Now that we’re in October, many brands are already starting to think about the run-up to Christmas and one of the most important days of the year for retail - Black Friday.

Influencer marketing is always something that brands rely on during the Black Friday period, but this year with online sales playing a bigger role, creators will be absolutely essential.

Although we’re still a month or so away from Black Friday on the 27th of November, there’s no time like the present to start planning influencer campaigns. To help you start the process and plan ahead, we’re sharing our tips on how to use influencer marketing to maximise sales this Black Friday.

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Start Your Influencer Campaign Early

One of the most important things to remember is that although Black Friday is only one day, people are looking forward to it in the weeks leading up to it.

For many consumers, Black Friday is their chance to buy the things that they’ve had their eye on for a while but have waited to purchase until it goes on sale on Black Friday. Leading up to Black Friday, consumers are looking for inspiration for Christmas gifts for others, bargains for themselves, and any one-off purchases that might be heavily discounted.

For this reason, it’s crucial to start your influencer marketing campaign in the weeks prior to Black Friday in order to capture your audience whilst they are hunting for upcoming deals.

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How Can You Plan Your Black Friday Influencer Campaign?

Some of the key things to consider when planning an upcoming influencer marketing campaign for Black Friday are:

What offers you’re looking to promote?

Which audience will respond well to your best offers?

What platforms will suit your product and offering?

Which creators will work well for your campaign?

What will your budget be for the campaign?

What are the desired outcomes?

Partnering with a platform that can pull data and inform your decision making can be really helpful in the planning stages.

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Partner With Creators And Get Their Input

When you partner with a creator who has an authentic connection to your brand, their input into the campaign can be invaluable. After all, a creator will understand their target audience better than anyone and will be able to use this knowledge to create targeted content. Build genuine partnerships with creators and ask for their input on how to promote Black Friday offers for your brand.

Brands may choose to set creators a brief and see how they respond, or even work with creators in the early stages of promotion ideation to get their input on what their audience would be most interested in. The best Black Friday content is that which feels authentic and is a product of a genuine creator-brand partnership.

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Focus On Inspirational Creator-led Content

People follow creators for inspiration and assistance with purchasing decisions, so showcasing your products will help consumers decide what to buy. In a sea of offers and loud promotions, the kind of content that stands out on Black Friday is informative, helpful and genuine.

You may choose to get a creator to share their favourite pieces from your collection, or to show how they would use a certain product that is going on sale on the 27th of November.

Creator content is able to alert customers to Black Friday deals that they otherwise may not have known about, so in this sense it can be really helpful to create inspirational content that points the consumer in the right direction.

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Think About How You Will Make The Most Of Buying Features

During Black Friday, people want to get their hands on the best deals as soon as they see them, so utilising a platform's buying features will make that happen.

Instagram in particular has great buying features that are set up for conversion. If you’re working with Influencer creators, it can be a good idea to utilise the swipe up and product tag options in posts and stories to help consumers find and purchase the products that they’re seeing in their feed.

Planning ahead to understand which products will be best suited to certain platforms is a must for Black Friday. For example, you may want to have a good mix of creators across Instagram, YouTube and TikTok to showcase your products and reach a varied audience. Utilising different platforms and the buying features of each will also mean that you can provide your audience with different kinds of content to inform their purchasing decisions.

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