Why Influencer and Celebrity Relations Move the Needle During the Holiday Season
As the end of the year quickly approaches, brands are vigorously planning holiday campaigns, promotions, and other efforts to finish out 2021 strong. These strategies may include incremental digital ads, brand partnerships, events, and influencer campaigns. All of which work together to amplify a brand’s message through creative multi-platform content. With the saturation of online advertising during the holiday season, reaching your consumer often and in the right places will help ensure your brand is breaking through the noise. Influencer and celebrity partnerships are valuable for garnering 3rd party validation of your products/brand, and during the holiday season when consumers are being bombarded with so many ads, seeing your product/brand on the profile of their favorite influencer or celeb can be the extra push they need to drive them to purchase during this key time period.
At Konnect Agency, our team of influencer marketing experts works alongside brands to develop meaningful partnerships that drive ROI during this holiday sale season. Our planning process includes the below steps to ensure successful campaigns with impactful partners, engaging content, and calls to action (CTAs) that drive both mass awareness and sales. A mix of all three is required to break through the noise during this heavy ads/sales season.
Three Tips for a Successful Influencer and Celebrity Relations Campaign
Start Early
Although this can be true for all campaigns, starting your planning and outreach early for holiday campaigns is especially important for a few reasons:
- Both influencers and celebs become increasingly busy during the holiday season, so locking-in partnerships with them sooner rather than later will provide you with a larger pool of both interested and/or available potential partners. Ideally, we would recommend these conversations start 8-weeks prior to your desired launch date so that you are able to lock in your partners long before the holiday rush. However, if you are not able to get that long of a lead on outreach, it is still possible to be successful about a month prior to your desired post date. You would just need to have tighter deadlines for contracts, content approvals and any other communication that could more quickly move the partnership forward.
- Due to the high demand of these folks during the holiday season, partnership rates increase drastically during Q4 so knowing exactly how you want to partner with someone and when, allows for more flexibility in catching them early on (before they are booked up) and therefore negotiating on the rate.
- Lastly, with multiple holiday breaks over the months of November and December, communication and turnaround time on contracts, approvals, edits, etc. can take longer than normal.
Picking the Right Influencer and Celebrity Relations Partner
Choosing the right partner for your holiday campaign goes beyond picking who you think would be a good fit. It’s important to analyze back-end and audience analytics to truly gauge how your target audience will respond to this person’s content. Based on your campaign goals, you might be looking at things like quality of content, ability to drive traffic (sticker taps/swipe-ups, etc.), and media-ability (for interviews, product trials, events, etc.) to gauge if a partner is going to move the needle during this key timeframe. It’s also worth considering what other projects or brand partnerships that person is doing during that time frame to see if they are oversaturated and/or if partnering with them won’t be as impactful.
For example, we recently worked with one of our food and beverage clients on a back-to-school campaign. The goal of this campaign was to target college-aged students and encourage them to showcase their school spirit through TikTok and Instagram Reels for the chance to win free products for their entire campus. Konnect worked closely with the brand’s internal marketing team to identify influencers and college athletes whose back-end analytics and creative content would drive mass awareness and engagement for the campaign. This campaign drove over 16 million potential impressions with their target Gen Z/Millenial audience.
Providing Clear Creative Guidelines
A creative brief should outline what the brand’s primary messaging includes for the campaign, along with any keywords, tags, hashtags, and CTA’s that should be included within the content. And although we suggest giving the influencer creative control on the concept (knowing that they know what is going to perform best visually for their audience) these briefs are extremely helpful to the creators when ensuring they have an understanding of the brand’s vision when engaging into the partnership.
Here are a few essential elements to include in your creative brief:
- Brand Overview
- Brand and Campaign Messaging
- Sample Visuals
- All Required Tags, Hashtags, etc.
Final Thoughts
Starting outreach early, vetting partnerships and providing a clear creative brief are all key steps in setting up and executing a successful campaign during the busy holiday season. At Konnect Agency, we work diligently to ensure that our influencer partnerships align with our client’s goals, are impactful, and truly move the needle for our brands during this key sale season.
Need help with influencer and celebrity relations? Konnect with us to learn how we’ve helped other brands build brand awareness through successful influencer partnerships.