For those tapping into influencer marketing this season, you’re ahead of the curve for breaking the “noise” against the competition. As November quickly comes to an end, most marketers are passed the stage of vetting influencers for a holiday campaign. The outreach is likely complete and negotiations are being finalized. And as you set up to pass the ball over to these amazing influencers to execute a stellar holiday campaign, ask yourself is there anything we can do in-house to enhance this campaign? The answer is YES!

Check out this influencer holiday campaign sponsored by Daniel Wellington Watches. Now over the next few weeks see if you spot any additional marketing efforts by the brand to enhance this awesome campaign.

In this blog we outline 5 tips to enhance your holiday influencer marketing campaign to increase awareness and engagement on your marketing channels and your partnered influencer’s channels:

1. Drip, Drip, Drop Marketing

As marketers you have a backstage pass to all the awesome creations coming through your holiday pipeline – use this information to your advantage.

Tell your audience through social media or email marketing that you have something cool coming soon and to stay tuned.

Provide your audience with hints and clues of an upcoming promotion to hold their interest. Once your influencer campaign has dropped informed your audience that the promotion is live by using campaign specific links and hashtags.

Selling a product? Drive your audience to influencer content to access a promotion code for discounts.

2. Sponsor Influencer Content

Many marketers are advocates of organic reach and engagement, but when an influencer creates authentic content during a highly competitive in of year, paid boost shouldn’t be frowned upon. However, a strategic approval to ad spending needs to be considered.

Internally, marketers should discuss the best channels for advertising. This largely depends on the audience you wish to reach. Does it make more sense to repurpose the influencer’s content on owned channels or should you work with the influencer to promote the content on their channels?

3. Talk to the Media  

Media outlets, traditional or online, love great angles for holiday-specific content. You’ve worked hard to develop a unique influencer marketing campaign so now you should be thinking who else would be interested in this?

For example, perhaps you developed an influencer holiday shopping challenge. How could this be spun for traditional media? Pitch outlets a few angles:

• How to get your holiday shopping done in 1 day
• Challenge: Finding amazing holiday gifts for under $100
• 5 of the must-buy holiday gifts for 2017

Use this as an alternative channel to insert influencer campaign content. Use influencers imagery or videos and links to their channels with the campaign specific content.

Creating a media worthy angle for an industry is possible with a little brainstorming and the right outreach strategy.

4. Blog or Vlog About it

Similar to the last tip for media outlets, think about how you can repurpose your influencer marketing initiatives to create a blog or vlog content for owned channels.

Using the example above of an influencer holiday shopping challenge. Think of ways you can repurpose this internally. Create a staff holiday shopping challenge and write or create a video about their experience. This could be great content to link to influencer content to increase awareness.

5. Retarget to the Influencer’s Audience  

Without taking away from the effect of your well-crafted influencer marketing campaign, there’s an opportunity to enhance awareness by marketing to an alike audience for the duration of the influencer campaign.

For this to be effective you must have a good understanding of your influencers existing audiences and platforms.

If your influencers are marketing a specific product (let’s use shoes for this example) to their audience, you should create ad content about the same shoe(s) and target your influencer’s audience. This way after the influencer’s audience is exposed to your brand offering you have the opportunity to remind them how to purchase. This is a great tactic in case the influencer call-to-action was missed or as a means of retargeting.

These are just a few ways you can enhance your influencer marketing campaigns this holiday season. Have any more ideas? We’d love to hear them in the comments below. :)