Jumpstart Your Summer Campaigns with Content Creators!

The summer season is just around the corner, but it’s no time for your marketing strategies to take a break! This season will be packed full with festivals, travels, picnics, and fashion, which makes it the perfect time to boost your marketing efforts. Here’s how you can partner with content creators to bring your summer campaigns to life!

Guide to launching summer campaigns

1. Decide on a summer event

To launch effective campaigns, you should start mapping them out months in advance, so you’re aware of which events or summer traditions you’ll be capitalizing on. You can launch campaigns around:

• Summer holidays
  
  Consumers will be planning vacations, road trips, and staycations during the summer months. They’ll be turning to social media for inspiration on cities to visit, places to stay, things to do, and food to eat. Creators can inspire consumers by:
  
  - Documenting their vacation to their favorite summer destinations
  - Highlighting different activities that people can do during their vacation
  - Hosting a vacation photo contest for their followers to participate in
  
  
• Experiences
  
  Most consumers have activities and traditions they typically do during the summer. They’ll be looking to take their families to theme parks, attend festivals, head to the beach, or go to the movie theaters. Creators can help you by:
  
  - Encouraging people to get out and visit museums and zoos
  - Capturing themselves fishing or kayaking with their friends
  - Promoting festivals, farmer’s markets, or outdoor movie screenings that are family friendly
  
  
• Beauty & Fashion
  
  Some people have different wardrobes and beauty routines for the summer. They’ll be shopping for specific products to use, such as moisturizing lotion, sunglasses, smudge-free eyeliner, and swimwear, among other products. Creators can:
  
  - Share their favorite summer looks that are great for a day on the beach
  - Spread the word about exclusive deals to purchase summer themed products
  - Create a tutorial highlighting various makeup products that are perfect for warm days
  
  
• Food & Drink
  
  During the summer, people start spending more time outside. They’ll be more likely to host outdoor events, and will be on the lookout for food and drinks that’ll be perfect to serve on a sunny day. Creators can share:
  
  - Recipes for refreshing food and drinks
  - Picnic ideas that consumers can use when they host their parties
  - Their favorite outdoor dinnerware in their Instagram Stories
  
  
• Back-to-school shopping
  
  Back-to-school shopping is a huge retail event. Consumer spending reached $82.8 billion in the US and £1.6 billion in the UK last year. Many parents will be hitting the stores to search for school supplies, clothing, technology, food, furnishings, and more! Creators can help by:
  
  - Creating shopping lists of back-to-school products for students of all ages
  - Demonstrating how different products have improved their student life
  - Showcasing back-to-school outfits or dorm room products

View this post on Instagram         

#reklame Eclipse or Heelcross? På tide å dra tilbake til Voss og Ekstremsportveko. Asaklitt Trillekoffert fra @clasohlsonnorge er pakket og klar👌🏼 Kjempe lett koffert av god kvalitet med 5 års garanti. #Reklame #Clasohlson #freestylefootball #travel #fotball #freestyle #suitcase #reise #clasohlsonnorge

A post shared by Tobias Becs (@tobiasfreestyle) on Jun 27, 2018 at 1:31pm PDT

2. Select a campaign goal

In order to measure the success of your campaigns, you’ll need to first decide what the goal of your campaign should be. It can be any of the following:

• Creating content of your product or service
• Build brand awareness
• Generate sales or app downloads
• Increase newsletter subscribers or followers on social media

By having a goal in mind, you’ll be able to determine whether you were able to achieve it!

3. Set a timeline

Timing will be a vital component to consider for summer campaigns. Many creators may already have vacations planned, and the best ones will be quickly booked up by other brands. If you’re also planning on shipping products to creators, you’ll need to consider sending them out well in advance.

This will give the creators enough time to receive and test your product, so they can create great posts.

4. Select creators

It is always a challenge to find Instagram influencers that are relevant for your campaign. To help you in your search, here are several tips you should keep in mind:

• Check whether the creators’ followers are genuine. Use our 10 top tips to help you identify fake followers.
• Review the engagement on their posts. This will help you determine how loyal their followers are, and how interested they are in what’s being posted.
• Determine if the creators’ content is high-quality. Their content will represent your brand, so it’s essential that you’re happy with their ability to create.
• Ensure the creators are relevant to your brand. If they are, they’ll likely have an audience that is interested in your products, and the creators’ sponsored posts won’t look inauthentic on their feeds.

5. Measure campaign results

To understand how well your campaigns performed, compare your results to the goals you set. For instance, you can consider:

• Creating content of your product or service
  
  Calculate how much you spent for each piece of content generated in your campaigns. You’ll be able to compare the price against the fees you pay professional creative studios. Typically, we find that content created in collaborations on inzpire.me are up 10x cheaper than content created by studios.
  
  
• Build brand awareness
  
  Measure the reach and engagement the creators in your campaigns achieved. To understand whether they performed well, you can compare their results against our Instagram Benchmarks here. Those who performed as well, or better, than our benchmarks were successful in building awareness around your brand.
  
  
• Generate sales or app downloads
  
  To track sales and app downloads, it’s important that you provide creators with tracking links or unique promo codes. This way, you’ll be able to see how many sales and downloads your campaigns were able to generate.
  
  Pro-tip: When you collaborate with creators to generate sales or app downloads, you should pay them a base fee for the work they do. If they generate a sale or download, offer them an additional payment!

6. Maximize your ROI

A huge benefit of working with creators is the authentic content they publish in your campaigns. To maximize your ROI, you should consider repurposing and reusing them in your ads, websites, newsletters, and social media. Learn how to reuse creator content.

7. Utilize an always-on strategy

For your influencer marketing campaigns to be truly effective, consider an always-on strategy. Your branded message will be better remembered with repeated exposures, so it’s vital that you combine your seasonal campaigns with ongoing collaborations.

To find creators you should partner up with, you should constantly monitor your campaigns for stand-out collaborations. Once you identify creators who perform exceptionally well, send them booking requests for long-term collaborations. By doing this on a continuous basis, you’ll optimize for even more successful campaigns.

Need some campaign inspiration?

Libresse partnered up with creators to break the period taboo. In the campaign, the creators encouraged their followers to enjoy summer and go swimming despite their period!

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inzpire.me

inzpire.me is an influencer marketing platform that connects brands with creators across the globe. Ready to launch a campaign? Schedule a call today!