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Welcome to Negronis with Nord. Are you worried your content may get lost in a sea of christmas lights and pajama pictures? Today’s episode James shares 7 key tips for holiday sponsored content. You can submit your questions for future episodes here.
Below is a transcript of the full episode for your reading pleasure. Make sure to subscribe to the Fohr YouTube channel to get notified of new episodes.
James: Okay, welcome Negronis with Nord, episode number 39. I'm drinking tea today because it is 3:00 PM and uh, I'm getting to an age where drinking a Negroni at 3:00 PM is gonna screw up the rest of my day. So we are on to tea today.
We are not going to talk about Elon Musk and Twitter today. The entire like tech world is kind of burning down right now. Crypto is collapsing. Twitter is, uh, an incredibly entertaining but distracting place to be. I'm having to like limit myself to just like checking it in the mornings and the evenings because there's just like so much **** happening right now in the world and it's all happening live on Twitter. It can be a little much, which is a good reminder as you go into the holidays to, you know, set some boundaries with yourself around social, uh, and make sure you don't spend your entire life refreshing your phone.
We are going to talk about holidays today. We've obviously talked before about how important this time is for advertisers. You know, a lot of brands sell a fairly large majority of their product in Q4, especially in this kind of back half of Q4 in the run-up to holiday.
We are hoping for a good holiday season in retail. Obviously as influencers, uh, that's something you wanna see as well. People going out, spending money, emptying their wallets, giving their money to brands so that those brands can turn around and continue giving that money to you. But it's super busy time for us. It's a really busy time for influencers. And just a few things to remember and consider as we get into this kind of busy season.
Seven key tips to help your Holiday sponsored content
First, make sure you are limiting the amount of sponsored content that you create. Uh, generally we say like 30% is probably like a good max to think about as far as what percentage of your feed is sponsored. So if you think about having five weeks or so of holiday content between Thanksgiving and, you know, the end of when you can ship things, which is kind of the end of the holiday advertising season.
So five weeks, if you do five posts a week, generally 25 posts, 30% of that would be, you know, eight or so sponsored posts. That's not a huge amount. If you are, you know, doing this full time and it's good to kind of map out exactly how many you have. And if you have 15 sponsored posts and you generally only would do 20 posts in that given time period, you might want to consider doing more organic content to make sure you're balancing it out. You don't want your audience to just get hit with ad after ad, after ad after ad. You have to make sure you're balancing it with that.
That moves us to point number two, which is you remember that your audience is the ultimate consumer of this content. They're basically your customer. And when we get busy and we have all these sponsored posts and all these brands that want all this different stuff for us, it is, it is natural to start to feel like your job is creating content.
Um, and that's, that's it. And being on brief, and we talked about this before, a little controversial. I said that part of your job is actually selling product. Another part though is delivering value to your audience. Ultimately, you have to create content that they want to consume. I don't know that your audience wants to consume a photo of you holding up a package in front of a Christmas tree saying like, buy this thing, right? We always say that your content needs to be grounded in your audience. You need to be providing value to them. That is even more true during the holidays. So like, do not forget that.
Number three, speaking of content, don't phone it in. The busier you get, the less time you have to spend on the posts that you're doing. Sponsored organic, doesn't matter. You have to make sure that as you get busier, the quality of your content doesn't go down For sponsored posts, you know, generally influencers are increasing their pricing, uh, over the holidays cuz there's so much more demand for these posts.
The quality level should go up then, right? These should be the best posts that you do all year. You should be planning for it. This is not a surprise, you know, holiday seasons didn't just come out of nowhere. You knew it was coming. Hopefully you've booked these deals kind of, uh, a decent amount in advance and you've been able to plan them out. But really, you know, you want to have a really tight content calendar and feel really proud of the stuff that you're putting out there, because again, you're gonna be fighting against all this other sponsored content and just generally you're gonna have more of it. Um, so it needs to work better.
That takes me to next point, which is context. You know, you have to remember that the people that follow you follow, you know, a bunch of brands. They follow other influencers, they follow their friends and family.
They follow meme accounts. You know, your content is a, is just a tiny portion of what they are consuming every day. And you have to remember, they are going to be bombarded by everyone. They're following with messages of, you know, buy this, buy this, add, add, add, add. While you may think that like standing in front of your Christmas tree and holding a product up is like good enough and is fine. They've probably seen that post 10 other times in the same day from other people and there's like diminishing returns on all of that. So like, the more **** you do, that's just like you standing in front of Christmas lights, you standing in front of like a bunch of gifts, you standing in front of a tree, something with a bunch of red, like, you know, those things like obviously makes sense.
We want to make our posts feel festive and feel like they're very holiday. But again, it just goes back to like putting more time and putting more effort and trying to stand out because they're, they will have seen that same basic post over and over and over again.
Number five, don't forget about the captions. Okay? Like, yes, we need to be spending more time making sure visually we're creating compelling, interesting, different content that's gonna get people to pause in feed or stop on your TikTok and, and get pulled in and watch it.
But don't forget the caption. More, more important on Instagram, the image is like what gets people to stop. And often it's the caption that gets them, uh, to actually buy on TikTok, it would probably be more of what you're saying, what, you know, what the kind of voiceover or what you're speaking to camera is. But like, those messages need to be really compelling and just, Hey, here's a brand it sells. This thing you should buy. It is not super compelling. Make sure again, that you like take the time to try and connect a personal story to it. Bring yourself and your personality into it. Make sure you use the product beforehand so you can tell an actual story about it. I see a lot of influencers in this time showing products in the packaging. Obviously brands have like special packaging, holiday packaging or something. And sometimes in the brief they want you to show it in the package, that's fine.
But then like, make sure in stories you're like showing yourself using it. Your audience is like ******** monitor is gonna be like, you know, beeping. They're gonna be much less tolerant of she sponsored posts in the next month than they would be maybe in July when they're not seeing as many
Six. It is a busy time for you. It is probably a busier time for the people that you are working with. It's such an important time for these brands. But also like, you know, they have pretty in-depth content calendars. And again, you may not think that being a day late is a big deal. It could be a huge deal to them because you fit into this much larger marketing plan and all of these things need to work together. So overcommunicate with your clients in this time, that's just a good general rule.
But especially now, just like overcommunicate, any delays, any issues, make sure that bad news travels faster than good news. You know, be empathetic to your friends that are, you know, you're, that are working at brands, the, the clients that you're working with. This is a really stressful time. And add that added to that is, you know, all the pressure that these brands are getting in the markets right now, um, it's making this season even more important because everyone's stock is in a ******* trash can. You know, be conscious of that and try and make their job a little bit easier if you can.
Last. Number seven, we're not gonna make it to 10. Sometimes there's only seven is have fun. You know, um, the kind of key to creating interesting, compelling content is probably enjoying making it. This is true of probably most any creative pursuit that like, you can't do it.
Well if you're not enjoying it and you're not having fun with it, this should be fun. You know, it's holiday season, there's lots to be happy about. You are using your creativity and your platform to be able to make a living. You're working with these incredible brands. They are paying you good money. Uh, they're putting trust in you to tell their brand story. This should be really fun. You should be having fun with it. If you're not having fun shooting it, it absolutely will come out in the content we have. You know, I mean, I don't know how many tens of thousands of pieces of sponsored content we've been responsible for. I can tell you, you can tell the ones where people weren't having fun, where they don't enjoy it and where they don't believe what they're saying. We tell brands don't spend good money on fake love.
It's because what convinces people is passion and it's belief and honesty. If you don't like a product, if you don't use that product and you're shilling it and trying to sell it to your audience, it's just not going to work. So it's probably best to not do it. You know, if you're shooting something and you're really not feeling it and you're not excited about it, it's probably best to try of reset and try and like come up with a new concept or something that you can enjoy because that is such a pivotal part of what makes these things work.
So I hope everybody has a bounty full and fun and lucrative holiday season. And here's to hoping American consumers take out their credit cards and spend a shitload of money in the next six weeks. We can kick off 2023 on a high note.
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Cheers, and thanks for watching.
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