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The summer holiday season is the perfect time for brands to launch their summer advertising campaigns. From increased awareness and traffic, aligning your campaigns with seasonal events can help increase your brand visibility.
As all marketers probably know by now, the influencer marketing sector is booming. Influencer marketing is a partnership between a brand and online creators to create content for a desired audience. Influencers have the power to influence and change people’s behavior, so are a great way to connect your product with the consumer to drive a sale.
Influencer marketing campaigns are super popular especially during the summer time, with posts on social media increasing by 30% showing how engaged everyone is at this time. Sounds like the perfect time to capitalize on seasonal trends and all things summer right?
However, adding influencer marketing into your summer advertising campaign can be extremely difficult as you’ll be competing with other brands to stand out and grab the attention of potential customers.
Daunting as it sounds, we are here and are going to let you know everything you need to elevate your brand and run the perfect summer advertising campaign with influencer marketing.
Steps to Run Your Summer Advertising Campaigns
1. Brainstorm
Firstly, to create an amazing campaign is to define what you want to achieve and have clear goals. Keeping them timely, specific and realistic. Getting a rough idea of what you want to include and what you don’t.
2. Research
It is important to plan out your summer advertising campaigns in advance. During this stage you want to look at the different aspects and platforms and start taking a look at influencers you may consider for the campaign.
During summer, you’ll start to see Instagram feeds being as active as ever as people have way more time on their hands.
While the photo-sharing app is the most obvious for influencer marketing, the rise of TikTok has developed a whole new sector of influencers which has allowed brands to reach a larger audience.
Although there are many demographics on the app, TikTok tends to appeal to younger users so the audience may have different buying habits. The concept of TikTok and the available options such as Hashtag Challenges, Trends and a ‘For You Page’ prone video content to go viral.
Also do some research into other successful summer campaigns, it will give you inspiration to build a successful campaign yourself.
Need some campaign inspiration? Get inspired and enlightened with the best influencer marketing tips from real campaigns here.
3. Key Products
Beforehand, when brainstorming you need to understand what summer means to your target audience. It is important to focus on key products or services. This makes your campaign more relevant to the season. For example, if you’re a skincare brand, during the summertime you would focus on advertising the products that contain SPF and give consumers glowing and fresh skin.
4. Summer Campaign Content
Imagery for your summer advertising campaigns should be bright, colorful and happy. The content at this time is at its peak so you want to stand out and do something different. Also, consider the events that have happened in 2020, summer may look different due to multiple industries struggling. You may want to consider producing content locally and finding local locations.
5. Measure Outcomes
During your campaign, you want to keep track of key metrics including audience reach, impressions, engagement, growth in followers, comments and revenue growth. These will act as indicators that you can use to improve your brand during the next seasonal campaign.
6. Maintain Influencer Relationships
You want the influencers you include in your campaign to be a long-term partner with your brand and not just be a one-off. This is beneficial for many reasons. Remember audiences want to be able to trust and relate with influencers, so a one-off promotion may not seem as trustworthy.
Things to Consider When Running Summer Advertising Campaigns
1. Selecting the Right Influencers
Be careful when selecting influencers for your campaign. You want to find creators who not only align with your brand but also have a record of being able to produce content for the summertime. Selecting the right influencer can also prove to have a higher ROI (Return on Investment) due to the trust built between the influencer and consumer.
2. Utilise New Social Media Features
Summertime for some can be considered a fresh start, which is why this is the best time to use new features on Instagram such as Reels and Shop to appeal to a larger audience.
Speaking of new features, check out this blog to take a look at YouTube’s newest content format YouTube Shorts and get the most out of your platform marketing.
3. Giveaways
Running giveaways are perfect during the summer, when people are looking to have fun as they are out of school or out of work but also towards the end of the summer period and back to school is approaching. For example depending on your brand, at the start of summer if your swimwear brand can host a giveaway of bikinis to wear throughout the summer and towards the end and a stationery brand can host a giveaway of back to school products.
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Using research done in the planning stage, you will know what your audience is looking for and what they want which can be a great way to gain new followers and increase interest in your brand.
After developing the rules, incorporating influencers can provide maximum effect. They can help you promote the giveaway and boost engagement. Done by sharing the giveaway on their stories, doing videos and posts and will reach a good range of audiences.
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4. Events
Depending on your budget, planning and hosting an event during this time can be perfect to increase brand awareness. Influencers are well known for showing up to the most glamorous events and posting it all over their social media.
The event needs to be about your business and selling your services but also adding the summer component to it. For example, an event done by the beach or by the pool with branded (your logo on the cup) summer cocktails.
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Combining Influencers and Summer Advertising Campaigns In Real Life
During the summer of 2019, US fast-food company Chipotle launched its summer advertising campaign on TikTok.
Knowing the app was super popular at the time, Chipotle partnered with content creator David Dobrik to celebrate free digital order delivery during summer with the #ChipotleLidFlip challenge. The challenge consisted of fans buying a burrito bowl from Chipotle and sharing them flipping the lid off.
This campaign wanted to highlight the brand and was relevant to the launch of their new promotions.
@daviddobrik #ChipotleLidFlip @chipotle #ad
Partnering with David allowed Chipotle to reach over 14M of his followers along with their own. On the first day of the challenge over 100k videos were posted by participants with the hashtag. A month later, the challenge had over 268M hits.
Earning millions of impressions and media coverage on BuzzFeed, CNBC and The Atlantic to name a few, this campaign broke records for digital sales and Chipotle became one of the most followed brands on TikTok with over 1M followers.
