The holiday season is a golden opportunity for businesses to ramp up sales, boost brand awareness, and engage new audiences. With more people than ever turning to social media for gift ideas and recommendations, influencer marketing has become an essential tool for reaching shoppers during this busy time.
Influencer holiday campaigns can connect your brand with consumers who are actively seeking holiday deals and festive inspiration. But how exactly do you make the most of influencer marketing for the holidays?
Here, we’ll walk you through strategies your business can implement to maximize your reach, boost your holiday sales, and get a jump on the competition.
Plan an Influencer-Affiliate Campaign
Influencer-affiliate campaigns combine the persuasive power of influencers with trackable, performance-driven marketing. Here’s how it works: you provide influencers—whether they’re popular Christmas influencers or rising stars on TikTok holiday trends—with unique discount codes or affiliate links to share with their followers. When followers make a purchase using these codes, the influencer earns a commission, and your business gets a sale. It’s a win-win!
Steps to Create a Successful Holiday Affiliate Campaign:
- Unique Discount Codes: Offer special discount codes for each influencer. This creates an incentive for their followers to make a purchase during the holiday season.
- Ongoing Organic Posting: Encourage influencers to keep posting about your brand organically, even after their sponsored posts. This extended promotion helps maintain brand visibility.
- Performance Tracking: Track sales through affiliate links to measure the campaign’s ROI. This allows you to see exactly which influencers are driving the most holiday traffic and sales.
Affiliate campaigns offer a measurable, results-oriented way to boost your holiday sales while ensuring influencers are genuinely invested in promoting your products.
Work with Local Influencers to Drive Traffic to Physical Stores
With many shoppers craving in-store experiences for holiday shopping, partnering with local influencers can be a game changer. These influencers often have highly engaged, local followers, making them perfect for driving foot traffic to your physical locations.
Benefits of Working with Local Influencers:
- In-Store Events: Partner with local influencers to host in-store events, such as holiday-themed shopping nights or exclusive discounts. This creates a sense of community and incentivizes shoppers to visit.
- Collaborative Promotions: Offer influencers special in-store promotions they can share with their followers. This gives their audience a reason to stop by your store during the holiday rush.
- Building Relationships: Fostering long-term relationships with local influencers can help you stay top-of-mind year-round, not just during the holidays.
Local influencers provide a personal touch, encouraging more authentic, face-to-face connections with customers and driving valuable foot traffic.
Diversify Content While Sticking to the Holiday Theme
The holidays are all about storytelling, and influencer marketing is no different. By working with different types of influencers to create various seasonal content, you can tap into the festive spirit while showcasing your products creatively.
Content Ideas to Keep Things Festive:
- Gift Guides: Partner with influencers to create curated gift guides featuring your products. Tailor these guides to different audiences, such as "Gifts for Him" or "Stocking Stuffers for Kids."
- Giveaways & Contests: Who doesn’t love a holiday giveaway? Use influencers to host giveaways or contests where followers can win your products. This can skyrocket engagement and bring new eyes to your brand.
- Holiday-Themed Posts: Encourage influencers to incorporate your products into their festive content. Whether they decorate with your items or unbox a holiday-themed package, this kind of content brings the holiday spirit to life.
By working with influencers to create this varied content, you can maintain a festive vibe while still pushing your products.
Boost Brand Awareness with Story Reposts
One simple yet effective strategy to maximize your holiday influencer efforts is reposting influencer stories. Influencers often share quick, relatable content in Instagram Stories, and reposting these helps keep your brand top-of-mind without overwhelming your audience with overly promotional posts.
Why Story Reposts Work:
- Maximizing Reach: Every time you repost an influencer’s story, you tap into their audience while reminding your own followers of your products. The more often people see your brand during the holiday season, the more likely they are to make a purchase.
- Engagement through Consistency: Consistently reposting influencer content can help build a narrative around your brand, engaging shoppers on an ongoing basis.
- Authenticity is Key: Be mindful of balancing reposts with authentic, organic content to avoid feeling too "salesy." Highlight the fun, festive, and real-life use of your products through influencer posts.
This strategy keeps your brand in front of potential customers in an unobtrusive, authentic way, building recognition and trust during the busiest shopping season.
Start Holiday Content Planning Early
Holiday influencer campaigns can take time to coordinate, especially when working with multiple influencers. From negotiating contracts to finalizing content, there’s a lot of back and forth. That’s why starting early is crucial.
Why Early Planning is Essential:
- Avoid Content Lag: Influencers often require time to create high-quality, engaging content. You’ll need enough time to review, approve, and schedule posts without creating bottlenecks. Starting now ensures you don’t miss the peak shopping periods.
- Targeting Early Shoppers: Many shoppers start hunting for deals and gifts well before December. By having influencer content ready early, you can reach these early-bird shoppers and stay ahead of the competition.
- Beat the Holiday Rush: Influencers get booked up quickly for holiday promotions, so securing partnerships early ensures you’ll have the right talent on board before their schedules fill up.
By planning early, you can avoid the stress and chaos of last-minute holiday marketing, ensuring your influencer marketing campaigns run smoothly and effectively.
Don’t Forget the After-Holiday Push
The holiday season doesn’t end on Christmas Day! Many people continue shopping for deals in the days and weeks that follow, making the post-holiday period a prime opportunity for continued influencer marketing for holidays. Keeping your holiday marketing campaign active during this time ensures you reach those post-holiday shoppers who are still on the hunt for deals. By keeping social media influencers involved after the holiday rush, you can maintain momentum and drive additional sales well into the new year.
Post-Holiday Opportunities:
- After Christmas Sales: Many brands offer post-holiday sales, and influencers can help promote these deals to their followers. Whether it's clearance discounts or New Year promotions, keeping influencers involved ensures continued sales momentum.
- Extend Campaigns: Consider extending your influencer partnerships into the new year to keep the buzz going. This can help maintain brand visibility and encourage more post-holiday purchases.
- Target Post-Holiday Shoppers: People often receive gift cards or return items, so there’s a good chance they’ll be looking to spend after the holiday season. Keep influencers engaged to capture these shoppers.
By continuing your influencer marketing efforts after the holidays, you can turn a seasonal boost into sustained sales growth.
Making the Most of Influencers This Holiday Season
The holidays present a huge opportunity for businesses to increase visibility, drive sales, and create lasting customer relationships through influencer marketing. Whether it’s planning an affiliate campaign, collaborating with local influencers, or diversifying your holiday-themed content, these strategies can help you make the most of the season.
To make your holiday influencer campaigns truly successful, it’s essential to start planning now. By preparing early and continuing efforts post-holiday, your business can stay ahead of the competition and maximize its impact during the most important shopping season of the year.
Need help with your holiday marketing strategy? Zero Gravity Marketing specializes in influencer marketing, and we’re here to help you take on the busy holiday season with confidence and success.