2024 Holiday Influencer Marketing: Everything You Need to Know
Believe it or not, the time has come again to prepare for the biggest shopping season of the year — the holidays! During the 2023 holiday season, online spend grew 4.9% year-over-year to $222.1 billion, a new record for ecommerce. Plus, for the first time, mobile shopping surpassed desktop during the holiday season, driving 51.1% of online sales.
We’re predicting these trends will continue this year, with social media playing a huge role in impacting purchase behavior. So, what’s the best way to drive product sales this Black Friday?
Lean on influencers to drive your social strategy forward and boost product sales this holiday season. Influencer marketing is the best way to meet your customers where they are and to drive meaningful impact throughout your entire funnel. Below, we’ve compiled some of our top BFCM influencer marketing tips for you to leverage this season — based on new data and insights.
Keep reading or watch our webinar, Black Friday Cyber Monday: Drive Meaningful ROI With Influencers This Holiday Season, on demand.
1. Start planning — like, now.
While we encourage marketers to start their holiday planning early every year, it’s imperative to get an even bigger head start this year. Why?
The 2024 holiday season is shaping up to be very different from the last couple of years, based on a few different factors.
- The 2024 election: With the election coming up on November 5th, marketers are expected to face a complex holiday marketing season. In 2020, consumer spending declined leading up to and and following the election period — a trend likely to recur this year.
- Short holiday season: The 2024 holiday season is shorter than the last, with only 27 days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The last time the holiday season was this short was in 2019, when marketers compensated by starting their campaigns early and extending store hours during peak shopping days.
- Early bird shoppers: 16% of US consumers have already begun shopping for holiday gifts in June, with many more looking to leverage major summer sales events like Amazon Prime Day to shop for gifts and other holiday goodies.
Early holiday planning is not only necessary this year, but it also maximizes your opportunity to capitalize on the holiday buying surge. For influencer marketers, getting a head start also ensures that you have enough time to onboard your creators, ship out your products, approve content, and go live with your campaign — well before the election commotion starts.
Use our sample collaboration timeline as a guide to ensure that all of your influencer content is posted in time this holiday season.
2. Offer holiday deals and discounts.
According to Salesforce, 43% of consumers are carrying more debt this year compared to 2023. And this isn’t unique to one income bracket — consumers across all levels are tapping into their credit lines more today than they were last year.
Stay mindful of the macroeconomic environment and create cost-saving opportunities and unique offers to attract shoppers of all budgets.
One of the best ways to do so is by running an influencer-affiliate campaign, giving creators unique discount codes to share with their audience. Consumers will be excited to shop with your brand at a discounted price, allowing your brand to boost sales even amidst the economic downturn. Meanwhile, your influencer affiliates will benefit financially from the commissions you pay them for driving conversions. You can even automate link tracking and affiliate payment using a tool like Aspire’s sales tracking feature.
Another offer you can provide consumers is “Buy Now, Pay Later.” 45% of consumers make purchases with “Buy Now, Pay Later” that they otherwise wouldn’t make. Plus, average order values (AOV) are 85% higher when shoppers use this alternative credit service. Encourage influencers to share about your “Buy Now, Pay Later” offer to generate sales and boost AOV this holiday season.
3. Optimize your mobile shopping experience.
Consumers are increasingly using their mobile devices to shop for holiday gifts. During Cyber Week 2023, 76.6% of website visits were on mobile and an impressive 66% of conversions happened on mobile. Mobile shopping will continue to power this year’s holiday ecommerce growth, contributing 27.9% of growth to this year’s holiday season ecommerce sales.
And because consumers are spending more time on their mobile phones — 3 hours and 6 minutes per day in 2024, per eMarketer’s forecast — they’re spending more money as a result.
Optimize your mobile shopping experience from start to finish. Work with influencers to produce mobile-friendly vertical content to grab the ever-elusive attention of consumers. Additionally, ensure you make it easy for your customers to shop from their phones with simple web pages that load fast and seamless checkout experiences, perhaps even leveraging social commerce tools like TikTok Shop.
4. Drive consumers in stores by working with local influencers.
While ecommerce has boomed in the past few years, a growing number of consumers have returned to pre-pandemic patterns and have started shopping in brick-and-mortar stores again. The lines of commerce have blurred, and consumers treat both ecommerce and physical retail as part of the same buying journey. In fact, research shows that 49% of shoppers prefer a mix of online and in-store shopping. Another study even found that 97% of Gen Zers like to shop at brick-and-mortar stores, as they can get products immediately into their hands.
So, don’t neglect in-store sales opportunities. Encourage in-store shopping by working with local influencers.
Specifically on TikTok — which is known to populate For You Page content based on location — partner with influencers who live near one of your stores and ask them to create content promoting a deal happening in-stores only. Instead of influencers driving clicks to your website, have their call-to-action lead to a store locator page and track those clicks. Be sure to create a store locator that is socially optimized and reflects your digital experience.
If you’re having difficulty finding influencers in a specific location, try Aspire’s suite of creator discovery tools to easily connect with local influencers. Specifically, our powerful influencer search engine allows you to filter not only by location, but also by social following size, audience and creator demographics, aesthetic, and more. If you need to find a very specific pool of influencers — say, golden retriever owners who live in LA — leverage our Creator Marketplace to get inbound applicants with this callout. Once you publish your campaign with this specific demographic requirement, relevant influencers can find you.
5. Diversify your marketing channel mix.
As the election approaches, political ad spending will increase significantly. Not only will paid ads cost more, but competition will also be tough. To grab consumers’ attention in this saturated digital space, you need to spread your holiday marketing efforts evenly across various channels, including not just your organic and paid social channels, but also email, out-of-home, SMS, and more.
And remember, to beat ad fatigue, your priority should be to produce engaging, relatable content that consumers can actually resonate with. Work with talented creators to source high-converting images and videos that you can repurpose across all of your marketing channels. By taking a multi-channel approach, you can maximize audience reach, create multiple touchpoints with consumers, and find customers on channels they respond with best.
6. Have re-engagement strategies ready to go.
Cart abandonment rates will likely spike during the holiday shopping season, as consumers research competing products and seek out the best deals. In fact, data from Cyber Week 2023 showed that 19% of shoppers abandoned their carts to find a better deal elsewhere, and 14.9% of shoppers abandoned their carts to see if a product would go on sale.
The good news is that there was also a 20-30% lift in marketing opt-in rates ahead of BFCM, indicating that consumers want to hear from brands again. Take this as a golden opportunity to re-engage consumers who seem to have fallen off and rekindle their interest with the following strategies.
- Cart abandonment emails: Did you forget something? Create a sense of FOMO by featuring influencer-generated content (IGC) and testimonials in your cart abandonment emails. Because IGC provides the ultimate social proof, shoppers will feel more inclined to move forward with their purchase when they see your products in use by other people. And because IGC is diverse, you can A/B test different IGC to target specific audience segments.
- Wish list reminders: Last holiday season, 54% of US internet users added items to a wish list to save products for later or to wait for deals. So, similar to cart abandonment emails, make sure to follow up with shoppers who have items sitting in their wish list — especially as those products go on sale, or inventory runs low.
- Targeted ads: Retarget those who have visited your site with ads powered by influencer content. Better yet, put paid spend behind organic influencer posts to run Partnership Ads, which have proven to achieve 3.9% lower cost per purchase and 2.4x conversion lift.
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approach, work with influencers to scale your seasonal content creation, hyper-target your audiences, and boost sales. If you’re ready to kickstart your campaign with Aspire, book a demo to set yourself up for success throughout the entire holiday season.
