It’s vital that you start developing your Christmas holiday strategy early to kickstart your campaign. Consumers will be turning to content creators for gift ideas and inspiration, as well as promo codes and discounts. It’s the perfect time of the year to create a buzz around your brand and boost sales.
Here are 4 reasons why planning and launching your Christmas campaign now can increase its success this busy season!
1. Christmas campaigns take some time to complete
In order for your campaigns to run smoothly, you should expect campaign processes to take approximately 5 weeks. The process includes:
Campaign Preparation
It takes about 1 week to draft your brief and select creators.
Onboarding
It takes about 1 week to launch the campaign and for creators to accept the booking requests.
* Plus: If you’re planning to ship products to creators, delivery times should be taken into account.
Campaign Period
It takes a minimum of 2 weeks for creators to take and prepare photos/videos for 1 piece of content. For 2 pieces of content, it can take a minimum of 4 weeks.
If you want a creator to publish more than 1 sponsored post, we recommend that you give them a longer deadline so they can space out their posts. Sponsored posts that are published within days of each other can negatively impact the engagement rate of the second post.With a longer deadline, creators will be able to space out their content and successfully maintain consistent engagement rates on multiple pieces of sponsored content.
Campaign Analysis
It takes about 1 week to gather key metrics, create a report, and give our recommendations for your next campaign.
So while December may seem far away, it’ll arrive sooner than you think!
Pro tip: Free up your time for other tasks! Our team can run a full-service campaign for you this holiday season, from A to Z. You’ll be given access to a Dashboard, so you’ll be updated on the progress of your campaign in real-time.
2. Consumers start shopping as early as November
As consumers begin to shop, they’ll be looking for gift ideas on social media to add to their shopping lists. Here are several ways you can work with creators to extend a helping hand:
Create a holiday gift guide
The Christmas season is a hectic time for consumers. They’ll be juggling different preparations, such as buying gifts. To ease their holiday stress, collaborate with creators to share gift guides. They can include your products or services in their guide, which their followers will see when searching for gift ideas.Sharing gift guides is an effective campaign strategy, as 71% of consumers are more likely to make purchases based on social media referrals.
Provide inspiration
Ask creators to feature your product or service creatively to inspire their followers. You can collaborate with:
- Food & Drink creators to whip up festive recipes for the holiday season
- Beauty and Fashion creators to showcase makeup looks and outfits that can be used for events
- Travel creators to share their favorite winter holiday destinations
- Interior creators to highlight ways your products can be used to decorate a home
Reveal exclusive holiday deals
Partner up with a set of creators to promote a Christmas advent calendar filled with exclusive discounts, promo codes, and giveaways. The creators can unveil a prize or deal once a day.
Advertise an event
Put on a special holiday workshop in stores, where attendees can, for example, make gingerbread houses or roast a turkey with their favorite Food & Drink creators. The creators can promote the event on their social media and publish Instagram Stories while it’s occurring. This will create a buzz around your brand and spread Christmas cheer.
Introduce a challenge
Present consumers with a fun challenge. The challenges can include various activities with your brand, products, or services, and the other people with the most creative ideas can win prizes.In the challenges, participants can bake a treat, build Christmas decorations, and more. They can then share their creations with a unique hashtag. The content will provide people with great DIY ideas and generate engagement around your brand.
Creators can advertise your challenge and select the winners! The winners can pick up their prizes in stores, which will create extra foot traffic for you this Christmas season!
3. You’ll have content in time to reuse for your other marketing campaigns
A benefit of utilizing influencer marketing is the genuine content that’s produced. It’s an effective way to build trustworthy brand-consumer relationships. Rather than using staged photos, you can reuse the authentic content generated in your campaign to enrich your ads, website, emails, and social media.
For instance, mobile shopping is on the rise. In fact, in 2018, mobile shopping processed the majority of digital orders for the first time. To gear up for mobile shopping, you can reuse creator content by:
Adding shopping links to the content
You can repost the content you receive in collaborations on your Instagram during the Christmas season. You’ll be able to add shopping links to the products being featured in the posts. When consumers search for gift ideas, they’ll be able to click on the shopping links and buy your products directly from your website.
To gain more authentic Christmas content and a wider reach, you can:
Host a competition with creators
The creators can encourage their audience to publish festive photos for a chance to win your product or service. This will provide you with additional content you can reuse, but be sure to ask for permissions before doing so!
Additionally, using creators to generate quality content is affordable. In our campaigns, we found that content published by creators can be up to 10x less expensive than those produced by professional creative studios.
Pro tip: We can include a Content Usage Rights clause in your campaign, which means you’ll be free to reuse the content generated in your campaigns. They’ll be gathered in the Content Library to make it easy for you to access and download.
4. The best creators will be booked for other campaigns
The holiday season is a busy time for both brands and creators. With many brands ramping up their holiday campaigns, there will be a huge demand for creators. Many of them may already:
- Be booked by other brands
- Have exclusive agreements with other brands
- Be unavailable because of planned vacations and family time
To avoid any last minute panic, be prompt in sending out booking requests!
Pro tip: We have over 10,000 curated creators registered on our platform, and an additional 35,000,000 profiles in our database. Based on your campaign needs and brand image, we’ll find and add relevant creators to your campaigns!
Need some Christmas campaign inspiration?
In 2018, Clas Ohlson partnered with 26 content creators on inzpire.me to promote their festive Christmas products. In the campaign, the creators shared how they’ve used Clas Ohlson products to make their homes cozy and warm this Christmas season. They built anticipation for Clas Ohlson’s products by sharing 3 themed posts leading up to Christmas!
Let our team take the load off your shoulders this holiday season. We’ll manage your entire holiday influencer marketing campaign, from drafting your brief to sending you customized reports. Contact us here to get started!
inzpire.me
inzpire.me is an influencer marketing platform that connects brands with influencers across the globe. Ready to launch a campaign?
