How to Use Influencer Marketing for End-of-Year Campaigns
How to Use Influencer Marketing for End-of-Year Campaigns
Even though it seems like June ended about five minutes ago, we are – believe it or not – in the fourth quarter of the year.
To some, this might signal time to secure that sought-after holiday PTO, but to most marketers, it means grabbing your helmet in preparation for arguably the most significant consumer spending period of the year. In an ideal world, your end-of-year campaigns and initiatives would have been mapped out in January – or at least by June – but we don’t live in an ideal world.
So, if you’ve got some leftover budget that will disappear come January 1 (“Use It Or Lose It” money) and/or a boss who’s really eager to see what this influencer marketing thing is all about in the final hours of the year, we’ve got some ideas!
1. Generate a Conversation: Have a particular product you’re eager to boost awareness for? An amazing offer that’s sure to drive sales for your brand? One fairly easy way to spread the word is to enlist a crew of influencers to publicize and participate in a social media-driven conversation with your target audience. This digital conversation should take place wherever your target demographic lives online and can be tailored to support brand messages that resonate most – think Twitter chats and Facebook and Instagram Lives. Not only is this a great way to connect with current and future consumers in a more conversational way, like Orkin did with this Twitter-driven effort, these virtual events tend to drive robust engagement rates and impressions.
2. Sharing is Caring: Science has essentially proven that we love people who let us talk about ourselves. In that same vein, people are eager to show appreciation for brands that care about how customers experience their products. Allow your audience to interact with your brand through a call for user-generated content (UGC) – amplified by influencers who can set the tone for the visuals, create awareness for the designated hashtag of your efforts, and encourage their followers to submit photos and videos of their own. Of course, it never hurts to incentivize participation with some sort of giveaway or sweepstakes.
Soliciting UGC gives your brand an opportunity to reach a wide range of people through natural brand advocates. Not to mention that it’s great for collecting assets to use on your brand channels – which is especially noteworthy because mixing in UGC with traditional content can result in a 28 percent higher engagement rate.
3. Get to Strategizing: You want to do a fully-fledged influencer marketing campaign, and you wanna do it right. We get it. Rather than rushing the process to get an influencer campaign off the ground during an already cluttered season, develop a clear-cut influencer plan for 2019 focused on increasing sales during other key marketing moments for your brand. We recommend bringing in an agency partner (and, boy, do we know a great one 😉) honing in on your brand’s priorities, the target audience, and the way they like to receive information in order to craft an effective influencer strategy.
Then, you can head into the new year with your ducks in a row and reap the benefits of thoughtfully curated influencer campaigns, the benefits of which we could talk about all day. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version.
Perhaps the best part of influencer marketing is that it is so incredibly versatile. Whether you’re aiming to gain a little more momentum for a particular initiative or flood the social sphere with gorgeous content produced on behalf of your brand, influencers can help you reach your goal.
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