How to Use Influencer Marketing for Festive Season

Festive shopping accounts for up to 30% of all retail sales!

Despite the pandemic, total holiday spending crossed the $789.4 billion mark in 2020. It was 13% more than the figure of the previous year’s festive season. If stats are to believe, the average shopping spends during festivals and holidays increases year by year.

But more than 50% of consumers are opting out of traditional retail shopping. They seem to be more interested in shopping from online stores and e-commerce platforms. In the United States alone, shoppers spent $201.32 billion online during the festive season last year.

The e-commerce industry earned $27 billion on Cyber Monday in 2020 – the biggest year for the industry so far. And Cyber Monday is not the only festive occasion. 

Interestingly, people start buying in October, even before Halloween. And marketers start promoting or teasing their holiday deals as early as the first week of October.

Influencer Marketing

Brands do not want to leave a single stone unturned in convincing their audience. Be it discount offers, TV ads, or social network reviews and explainers – everything they do has one purpose behind it, and that is – to gain the attention of buyers and persuade them to buy.

Partnering with an influencer increases your brand’s reach and awareness within your target market. Apart from that, tying up with an influencer can give you a loyal customer base. 

A study conducted by Facebook reveals that one in two consumers (around 50% of them) believe in influencers. Another Facebook survey shows that about 96% of people discover brands and products online.

Since an influencer – an individual of influence – is endorsing or recommending your brand to their audience, it automatically helps build credibility and trust – the two factors that fruit in long term.

You too can boost your engagement and sales during the festive season by involving influencers to directly or indirectly promote your offers and products.

The most interesting aspect of influencer marketing is its cost and yield. It is an affordable and cost-effective way of marketing your brand. Additionally, influencer marketing can give you $5.20 of sales for every dollar you spend.

So, how do you use influencers to promote your festive offers?

Define Your Goals

Even before you hire an influencer, you should brainstorm over what you expect from your festive marketing campaigns. This should ideally be done for each campaign. But finalizing a figure for the entire festive season will help you find the right influencer(s) and plan your approach.

Ensure that your goals are specific, realistic, time-bound, and measurable while defining your influencer marketing goals.

This phase will also involve defining your marketing budget, so your expenditure doesn’t go over the limit.

The Products and Offers 

You will also need to list down the products and services that will be a part of your festive deals. The choice is yours; you can pick just one product or your entire line for your festive influencer marketing campaign.

However, it would be wise to promote your biggest offers, as it will be the one that will catch the attention of buyers in the first place and influence them to visit and buy from your e-commerce store.

If you don’t have anything new to offer, you can promote your regular products by giving them a festive look. Add a new packaging or apply a new label on the old one - you have your creative freedom here. Just do something that gives your products a refreshing festive feel.

Hire the Right Influencer

Now is time to find an influencer for your festive offers. 

With a misfit influencer for your festive marketing campaign, you won’t be able to generate expected traction. Let’s understand it with an example:

Say, you hire a celebrity influencer from Germany with more than 200K followers for your festive influencer marketing campaigns. And your target audience is based in the Asia-Pacific region. Will your influencer marketing efforts yield?

Probably not! That’s because a German influencer might not have an engaged audience from this region. The right influencer is who is based in the same region and understands the sentiments of the audience.

So, choose region-specific influencers for your influencer marketing campaigns!

Here’s another tip for hiring the right influencer. Choose the one that fits your budget. Don’t go after the number of followers. Instead, focus on the engagement and results they drive.

Compelling Content

Influencers are like the commander of your marketing army. But the content they use to promote your brand is still the king.

Without effective content, your strategies and campaigns won’t perform to your expectations. Discuss the content with the influencer from the very beginning. 

In fact, you should create the plan of content first with your marketing team, and finalize the approach or other aspects of it with the influencer after hiring him/her.

Review, unboxing, and explainer videos still work. But you should always be open to offering something new, something unique through your influencer marketing campaigns.

Pro Tip: Use hashtags to increase visibility and make it easier for the audience to find and identify your content easily. And don’t forget to include relevant festive hashtags.

Paid Campaigns

Once your influencer marketing content is ready, it can be shared via regular timeline updates. The strategy should be to share the content first from the timeline of the influencer, and it should be liked and shared by the brand on their timeline afterward. If you are using Instagram for marketing then you can check out stories and post ideas that you can post on your marketing campaign to deliver more sales. 

To supercharge your outcomes during the festive season, run platform-specific paid ad campaigns. This way, you can show your influencer marketing ads to a highly targeted audience. You can choose your audience based on their age group, gender, location (people from a town or even a specific zip code), and preferences, and several other metrics.

Measure the Outcomes

Analyze how your campaigns perform. This will enable you to fine-tune your festive influencer marketing strategies for performance.

You can use an inbuilt analytics tool on each social network. Or maybe, you can consider working with an advanced social media analytics tool to measure and improve the performance of your festive campaigns.

Bottom Line

But before you get started with festive influencer marketing, you should understand the regulations imposed by the government in your country. Make sure you don’t violate the terms and conditions of the platform too.

Also read:

6 Social Media Ideas for Black Friday & Cyber Monday

How to Increase Your Engagement in the Run-Up to Christmas

Happy festivities! 🎅🎄🎁