When it comes to searching for gift inspiration, scrolling through social media feeds is becoming the new stroll down the high street. Every month 90 million users click through to product pages from Instagram alone, showing how an effective influencer marketing campaign can bring Christmas early for retailers.How do you go about creating an influencer marketing campaign with real, meaningful impact? Here are three top tips for creating an influencer marketing campaign, which will make you exceedingly merry this Christmas.

Find the right influencer

Finding the right influencer for a campaign is as difficult and as rewarding as finding the perfect present for your mother. Many brands fall into the trap of not fully thinking about which influencers will work best for them and waste money on building a campaign that is doomed from the start.To avoid this, make sure you don’t judge an influencer solely by the amount of followers they have. It’s important to choose people who will act as genuine ambassadors for your brand and reflect the spirit of your campaign. Follow the examples set by brands like Zales Jewellers, who last year partnered with real-life Insta couple Jaci Marie Smith and her husband Leif Carlson to bring the experience of gifting jewellery to life.Instead of commissioning an influencer to create a series of simple ‘hero’ posts, the US brand worked with the Instagram couple to create the short film, ‘A Holiday Romance’. The video received nearly 70 thousand views, hundreds of comments, and managed to make itself noticeable in the sea of promotional posts.It’s a strong example that shows how an influencer campaign works when a brand aligns itself with the right influencers. Instead of chasing huge follower numbers this Christmas, think about who will bring you the most meaningful engagement with your consumers.

Schedule your posts for the right time

It’s the most wonderful time of the year but, when it comes to influencer marketing in the festive season, some of those times are more wonderful than others. In order to make the most out of an influencer marketing campaign during this period, you need to check that you’re commissioning content that will be delivered during the key e-commerce periods.In the run-up to Christmas, event shopping dates like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are naturally peak periods for shoppers. However, December still remains the key time for shoppers filling their online baskets. It takes up a giant 12.5% of the whole year’s retail spending, with 2016 seeing an extraordinary £43 billion spent in December alone.Retailers should also ensure that their influencer campaigns last beyond Christmas Day. Consumers continue to shop for a long time after Christmas, with research revealing that over 60% of consumers continue their festive shopping beyond the December 25.You need to think carefully about when you want their content to be published. This means working closely with your influencer to ensure that you’re targeting your audience at the times when they are most likely to be looking at their screens.

Have the right measurability strategy in place

Finally, there’s no point in doing an influencer campaign at all unless you can measure its success. You can’t rely on your influencers alone to tell you how successful their posts have been, and it’s not enough to just read the likes, comments, and views on social posts. For example, Buzzoole has worked with Nielsen to provide ‘True Reach’ statistics for their clients to establish a metric that can specifically define how many users have been reached during an influencer marketing campaign.It’s important to ensure that you have a strong measurement strategy in place in order to have maximum visibility about the success of your campaign. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea whether your influencers have brought triumphs or turkeys to your campaign.
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