For many people, the lead-up to Christmas and the holidays is all about time with family & friends, a break from work, decorations, food, gift shopping and parties - all to the soundtrack of Mariah Carey.
For marketers. It’s game time.
With Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Christmas and New Year all falling in quick succession, it’s called the silly season for a reason.
According to Numerator, 67% of consumers plan to spend (USD)$200+ on Christmas, with 47% intending to spend over $300.
Higher than any other holiday, the majority of that spending occurs between the end of November and Christmas Day and goes towards gifts and food over any other category.
For brands - the competition to get in front of customers is at its peak around Christmas, but so too are the opportunities to drive sales.
The most effective strategies take a multi-channel approach, and Creator Marketing has never been a more valuable channel for reaching and converting customers over the holiday season.
Keep reading to discover why, alongside tips for optimising your Christmas Creator Marketing campaigns, and some elite creative strategies from brands nailing theirs with TRIBE.
Why are influencers and creators the secret to ho-ho-hot holiday marketing?
For Christmas, consumers spend more with online retailers, and about 64% of them discover holiday offers via digital ads, and 73% of purchases are made on mobile during Black Friday. Your customers aren’t requesting Christmas gifts from atop Santa’s lap anymore, they’re turning to social media for inspiration and gift ideas.
Yes, they’ll be looking at your brand’s ads, but on social, 63% of consumers trust recommendations from creators more than they trust brand messages. This isn’t just because they’re more relatable, there are LOADS of benefits to collaborating with creators, here’s just a few.
📈 Organic reach. By partnering with the right creators you’re reaching potential customers within their engaged and diverse audiences, and beyond.
🎨 Creativity. There are only so many creative ideas your team can think of. By tapping into creators you’re working with multiple voices who can bring your products to life via their unique voice and perspective.
📹 Format. At their core, creators are storytellers making them experts in crafting short-form video - the undisputed preferred format on social media.
📊 Performance. The evolution of Creator Marketing has changed the game. It’s no longer an organic channel for brand awareness and reach alone, marketers now have the tools to easily supercharge their paid media with a volume of high-performing content performance marketers can only dream of.
3 strategic tips to optimise your Christmas Creator Marketing
1. LEAN INTO EMOTIVE STORYTELLING
People celebrate Christmas in many different ways, but arguably the most common themes are love, togetherness, generosity and the overall magic of the holidays.
Emotive storytelling is always powerful, but even more so now - just think of the anticipation we feel for brands like John Lewis to release their iconic Christmas advert.
John Lewis, and brands like Coca-Cola, Aldi, and Air Canada all warm our hearts and emotionally connect us with their brand. A very different approach to the focus on product benefits and discounts for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, this storytelling approach is memorable, shareable and relatable.
Creators are the storytellers of social media. They can celebrate what your product personally means to them - in ways your brand simply can't.
2. DECK YOUR FEED WITH HIGH-PERFORMING, BEAUTIFUL CONTENT
Why give your Social Media Manager a bottle of wine when you can give the gift of content to post before, during and after Christmas? (Maybe give them some wine too).
When you run an Influencer Marketing campaign on TRIBE, you can repost the stunning content from your paid partnerships with creators onto your brand’s feed. It’s a super quick and easy way to decorate your own feed with dynamic Christmas content that’s been crafted for your brand, that your team doesn’t have to create themselves.
3. SPRINKLE THE CONTENT MAGIC ACROSS MULTIPLE CHANNELS
Repurposing content is the name of the game. Even John Lewis takes their iconic TV advert into their social, in-store and eComm channels.
If an organic creator post performs well, it’s unlikely it's just the creator’s audience it resonated with. The brands nailing their Creator Marketing strategies follow this formula:
1. Build a large community of smaller creators to shoot and post content
2. Discover their top organic performers
3. Boost that content in paid as Creator Ads
4. Amplify highest performing paid content with more media spend - now with unwavering confidence.
Not familiar with Creator Ads? Otherwise known as TikTok Spark Ads or Partnership Ads on Meta - Creator Ads have transformed Creator Marketing. They combine the genuine, relatable content your customers love with ad-targeting technology.
They appear under the creator’s handle - making them feel more organic while giving you the option to target specific audiences and add call-to-actions to drive & track traffic and sales.
Or, you can simply license the rights to the content to fuel your own ads. But why stop there? Licensing content gives you a goldmine of content to fuel your EDMs, print catalogues, OOH or website.
3 brands bringing joy with Christmas campaigns on TRIBE
1. FAGE: THE CHRISTMAS AESTHETIC
In the lead-up to Christmas, Fage had two objectives.
1. Generate a volume of on-brand, Christmas-themed content to fuel their Instagram throughout December.
2. Reach a large audience of people looking for products to buy for their Christmas feasts.
They achieved both - effortlessly!
Partnering with TRIBE, their Christmas brief went live in late November, with final content being published to Instagram from Dec 2nd until the 22nd. Their brief called for creators to shoot Reels and Feed posts that placed Fage in festive scenes capturing that magic of Christmas.
With a stunning mix of delicious foodie content and kids & adults indulging in a treat, the highly aesthetic performed above benchmarks.
35 posts were published to a combined audience of over 1.1M, with an average reach % of 19%, and an avg. engagement rate of over 30%. Fage not only reposted their fave content to their own Instagram, they amplified the top performers to fuel their paid social ads - driving further performance.
2. QVC: MULTI COLLAB PARTNERSHIPS
For QVC, authenticity was key so, who better to turn to than creators who genuinely love their brand? QVC's goal was to partner with a smaller number of creators to shoot and publish multiple Reels, all showcasing their fave products from their 'Christmas Gift Guide'.
Wanting the content to be true to the creator, all 3 were able to select the products they loved the most before shooting Reels showcasing them. The best-performing content racked up almost 6k engagements and overwhelmingly positive sentiment from the audience. So positive, QVC licensed 4 videos to amplify in their paid advertising.
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@gabby.bracey |
@thriftyblondeblog |
3. RYOBI: THE ART OF GIFTING
Power tool brand Ryobi needed one thing for Christmas. Creative ideas.
Who better to deliver than those who think creatively for a living? With the goal of amplifying their overall Christmas campaign of 'gift-giving to loved ones', Ryobi briefed TRIBE's creator community to shoot Reels and TikToks that told the stories of:
• Why a Ryobi product is the perfect gift?
• What Christmas-themed DIY project can you tackle with a Ryobi tool?
• What Christmas gift can you make with a Ryobi tool?
Cleverly working with both Instagram and TikTok creators, Ryobi not only published 9 short-form videos they were able to amplify that content by boosting it as Creator Ads to increase reach, awareness and conversions.
Check out one of those boosted videos from hilarious TikTokker, @the_gretaway that organically racked up over 360k views alone.
If you're ready to add the magic of creators to your Christmas Marketing campaign reach out to your Customer Success Manager - who'll have you up and running as quickly as Santa can slide down a chimney (ok, we'll stop with the Christmas puns now).
New to TRIBE? Get in touch and our expert team will reach out to discover how we can help transform your strategy this holiday season, and beyond.
