Brands’ competition is at its peak during the holiday season, and the race has already started. 

Over the last five years, holiday sales in November and December have averaged about 19% of total retail sales*, most of which were driven successfully by influencer marketing strategies. More precisely, 49%* of Christmas sales happen during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but there’s still that 51%* will purchase all the Christmas gifts during the following month.

Holiday influencer marketing campaigns are typically prepared well in advance to benefit from this crucial sales period.

How to approach Christmas campaigns

From micro- to nano-influencer to macro-influencers, as a brand, you will see that the ones that click with your values and vision are the perfect fit for your campaign.

Influencer Marketing has become a much more complex solution than it used to be. This is why we want to share the essential tips to succeed in the Holiday season campaign.

Technology is there, then use it!

Since 2013 at SamyRoad, we have developed predictive technology aimed at enabling brands to understand crucial variables such as Brand Affinity, an index that quantifies the affinity between the brand itself, the influencer and the audience, or the Content Affinity, which means the identification of the subjects with the highest volume of mentions and interactions through social listening.

Be emotional and diverse, be authentic. 

Influencer marketing is not just about finding the right influencer; we must remember that the message and the way we communicate are essential too. 

Our target audience is slowly losing their capability of attention, it’s hard to accept, but it’s true: they feel overwhelmed. When you think of all the messages they see simultaneously, only the ones that reach their mind will succeed. 

Entertainment is king

Entertain your audience, and make it exciting for them while you keep the brand’s values on point.

Stay away from the static world; try experimenting and introducing the video format to your campaigns. 

Think out of the box. 

Paid media must be part of your brand’s strategy to increase traffic, sales, and a conversation around your product and brand. You will reach your target and future audiences faster through paid media, especially if you use it accurately and truthfully. The more tools you can use for a more successful influencer campaign, the better outcome you will get from it. 

 It’s time to make a choice: consideration or performance

It is essential that there is strategic planning in your influencer marketing campaign to be able to define an action plan that is aligned with what the brand expects to obtain from the campaign.

That’s why as a brand manager you need to define what you expect to obtain from the campaign and whatever you decide it should be easily linked to any of these two goals: consideration or performance.

Consideration campaigns

Back to the basics. When you look for a higher consideration towards your brand, you need to either educate or re-educate your customers on all the benefits and features that your brand, products or services offer. Once your audience knows all these positive things about your brand, you need to ensure that they are aware of them during the purchase process and ready for any problem or urgency. 

Here are the main tips to boost the consideration of your brand: 

Be part of the influencer’s storytelling 

As a brand, we cannot intervene as outsiders inside the influencer’s storytelling; you need to be part of it. It needs to feel natural, not an imposed collaboration. The more the brand lives inside the influencer’s story, the more the audience will believe in your brand. 

Use your product to generate higher empathy

Create content based on moments or situations the audience will experience in the coming days. Content that empathizes with the audience generates a greater bond with them. The more authentic and relatable content, the more your audience will listen to what you say. 

Teach your audience how to use your product or when its best to use or consume it, especially for these special dates. 

If you are in the  food industry, have your influencers cook the perfect Christmas recipe with your product. If you’re in the makeup industry, have your influencers show how they will use your product for New Year’s Eve. 

Explore the power of Hashtags

Choose your format according to the medium you will use, and remember the power of hashtags. Using a hashtag that sticks throughout the campaign will make it easier for your audience to track you. It’s a way of organizing your content under the same folder. 

Performance campaigns

We’ve seen during black Friday how influencers not only shared a discount for specific brands but also shared which products they love from the brand. This helped users choose the product from the brand because their influencer uses it.

Make the audience desire the product.

The more the influencer leads and guides how to use and when to use specific products, the more the audience will feel like buying them.

Guide the audience through the influencer.

Using a live format, having the influencer create live content and giving your audience a testimonial about specific products will help them decide and buy the product in less time. 

Be accessible, always.

The more accessible the audience to access the products, the more traffic your website will get. Therefore make sure that your social media links to your website and your Instagram shop, and make your audience swipe up their favourite.

“How to create the perfect influencer marketing campaign? Combining all the mediums and platforms we have and constantly reinventing ourselves through creative strategies. And by not living by the book and experimenting with different formats such as case studies, Ebooks, In-person events, podcasts, videos and other types of content.”

Ricky Pombo Head of Brands & Campaign Strategy At Samy Alliance

It is undeniable that today’s creativity and advertising go hand in hand with social media platforms. The familiarity that this new way of targeting the consumer transmits has managed to achieve an even more significant impact in a short time than traditional media. However, is it worth it when it comes to generating content? The answer is no. Although the platforms have achieved excellent results in recent years, the truth is that the consumer needs new stimuli. The excess of advertising is becoming increasingly exhausting and is beginning to generate rejection among the audience.

How to solve it? Brands are transparent; creativity must be the main ingredient for Influencer Marketing campaigns to be accepted naturally and organically. And the primary goal of campaigns with influencers is to generate brand awareness and increase engagement with their audiences. This has raised different debates within agencies about influencers’ participation in the creative process of campaigns. After all,  they know their followers and what works for them.

Influencers as a creative part of the process

It is impossible not to have heard of the latest advertising campaign for the Spanish food service start-up specializing in hamburgers: Vicio. A campaign around a play on words with the name of the competition (GOIKO) and the leading influencer (Jessica Goicoechea). 

“This is the first campaign of this style that we carried out in Vice, and we wanted to be faithful to our style. Having Jessica as the first visible face of Vice could not make us more excited since we both share values and principles when it comes to communicating. At Vicio, we are natural and honest, and we like to define our style as “Elegant Flash”. We believe that our values fit perfectly with Jessica and with the content she creates”, points out its Co-founder and Co-CEO.

This campaign is a clear example of how unity is strength since it meets all the requirements for success; creativity, innovation and ingenuity through its key protagonist, the influencer Jessica Goicochea.

Influencers and creativity: the main characters 

In addition to the Vicio campaign, we find other brands where the strategy spins around creativity, such as the Nutella campaign. In it, not only does creativity stand out, but also the correct choice of the protagonists to transmit the messages. Through “We have good things at home”, the campaign vindicates our land’s beauty, honouring our country’s unique landscapes thanks to its special edition jars. For this, the Samyroad agency created a strategy where everything took place in creating a space called “Casa Nutella”. A set of fun and educational activities were carried out by a group of influencers from different parts of the country, including Tania Llasera, Tomas Páramo, Alma Obregón and Barbesito, who transmitted the event through his Twitch account. This experiential event, where the influencers enjoyed different challenges related to our country’s landscapes and cooking, was a complete success thanks to the fact that it reached the audience in an organic, distinctive and creative way, providing value and content.

These campaigns are clear benchmarks of how creativity in Influencer Marketing is, without a doubt, one of its cornerstones. With it, we not only manage to generate value in the audiences and position brands, but it also allows us to win over influencers when transmitting their messages. As we mentioned earlier, no one knows their followers better than they do, and nothing is more motivating for them than participating and being part of campaigns where they have a fundamental role and are listened to give their audience the quality content they deserve.

During the last years, we have experienced different adversities that have made us depend even more on the media to be able to inform our knowledge and learn how to face these challenges.

This is nothing new. Since the first newspaper appeared in England in 1702, the media have served, apart from communicating news, as a tool for disseminating information to society.

Today, however, younger generations, like Alpha, have exchanged traditional media for social media platforms. These new media platforms must also be understood as a change in how the message is spread and received. An influencer no longer only influences the public in certain aspects of their day; they can become a reference for each of the public’s decisions throughout their lives.

Influencers that influence 

Until now, our influencers have always been there to recommend different lifestyles. What to wear, what to eat, what to visit, what to do. These were the questions they answered, but recently, influencers have begun to answer the question of how to be and behave in society.

We can see a clear evolution from influencer to influential, a personality that influences the behaviour of their followers. In other words, an influencer who affects the final purchase of a product can also directly affect the consumer’s way of life.

The younger generation, the Alpha generation, looks up to influencers for a more humane and realistic lifestyle. They are looking for a guide, someone to follow, with solid values. They look for a personality that empathises with them and tries to guide them to a more compassionate way of life.

Influencers being influential 

Now that it’s time for all of us to go back to school, but above all, for the children to return to their classrooms, we are more aware of what happens inside these enclosures.

The concern for the smallest among us is palpable. To guarantee the children of our society better day-to-days, to protect them from possible unnecessary and irreversible traumas.

Empathy is one of our most essential tools, which is why the pain and injustice of others hurt us so much.

A few weeks ago in Spain, we were able to experience the effect that our most influential influencers had on a case of bullying.

The viral effect that the most famous personalities in the world of influencers had to share their outrage over a case of bullying significantly impacted the young generations, much more than if it had been just an anti-bullying campaign. 

“The school bathroom reminds me of my sister Maria’s first day of school when a girl pushed her for being the new one. Thank God the situation did not escalate, and we could stop it. Still, I think of all those people who today continue to suffer this bullying and harassment and take refuge in the bathroom to be able to be calm and that nobody bothers them. My heart breaks.” Shares Marta Pombo, a Spanish influencer with more than 800,000 followers.

The famous streamer Ibai Llanos declared through his channel his anger towards a case of bullying; he even decided to point out the kid that was suffering from it and celebrated his birthday on stream. He condemned the act of bullying and the people who were acting on it. 

The power of influencers 

Influencers today have much more power over the public than we can imagine. The responsibility that comes with this power to be a reference and support to their followers.   

They are not only people who help brands position themselves and transmit their new products, ideas and values, but they are also helpful channels to transmit essential values to the public.

We have long seen large organisations work and fight to transmit these values. But we must be realistic when it comes to targeting the younger generations.

The Alpha generation and those yet to come follow their favourite personalities for guidance. What they do and represent will have much more weight on their followers than what large corporations have.