Leverage influencer marketing for Christmas 2024

If your target group is active on Instagram, influencer marketing for Christmas is a must. Especially before the holidays: 52% of consumers find gift inspiration from social media ads!

Here are 9 ideas on how to support your Christmas campaigns with influencer marketing 👇🏼

1. Don’t forget about the holidays before Christmas

As a marketer, you’re probably already planning your Christmas campaigns. However, many consumers start their Christmas shopping much earlier – so you probably should start your marketing in November (or even October). Here are some dates to remember:

24th Nov – Black Friday
27th Nov – Cyber Monday
23rd Dec – Super Saturday

Black Friday case study: “Solaris is Black”

One of the coolest Black Friday campaigns we’ve had on Promoty is “Solaris is black” by the cultural shopping center Solaris.

During the Black Friday weekend, restaurants in Solaris offered black food and stores brought out their black products. The goal of the campaign was to raise awareness about the Black Friday offers in the Solaris center. Therefore, the photo had to be taken in Solaris Centre, plus black products or food, and the influencer had to be in the picture.

2. Start early to avoid stress

It’s the same with all Christmas-related activities: the sooner you start, the more stress-free it goes!

Working with influencers takes time – especially during Christmas when they have significantly more collaborations than usual. Usually, running an influencer campaign takes 2-4 weeks: from finding suitable influencers and reaching out to them to sending packages and confirming content.

When planning campaigns, marketers should remember that there is always a lag between reaching out to influencers and getting the content live: if the brand wants the content to be posted in early November, the campaigns should be set up in October.

3. Work with your superfans

Standing out during the Christmas period is difficult – social media is full of sponsored content. What works during this time, is authentic recommendations. Thus, you want to find influencers who already use your products and sincerely recommend your brand to their followers.

To find your superfans, start with your customers. A happy customer is always the best influencer: they already use your products, they understand the benefits, they have a powerful story, and they can sincerely recommend your brand to their followers.

After that, you check your social media channels: who are the people who tag you in their stories and already recommend your brand to their followers? If you’ve previously done influencer marketing, you probably have some influencers you could continue working with.

On Promoty, you can also see suggested influencers for your brand, based on who follows you, who has been engaging with your content, or who have you previously worked with:

Suggested influencers on Promoty (try it out for free)

With Promoty Premium, you could also get access to our influencer search tool where you can filter our global database of influencers by their size, engagement rate, age, gender, number of followers, or followers’ demographics (age, gender, location), and other criteria.

For example, if you’re looking for influencers from South Africa, your search would look like this:

Searching for South African influencers on Promoty Discovery

For every Instagram and TikTok influencer, you can see their detailed profile insights, audience demographics, influencer credibility, previous sponsored posts, brand affinity, and much more. This way, you can find influencers whose audience matches your target group!

4. Do influencer campaigns with a Christmas twist

A good campaign starts from well-thought-out goals and a good campaign brief that clearly communicates the brand’s expectations to the influencer.

For example, you can give an influencer a hint that your product or service would be a good Christmas present so that they could build their post’s caption around this message. You can also ask them to give their suggestions on choosing a Christmas present from your products.

You can also collect ideas from around the world – for example, our team fell in love with  Primark’s red-striped shopping bags that can later be used to wrap gifts or make Christmas decorations!

Influencer marketing case study: Marabou’s expanded product range

Reward: Money + products (snacks worth of 60€)
Posts: 5
Reach: 145 604
Likes: 3555
Comments: 1318
CPE*: 0,11€

*CPE – cost per engagement

5. Work with influencers to get Christmas visuals

Creating scroll-stopping visuals is one of the superpowers of influencers – as they do it daily, they know perfectly well how to catch attention on social media. That’s why many brands work with influencers to get branded content.

Here are some of our previous years’ campaign photos:

6. Be strategic about your influencer marketing

Well-thought-out and well-targeted campaigns help attract both influencers and customers. One of our best examples from last Christmas is Mylook online store. They ran multiple Christmas campaigns with different messages for each target market (Estonia, Finland, Latvia). Additionally, they set up a New Year’s campaign for a Russian-speaking target group in Estonia.

In addition, we always recommend doing multiple collaboration posts with each influencer (as MyLook did). While single posts may not catch the attention in the busy pre-holiday season on social media, long-term influencer partnerships seem much more trustworthy. Additionally, it creates several touchpoints with potential customers that increase the probability of making the purchase decision.

7. Measure results with discount codes

Giving influencers personal discount codes is good for three reasons. Firstly, a good discount is a strong call to action to get a potential customer to make a purchase. Secondly, it helps you as a marketer understand how many sales each collaboration brought. Thirdly, influencers often like this option because this way they can offer value by sharing something useful with their followers!

Additionally, suppose you generate discount codes that are valid only for a short time or have a limited number of uses. In that case, it will encourage potential customers to make a purchase faster, thus might increase your sales!

👉🏼 Read more: How to measure influencer marketing?

8. Support influencer marketing with paid advertising

Paid advertising is a good way to get more visibility or to generate more touchpoints with potential customers in order to increase the chance of the purchase.

For example, you can use influencer marketing to direct potential customers to your website or Instagram profile, and then retarget them with retargeting ads. This way you can for example reach those who have visited your Instagram profile but haven’t been to your online store yet.

Moreover, using influencer-generated content (IGC) in paid ads might be a good idea: according to Meta, ads with IGC have 53% higher click-through rates than ads with business-as-usual visuals!

@laura_klauzer x Marabou

9. Start building your ambassador program

Doing one-off collaborations might give you a lot of short-term visibility during the holiday season – but eventually, your goal should be building long-term partnerships with your influencers and turning them into brand ambassadors.

Thus, we recommend throwing a bigger campaign before the holiday season and measuring the results. After that, you can continue working with influencers who brought the best results, and eventually, build an army of brand ambassadors.

To store the information about previous collaborations and influencers’ preferences, you need an influencer CRM – such as Promoty. It is an influencer relationship management platform that allows brands to manage all their (potential) influencers, collaborations, chats, and content in one place.

Here’s a short demo video of how it works:

The influencer CRM can be used to manage your current and potential collaboration partners, detect branded content, and chat with influencers. For 50€ monthly, you will also access our Influencer Discovery to find more influencers for your brand and see their detailed analytics.

Create a free account to get started!