlap with many different audience types and still work.
A last-minute holiday campaign is similar and you need to focus on targeting to get the best results.
Don’t Overspend
In business, waiting until the last minute can often cause us to overspend. Without the time to do the proper research, we may end up overpaying or simply paying for things we probably didn’t need.
If you’re putting together a campaign at the last minute, make sure you don’t overspend.
Even though it’s last minute, still pay close attention to your costs and potential ROI based on real metrics and past sales data.
Holiday Influencer Marketing Strategies
In this section, we’ll cover some strategies you can use for your holiday influencer marketing campaign. Use these as a jumping-off point to create your own unique campaign that fits your brand, budget, and goals for the holiday season.
Custom Holiday Giveaways
Giveaways are always a solid way to boost engagement when running an influencer marketing campaign. They also work great for the holiday season since customers are already in a bargain-seeking mindset as they finish up their shopping.
By tailoring your giveaway around the holidays, you also boost engagement and can create a festive atmosphere that helps build excitement around your brand.
If you’re creating a giveaway-style campaign, just make sure you launch it early enough. A late-running giveaway too close to the holiday shopping deadline can yield poor results since many people have already completed their shopping.
You want time for the giveaway to run its course and leave enough time for those who engage with the promotion to still purchase an item through your store before the holiday.
Try Affiliate Relationships
In some cases, you can try to forge affiliate relationships with your influencers. This can help them put more effort into promoting your brand while also helping you control costs and guarantee a specific ROI.
Some influencers prefer affiliate relationships when promoting products with subscriptions or memberships. These affiliate partnerships will generally pay the influencer a recurring amount based on the membership length.
This means the influencer can receive a continuous revenue stream from each sale they send to your subscription or membership site.
Give Back To The Community
Another option is to tie in your campaign with a cause or charity you feel strongly about.
An example of this is to dedicate a portion of the proceeds of sales to the charity or social cause of your choice. This helps align your brand’s message to the audience and also resonates with the spirit and tone of the holidays.
There are a lot of different ways you can do this so feel free to be creative and also work with your influencers to see if you both have charities in common that you both support.
It’s a great way to do some good while also strengthening your partnership with the influencer and their audience.
Emphasize Black Friday & Cyber Monday
This one seems obvious, but if you’re planning ahead, make sure to include both Black Friday and the following Cyber Monday promotions.
With e-commerce, these have become two of the biggest promotion days for virtually every industry. This means many shoppers specifically hold off until they hear what promotions their favorite brands will unveil.
Don’t get drowned out by the competition on these critical days and ensure your deals are communicated in advance of these days with the influencers you’ve chosen.
Holiday-Themed UGC Campaign
UGC (user-generated content) can be an integral part of your holiday influencer campaign.
Whether promoted by your influencer partners or on your own social media channels, it’s an easy way to increase engagement and tap into the spirit and vibe of the holiday season.
This type of campaign also allows for a high degree of creativity since there is an almost limitless number of ways you can tie specific UGC campaigns to your product and the holidays.
Other Holidays For Themed Influencer Marketing Campaigns
We’ve mostly touched on the end-of-the-year holiday season as that’s typically when retail and e-commerce brands push their biggest sales and seasonal marketing efforts.
But more and more brands are leveraging other holidays such as Halloween to launch specific campaigns and promotions for these popular holidays.
Consumers and audiences have really come to expect certain holiday-themed campaigns and marketing during these times, so missing out on these can make your brand look out of step.
Final Tips For Holiday Influencer Marketing
Whether you’re planning all year or you need to get a campaign up and running quickly, this guide should hopefully have given you some ideas to help create a holiday influencer marketing campaign that delivers a strong ROI.
Just remember to track and analyze your campaign when it’s over and use those metrics to improve for the next holiday season.
Holiday sales data is crucial for developing new campaigns and preparing your inventory, landing pages, and other assets.
Gathering and analyzing this data will allow you to keep improving holiday after holiday so you can always end your year with strong sales.