Holiday 2025: Influencer Tips for Brands
Every holiday season, brands face the challenge of standing out in a crowded space. Influencers offer a powerful way to do that, with a built-in audience that trusts their recommendations more than traditional advertisements. Partnering with the right influencer can help your brand tap into those ready-made audiences, increasing credibility, building trust, and boosting visibility with potential customers.
Timing & Preparation
- Establish a Workback Timeline: Create a detailed timeline outlining each phase of your holiday influencer campaigns: from initial outreach to content going live. Include key milestones such as brief approval, content creation, review rounds, and final posting deadlines. A clear timeline helps keep creators and internal teams aligned and ensures timely execution during a busy season.
- Define KPIs Before Briefing: Set clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and success metrics before developing your influencer brief. When creators understand how their performance will be measured, they can tailor content to meet your goals. Align KPIs with your broader holiday objectives to ensure influencer campaigns support your overall marketing strategy.
- Select Brand-Aligned Influencers: Collaborate with influencers who genuinely reflect your brand’s values and aesthetic. During the crowded holiday season, it’s especially important to work with creators who limit the number of brand partnerships they take on. Influencers involved in too many campaigns can dilute your messaging.
- Pre-Approve Messaging Themes and Do’s & Don’ts: Provide influencers with holiday-specific messaging guidelines, product positioning, and any brand-sensitive language to avoid. This prevents content revisions later and helps keep posting schedules on time.
Content Promotion
- Build an Integrated Distribution Plan: Before content goes live, determine where and how you’ll repurpose top-performing influencer content across owned and paid channels, especially in email, site banners, retargeting ads, and gift guides.
- Secure Paid Usage and Whitelisting Rights Early: Lock in paid usage and whitelisting rights for the full holiday season (October–December). This gives you the flexibility to repurpose influencer content across email, SMS, site banners, and paid media. Running ads from the creator’s handle via whitelisting often outperforms brand-owned posts especially during high-competition periods such as holiday.
Budgeting
- Budget for Usage Rights and Media Spend: Influencer demand (and rates) increase during Q4, especially when usage rights and paid amplification are included. Ensure your budget covers not just content creation, but also licensing, whitelisting, and boosting.
- We recommend allocating 30–50% of your total influencer budget to media spend, allowing you to extend reach and visibility for top-performing content.
QVC+ and HSN+ Holiday Campaign
WITHIN’s Influencer team activated 14 macro-influencers for a holiday campaign with QVC+ and HSN+, targeting adults aged 35 and older to boost awareness of their streaming platforms and capture email leads. Each influencer delivered a 30-second Instagram Reel and a 20-second Instagram Story with a UTM link driving to the holiday promotion, along with 30 days of paid usage rights. The campaign delivered strong performance, generating a 22% lift in engagement compared to standard creative, a 9% CTR for paid traffic campaigns, and a 4.7% lead conversion rate.
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Strategically investing in influencer partnerships allows brands to stand out during the competitive holiday season. By selecting influencers who align with their values and by establishing clear goals with defined KPIs, brands can connect meaningfully with consumers.
WITHIN can help your brand partner with the right influencers to reach your target audience and maximize your holiday sales. Send an email to hello@within.co to request a free consultation and custom holiday influencer brief!