The holidays are rapidly approaching, and it’s time to start thinking about holiday marketing initiatives in earnest. Tim Lambertson and Kelli Frazier sit down to talk about why influencers should be a key part of your marketing strategy this year and the unique benefits they bring to the table. It has been an undeniably tough year, and so much is changing in the way we do things. Take advantage of this information to make it easier for you to tap into your online markets this year.
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3 Reasons Influencers Marketing Is Your Greatest Gift For Holiday Campaigns
I am here with Kelli Frazier. Kelli, how’s it going? Our topic on this episode is one that’s close to your heart. If anybody out there is wondering why, it’s because we get to talk about the holidays. More than anything, it’s important to understand that from a brand’s perspective, now is the time to be thinking about what you’re doing for the holidays. You might even be a little bit late to the party, but not too late. We’re going to focus on three reasons why you should work with influencers for holiday campaigns. Always when we need to tackle topics like this, it’s easier to digest it if we keep it to three very tight, specific reasons. There is a little bit of biased here and that’s because maybe we own an influencer marketing agency but I think that’s okay. We want to emphasize this point. We have some very reliable data that we can pull into this to talk about.
Social Media Usage
If it’s okay with you, I’m going to dive right in. Let’s talk about reason one. This is quite deep. It’s a little bit lengthy, but if there’s one reason to be embracing influencers at the core of what it is that they do, it’s this. Social media usage is up clear across the board. There is a lot of various statistics that are coming out, but the common denominator here is that social media usage is up globally, and it has been climbing at the point that 2021 will probably be the biggest social media year we’ve ever seen. In 2020, I would say specifically because of COVID and the fact that we’ve had a global quarantine, social media usage is up. If there’s any reason, that’s number one right there.
We have a couple of compelling statistics that I want to share with you. I want to get some feedback because they’re important. First and foremost is that according to sources, global internet traffic is up by 30%. When you think about how much internet usage is happening regularly and then you say it’s increased by 30%, that’s more of a reason than anything to be thinking about digital campaigns. Here’s the next one and I want to get your response to this. Instagram influencers have an average increase in likes of 67%. They have more than a 50% increase in comments since the beginning of March 2020. Kel, why is that important?
In addition to the increased use of the internet, we’re also seeing the influencers seeing better than ever engagement. Those two things hand in hand do spell out the first reason why influencers need to be a part of your digital campaign for the holidays. Another interesting stat that we saw early on in 2020, we saw that we thought was interesting and why Tim, you may have hinted around that we may be even a little late to the game, is that in April 2020, we were seeing that holiday searches on Pinterest had jumped 77% over April of 2019. That trend included three times increase in searches for Christmas gift ideas specifically. That’s eight months before December. People because they’re at home, because it’s been a tough year because they’re spending so more time online, they’re starting to think about the holidays earlier. It’s something to feel good about. They’re starting to think about preparing for the holidays in a different way and a lot of that being moving their shopping trends online.
[bctt tweet=”There’s an influencer for every consumer type you’re looking for.” username=”lmstheagency”]
We can even say, “Great, everybody. Fantastic episode and post worthy.” Let’s limit it to one reason why we should be and there it is. Social media usage is up. Internet usage is up. Influencers have gotten more traffic. Their engagement is up. Everybody’s home and we’re shopping online. What’s the second reason. I don’t know that I need a more compelling reason, but give me number two.
Heavy Engagement With Customers
Number two is influencers are heavily engaged with the customer you’re looking to attract. Giving you direct access to specific consumers that you may not have access to on your own. If you’re, for instance, looking to market to fitness enthusiasts between the ages of 20 to 40, a vegan foodie who loves cooking, but it’s too busy to do so or any other combination you can dream of, there’s an influencer for that. We talk a lot about this at the agency that there’s an influencer for every consumer type you’re looking for. Using them as that way finder to get directly to your consumer in this time is impactful.
What if I’m looking for the busy Millennial mom? Let’s say you’re a brand and you want to sell your product to the busy Millennial mom, the best way to do it, Kelli, is influencers.
I would say and I think you make a good point out of this that the more specific you can be, the better when it comes to selecting your influencers. Thinking even past the busy Millennial mom because that’s one of the most coveted consumer subsets, but drilling down even further and thinking about interest sets within that and matching your influencer to that because as we’ve already covered, these influencers are getting more engagement than ever. These are the consumers that you’re looking for. Those are the people that are engaging. The more specific you get, the more direct you get with their consumer. That was two.
Push Past The Clutters Or Ads
The example that you gave of fitness is extremely important. Not only is fitness important leading into the holidays, but post-holiday too. I feel like that’s when we start getting inundated with what’s going to be your health plan for 2021. We’re talking about not only what product you’re going to sell ahead and into the holidays but directly thereafter. That takes us right into number three. This one is extremely important too. Any one of the reasons why content creators and influencers are so valuable to a well-rounded digital marketing campaign and that is because, number three, they help push past the clutter of all of the other ads and the ad blockers that are out there all over social media.
We’ve all done this. I put on my face mask when I was heading out to go to the grocery store. I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like, “This is weird. I don’t like this mask. I want one of those fun black ones that makes me look cool and unique.” I went and I searched for masks. It’s probably been maybe two weeks now. I am inundated with mask ads all over social. If anything, it’s only going to increase heading into the holidays. I know that’s odd analogy here. We can depend on influencers and content creators to market products and put things in front of us. I don’t feel like they are dark ads. I am going to thumb past a dark ad quickly because I’m not in the mood for it at this particular time. Because I’m so highly engaged with the influencers that I’m following, then I automatically have now dedicated my time to those posts. The influencer has been successful in pushing past the clutter of all the other ads.
When you think about that, anywhere from 30 to 45% of users employ some version of an ad block on their device, that’s a pretty significant number of people that’s out there not seeing ad content. When you think about that and influencers are valued for the fact that their followers trust their opinions and their recommendations, especially when compared to ads, then you’ve got this straight shot to the consumer without using ads. During a season when all of us are expecting to be inundated with ads, it’s a great way to cut past all of that clutter.
Those are three compelling reasons. Let me tell our readers, I’m a talker and I could probably spend another 45 minutes chatting about 1 through 3 here, but I’m not going to do it because we made a point to make it short and succinct this time. What everybody does not know that we’ve run this episode and we’ve recorded it about eleven times. I get the point. I am going to be short and sweet. I will recap those reasons. I want to end here with how to work with influencers. I know we covered it in the Secret Sauce episode. For anybody that’s out there that hasn’t read it, go read the secret sauce episode. It’s all about how to work with influencers. Kel, run us through these three reasons why again, please.
[bctt tweet=”The more specific you get, the more direct you get with their consumer.” username=”lmstheagency”]
Number one, social media usage is up across the board and will continue to be high into 2021 and influencers are seeing better than ever engagement. Two, influencers are heavily engaged with the consumer you’re looking to attract. It’s that direct line to that specific consumer. Three, they can help push past the clutter of all of the ads and get around ad blockers, which we talked about or that’s a pretty significant portion of marketing content that’s not being seen so they can help cut that cut through that clutter, especially at the holidays.
I want to pat you on the back here because you’ve been able to narrow a long list that we’ve created down to three. Kudos to you, Kelli Frazier for keeping us short and succinct and to the point here. I’m very appreciative. Thank you for making that so simple and easy to understand anytime. Let’s talk about some quick ways that we can work with influencers. Kelli, because you do the everyday, all day, I feel like we can do it again right now. If we want to work with influencers, can you give me the quick list? What do I need to do? How can I do this correctly? The holidays are looming. It’s coming time to crunch time here. What do I need to do?
We talked about this before, but creating specific criteria for who you’re looking for. When I say who you’re looking for, I mean your consumer, not the influencer. Start with the consumer that you’re looking for and work back from that to build out the criteria for the influencer that you’re looking for. Once you do that, then you want to craft an outreach to be as effective as possible to getting through to that influencer. For us, we always say lead with something personal. Know who you’re talking to, know why you think they are a great fit for you and your brand.
Tell them what you appreciate about their content. Be clear and upfront about what the ask is, what you’re looking for and what your goals are so that you come at it from a personal, but also a collaborative angle. You said this before Tim, but we went deep into this on our episode about the secret sauce. If you want the full scoop on that, read that episode. Those are to me, the big ones that define your consumer, use that to define the criteria for your influencer and take a personal collaborative approach.
There are three reasons why you need to work with influencers over the holidays. It’s coming up. It’s looming. If you have any questions about how to do these and things that you don’t understand, Kelli and I are working on a Questions episode. One of the most important things that I’ve been told about Questions episodes is you need questions. For anybody that’s out there reading, if you have anything that has come up for you, you’ve read some of The Post Worthy Podcast episodes. You went through reading this and you still don’t know, please send us a message. You can DM us in several places and follow us in several places. Please do. You can find us @ItsPostWorthy on Instagram. You can send us a message there and follow us on that.
You can always go find us @LMSTheAgency and you can send us a message there. If that’s not good for you, then you can always go to our personal LinkedIn pages. I’m Tim Lambertson on LinkedIn. Kelli is Kelli Frazier on LinkedIn and send us a message there. We’re happy to answer and get back to you. Depending on the amount of questions that we get, we are going to do our best to get it into our Questions episode and answer what is on your mind. I’m happy for you to join us. Thank you for tuning in. We’re very thrilled to have you. We’ll speak to you next time.
Important Links:
- Secret Sauce – Previous episode
- @ItsPostWorthy – Instagram
- @LMSTheAgency – Twitter
- Tim Lambertson – LinkedIn
- Kelli Frazier – LinkedIn