Can you believe it’s that time of year again? Just when you feel like you’ve completed your Q3 goals, holiday marketing creeps up like that one colleague in an ugly Christmas sweater (if only they’d all have bells on them so you could hear them coming, right?).
If you’re looking at your current campaigns and wondering if there’s still time for an extra holiday boost, the good news is… influencer marketing is the way to do it. Because influencer marketing is most effective when lived “in the moment,” social media is the perfect way to not just promote your products, but also to leverage your influencers’ follower base in an authentic, relatable way.
While the best way to utilize your influencers is to engage them early (especially for holiday marketing), we’ve put together a few last-minute ideas to make the most of your efforts – the smart way.
3 Ways to Leverage Influencer Marketing for Last-Minute Holiday Campaigns
1. Online “holiday party” giveaways.
Everyone loves a holiday party, and these days some of the best ones are happening online. A super simple theme idea is a “last-minute gift guide” – which, of course, features your product(s).
Incentivize your influencers with freebies so they can give away their favorite picks from your product line for those who attend their live online “holiday party”. Pair up the party with a discount code for those who don’t win the live giveaway, but want to get in on the action. If you can throw in free shipping, 9 out of 10 consumers say that’s a surefire way to get them to purchase more of your products.
2. Use unboxing video content.
The unboxing video is a social media phenomenon that has become quite popular the last few years. Research shows that these are some of the most liked and viewed videos out there, both from a paid and organic perspective. That’s because they help with two fundamental parts of influencer marketing: urgency and visualization.
By having influencers create unboxing videos of your products, you can get followers excited about the feeling of opening their own box of holiday goodies. Plus, it reminds them that these products actually take time to get to their destinations – so they better act fast.
Including details like “order by X to arrive by Christmas” (or whatever holiday you’re featuring) is very important to driving ecommerce sales. Providing this clarity helps drive decisive action – so your influencers’ followers don’t take their credit cards to the mall for those last minute gifts.
As with all influencer marketing campaigns, creating an experience around the product is essential to connecting the purchase with the emotional aspect of the buying decision.
3. Use your employees.
Many employees would be thrilled to be micro-influencers... if you incentivize them. These days, consumers connect more authentically with influencers than they do big-budget celebrities or paid media, like commercials or advertising. Leverage the people who know your brand, products, and services best – those who work for you.
When you turn your employees into influencers, there’s little to no learning curve so you can get your last-minute holiday promos up and running quickly.
And when you partner with a platform like Creatable, it’s really easy to get your influencers (yes, including employees!) up and running seamlessly and quickly. There’s even a custom app for them to create content right on their phone without any fancy equipment – so you can give them the green light and have content published in a snap.
Not only can you find and recruit content creators in your niche right in the platform, Creatable streamlines the operational aspects of maintaining your influencer relationships. You can manage payouts, content approvals, and campaign performance – with clean, reliable data. You’ll have access to everything you need to determine the success of your holiday campaigns in one place (no more gathering intel from multiple sources and hoping it’s right). And because Creatable integrates right into your ecommerce platform, you get real time analytics that utilize first party tracking.
To find out more about how Creatable can save you time and give you the flexibility to create, launch, and monitor your last-minute campaigns (and any other influencer marketing initiatives), schedule a demo with us here.
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