Launching a holiday influencer campaign on a budget
With the holidays approaching, you might be thinking up your strategies for seasonal influencer campaigns. You don’t need big bucks in the bank to make a successful one happen. Here are our essentials when it comes to creating holiday influencer campaigns on a budget.
🔑 Focus on engaging creators you’ve already built a relationship with.
For brands on a tight budget, we don’t recommend launching a large-scale gifting campaign to creators you haven’t built a relationship with. That’s because posts and content from these types of campaigns aren’t guaranteed, and when being cost-conscious, you want to focus on initiatives with more certainty.
Instead, connect with creators who you already know and love the brand. They’ll likely be more interested in product gifting and want to post for you. It’s also a great way to say thanks to creators who have supported you in the past.
As a reminder, we don’t recommend requiring a post in exchange for gifting a product. (See our ethical gifting guide here.) If you’d like more assurance that you’ll receive a post in exchange from gifting, consider paying creators for an unboxing Story. Stories are typically less pricey than an in-feed post, and still result in great content that can be repurposed.
🔑 Work with creators on multi-deliverable projects.
Creators will often create package deals for brands looking to work with them on larger projects. This ends up being an economically-wise choice for brands given the investment per deliverable is lower. It also gives creators more opportunities to familiarize themselves with the project and learn the brand’s posting requirements.
🔑 Avoid influencer platforms that don’t pay their creators.
Sure, these platforms are seductive due to the low cost to participate, but that’s at the expense of not paying creators. (Or paying them well.)
We commonly hear from brands that the deliverables from cheaper platforms are often not usable or high-quality, so the investment isn’t worth it. Plus, these platforms often do not allow brands to review and approve the creators or the content, so you have no control over your output.
This is… a shameless plug for Palm, because we do pay our creators, hand-curate a short list of influencers for each project, and brands can choose their favorites to work with. Brands also get to review and approve content upfront and ask for revisions as needed. It’s an investment in quality content and aligned content creator relationships.
🔑 Start now and prepare.
It pays to work ahead. Take the time to create campaign briefs that cover everything you need. Multiple rounds of revisions can up the cost per deliverable, so the more clarified and communicative you are on your needs and vision, the more you save.
And creators might charge for expedited deliverables the tighter the turnaround time.
That being said, you should give creators freedom to bring your ideas to life. The more directed (or micromanaged) a campaign brief is, the less engaging and authentic (and therefore successful) the content will be.
