It’s already October and the holiday season is upon us. In the months leading up to Christmas, shoppers are hunting for the holiday decor, gifts, and recipes. Undoubtedly, consumers are turning to friends, family, and the internet for recommendations in the months leading up to the holiday season. In fact, Inmar Intelligence reports that 70% of millennial consumers are influenced by the recommendations of their peers in buying decisions and 30% of consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by a non-celebrity blogger.
We all know that the lucrative holiday season is also the busiest time of year for ads and branded content, so how do you break through the noise? Winning holiday content marketing strategies have evolved from spending enormous budgets on broadcast ads and creative agencies to engaging audiences through more organic, user-generated content. This is where influencers can help. Here are some steps you can take to run a successful influencer campaign this holiday season:
- Define your goals
- Are you looking to generate a lot of low-cost authentic content to repurpose on your social channels and ads? Perhaps you want to generate more brand awareness for your brand? Define your goals and budget upfront so you can ensure that all your strategies are working towards defined KPIs. Having a clear focus will help you knock one overarching goal out of the park rather than seeing mediocre results by trying to achieve too many things all at once.
- Create a timeline
- Set up a timeline of when you need your content and give your content creators enough time (we recommend a minimum of 2 weeks) to submit their content from the time they receive the product. Work with your Cohley Digital Strategist to ensure your content will go live in time while giving your creators ample time to create quality content.
- Accept creators based on your defined goals
- The creators you accept to your campaign should completely depend on the goals you outlined in step 1. Whether it’s photography quality, content theme, or follower count, you’ll want to use defined criteria to vet through content creators. The ambiguous “brand fit” criteria casts too wide of a subjective net to truly pick the creators that will set up your campaign for success.
- Take full advantage of all content gained from your creator partnerships
- The value of content gained from your influencer campaigns reaches farther than a single Instagram post. Are you repurposing the imagery for your social ads and marketing emails? Are you running A/B tests to determine whether user-generated content performs better than photos from your professional shoots? Are you filling your own social feeds with influencer content? The ROI of influencer content can be limitless!
How are you going to incorporate content into your brand’s holiday strategy? The Cohley Team is here to help you bring some of these tactics into your content strategy before the New Year. There is still time to take action! Contact us at hello@cohley.com - we want to help!
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