Christmas is nearly upon us and gift shopping is in full swing, so ensuring that you’re successfully marketing your products is crucial. At this time of year, brands everywhere are ramping up their marketing efforts to ensure their success, so what can you do to make sure you’re standing out from the crowd?
By launching an influencer campaign ahead of Christmas, you can market your product to an audience, driving your sales, boosting your brand awareness and increasing your return on investment.
Influencer marketing strategies have become increasingly prominent over the years, and 2021 saw 63% of marketers planning to increase their budget for influencer marketing. With Christmas just around the corner, we’ve created a handy guide that’ll help you launch a successful marketing campaign through influencer collaboration – let's take a look...
Benefits of influencer campaigns
Gone are the days where John Lewis adverts reigned over our screens. Preference among consumers is leaning more and more towards online shopping over bricks-and-mortar stores, with reports stating that 63% of shopping occasions begin online.
Humanistic elements and personalisation
Influencer marketing has the edge over digital advertising on account of its humanistic approach. Utilising influencers that are relatable and authentic to their audiences helps to create a sense of trust and personalisation, which is key to creating an effective and impactful marketing campaign.
Cost-efficiency
Influencer marketing campaigns are cost-efficient and feel more natural to consumers as they’re appearing on home turf – statistics project that 4.4 billion people will be using social media by 2025, so, advertising in a natural way on social media platforms with influencers, is sure to maximise your reach.
Easily accessible
Social media marketing has overtaken print as an advertising channel. Plus, 42% of internet users are making use of ad-blocking plug-ins, so more traditional digital advertisements are becoming redundant, leaving influencer marketing as a far more viable option.
So now you know why you should be using an influencer for your Christmas marketing campaign, the question is how do you go about it?
What are your goals?
The key to launching a successful influencer marketing campaign is knowing exactly what you want to get out of it. While funding sponsored Instagram posts is certainly a viable option, it won’t always be the right one for your specific product or brand. What makes your marketing ‘successful’ will depend on a few key factors:
How many influencers are you planning to work with? If your budget permits you to work with several influencers, then you could reach a wider pool of potential customers.
How large is your budget? The bigger your budget, the bigger the influencers you’ll be able to collaborate with, meaning a more varied audience can be reached.
Do you want your social media influencers to promote specific products or your brand in general? Do you want to shift more of your Christmas gift sets, or simply get your brand name noticed by potential customers?
Who do you want to target? By working with an influencer who is already in your target audience's area of interest, you will increase the level of trust they have in your brand. It’s been reported that 49% of consumers rely on influencers’ opinions before making purchases, so this point is particularly important for driving sales.
By having a clear understanding of what it is you hope to achieve from working with an influencer, you’ll enjoy greater success from your collaboration. This is because a well-thought-out strategy with clear, set-out goals will be a more attractive business proposition from an influencer’s point of view.
Get the right fit: find influencers for your Christmas ads
With our expertise in influencer marketing strategies, we’re able to help you find an influencer in the right genre for whatever it is you’re trying to market. For example, if you’re marketing homeware, then we’ll suggest you collaborate with a home and lifestyle influencer, as their following will represent your target audience. But nailing down the genre of influencer you want to work with is only the first hurdle; the form of content you plan to use is also make or break when it comes to targeting the right audience.
As we’ve already touched on, influencer marketing campaigns can take a number of forms across a number of different platforms, and aren’t solely limited to sponsored Instagram posts. The product or brand interest that you’re advertising will dictate the form that any sponsored content should take. We’ve broken down what we think are the best ways to approach influencer marketing across a few popular sectors - read on to find out more.
Technology
If you were a technology company, for example, you might be more inclined to work with a gaming or technology influencer. Once you’ve narrowed down the influencer, or influencers, that you’d like to collaborate with, you’ve got to decide what form you’d like any sponsored content to take.
For any sort of tech product, YouTube is usually the best fit – with a dedicated or integrated video. Long-form video content, where an influencer can talk at length to their audience, will provide more scope for the standout details of your product to be discussed. In 2021, 89% of video marketers pledged to include YouTube in their marketing strategies, which tells you
just how important a platform it is
Gaming and technology influencers are renowned for unboxing videos, detailed reviews and thorough gameplays and audiences that seek this content, will naturally search for it on YouTube as opposed to the likes of Instagram.
If there are a lot of details that make your product a standout, then having an influencer list them all in the caption of an Instagram post might make a viewer switch off. But if someone is a regular viewer of long-form video content and you’ve inserted an advertisement for your product into their favourite YouTuber’s video, then they’re more likely to engage with what you’re marketing because the form will line up with their expectations.
Beauty
If your product or brand falls within the beauty margin, then working with a beauty influencer on your marketing campaign is a no-brainer. But when it comes to the form of your sponsored content, then you may wish to consider short-form video content: think Instagram Reels, Stories or even TikTok.
Short-form video content means that an influencer will get a chance to show your product in action without being too tedious. With beauty products, the visuals are key, so short-form video content would be a more fitting choice since they allow a consumer to see your product being used in real-time without being overwhelmed with detail.
Instagram Stories may be a particularly good fit for marketing this sort of content – so long as you’re working with an influencer that meets a few key parameters, you’ll be able to make use of the new linking function. This means that a consumer viewing the story will, conveniently, be able to tap the link and be taken directly to your brand or product’s page to get more information and hopefully, make a purchase.
Fashion
Working with fashion influencers is where we’d recommend the classic Instagram post. If you’re promoting a fashion item or accessory, then a sponsored Instagram post will leave all the focus to how your items look.
An influencer can tag your brand in their post, making your page easy to reach, and they can use the caption space to post a short description of the product you’re advertising. Plus, on your own page, you can make use of Instagram’s shopping features, where you can tag individual products for sale with convenient links to purchasing sites.
This means that potential customers, who are shown your product via an influencer marketing campaign, are only clicks away from a page where they can actually buy what you’re advertising – with convenient features like this, it’s no wonder that 57% of fashion companies engage in influencer marketing.
Make this your best Christmas social media campaign yet
The benefits of influencer advertising are clear. Influencers boost your brand’s profile by connecting you with their following, thereby increasing your potential sales and revenue. They can promote your products in a way that feels more authentic, and since consumers trust the opinions of the influencers they follow, they’ll be more likely to trust your brand in turn.
So, how do you set up your influencer marketing campaigns ahead of Christmas?
Contact our team today by emailing contact@influencermatchmaker.co.uk, or give us a call on 02039 580 427.
