How brands can activate influencer marketing for the holidays and other seasonal moments

Part two of our 'Influencer marketing for the holidays' series.
How brands can activate influencer marketing for the holidays

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Stuck on how to activate your influencer efforts this holiday season? Regardless of your sector or category, we’ve got some inspiration to get you going.

If you’ve already read our previous post around seasonal marketing, you’ll recall we touched on the opportunity available to brands, the growth we’re expecting to see this coming holiday season, and some influencer marketing case studies from prior seasonal campaigns. 

For this installment, we’re going to look at different approaches that are suitable for a wide range of industries. Whether you’re in tech, fitness, food, or beauty, our goal is for you to finish this post with some fresh influencer activation ideas for your next campaign. 

Incentivise your audience

If you’re a direct-to-consumer (DTC) online retailer, we’re sure you’re already planning your affiliate marketing approach around seasonal moments. One great way to drive further, and easy-to-measure value with your creator marketing, is by building incentives into your influencer collaborations. 

By giving each member of your creator squad a discount code or referral link, you can directly attribute any sales to specific creators. If your budget allows, we always suggest using a range of influencer types – from the macro end (typically 100-500k followers) to nano creators (up to 25k) – so you can offer broad coverage and get a real sense of which creator type drives outcomes.

How brands can activate influencer marketing for the holidays

Jump on trending content

Although less straightforward to nail, another way to beat the competition for mindshare during seasonal moments is to get trending. We’ve seen this working particularly well across the beauty industry this  year. 

It’s easy to write off going viral as an unrealistic ambition for a challenger brand, but it’s not only been the likes of big multi-national corporations like L’Oréal that have had success in creating challenges and going viral. E.l.f. Cosmetics’ Vice President said that over the past two years, the brand has jumped from the 8th to the 2nd most favorite beauty brand among teens, thanks to their viral #eyeslipsface campaign. 

If you’re within an industry that quite naturally engages in challenges – think food, fitness, or fashion for example. Creating some sort of task-based action for a squad of creators to launch across social could be a highly impactful way to differentiate your brand during your seasonal campaigns. 

How brands can activate influencer marketing for the holidays

Find a real purpose 

One approach to creator and social media marketing we’re seeing increase year on year, is marketing with purpose. A great example last year was the TikTok and Shopify #ShopBlack campaign. TikTok reported that the hashtag amassed well over 70million views , while the “Find Black-owned businesses” section within the challenge page saw a 23% clickthrough rate. 

Earlier this year, we partnered with Wrangler Europe to connect them with creators from the LGBTQIA+ community in Germany and Poland. They worked with 11 creators to create high-quality and impactful Instagram content that showcased the collection and promoted the fact that a percentage of the collection’s sales profits were being donated to ILGA World.

The campaign successfully drove over 165K organic Instagram impressions, reached over 156K potential customers, and generated over 18.1K organic Instagram engagements. In a survey of over 900 of our creators this year, over two-thirds of the creators who took part stated that it was important for them to use their platform to raise awareness of social and environmental issues.

pride month wrangler

What can you learn and what we’re expecting

Wondering what you can take from this? The first is the common thread that runs through all of the examples we’ve given above. This is the fact they’re recognising specific trends, communities and cultural movements on the platform they’re activating. That results in a campaign that feels more native and natural to the platform or community, and therefore connects in a frictionless way. 

The second, and in our opinion, the most important theme we see through the majority of these examples, is this idea of bringing the online world into the real world as a point of connection. 

Whether it be by encouraging your audience to not just view or observe your campaigns, but actively become engaged, or to bring your products to life through more interactive and experiential approaches, the brands that are really winning are the ones that are thinking about how to make their campaigns feel more human and authentic. We’ll explore this concept more in the third edition of our series.

Finally, activating strategic paid media to boost organic influencer content, extends the shelf-life of your creator investment. In the pursuit of wallet share during the most lucrative peaks of retail activity, brands can be on trend and create viral moments, increase their community engagement, and most crucially, drive revenue impact to the bottom line.

Get caught up with part one of our ‘Influencer marketing for the holidays’ series: Why you need seasonal moments in your campaign calendar

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