How to Launch a Father’s Day Influencer Campaign

A Step-By-Step Guide to Your Father’s Day Influencer Marketing Campaign

National Hug Day, National Puppy Day, National Smile Day – there are so many holidays that it seems like we’re celebrating something new every day. But, the old favorites are still around and going strong. And on June 17th of this year, we get the chance to celebrate all things “Dad” for Father’s’ Day 2018.

Holidays are great marketing opportunities waiting to happen, and Father’s’ Day is no exception. You’ll see a wide range of campaigns across social media, many of them featuring famous, celebrity dads. But, if your budget won’t quite stretch to include a cameo by Will Smith or David Beckham, you can always harness the power of the growing army of “daddy bloggers.”

There may be more options available to you than you first thought when it comes to running a super-successful influencer marketing campaign this Father’s Day.

 

 

Finding the Right Collaborators for Your Father’s Day Influencer Marketing Campaign

Like any holiday, Father’s Day has a few products we typically associate with the holiday. Brands that happen to sell ties, golf clubs, and Home Depot gift cards will probably find it easier to market their wares during this time of year. And, it’s these brands that will benefit most from some inventive influencer marketing campaigns.

But, you don’t have to be a father-focused brand to see the benefit of a Father’s Day campaign. Using some creative thinking, the right influencers, and solid strategies, practically any brand can see some amazing results from running a campaign that pays homage to dads everywhere.

So, the answer to the question I posed leading into this section of the post is yes. A Father’s Day  influencer marketing campaign will help your brand if you can personalize it to your needs, goals, and your target audience’s desires.

With any influencer marketing campaign, choosing the right influencers is essential. The influencer you select can literally make or break your campaign.

More than follower count metrics like engagement rates, legitimacy of their followers, post quality, partnership history, products mentioned, product prices, and audience all make huge impacts to their online success. We recently published a piece on what to look for in both micro and macro influencers. Today, we’re just going to focus on choosing your influencer based on niche.

Daddy bloggers

But, I didn’t even know daddy bloggers were a thing, you cry!

You’re probably not alone. The parenting blog world is largely made up of the fairer sex, with an astounding 97% of bloggers in this niche being the typical and the not-so-typical mommy bloggers. But, daddy bloggers are out there, and they’re growing in influence.

The rise in the number of stay-at-home dads has, no doubt, played a key role in the rise of daddy bloggers. The daddy equivalent of sites like Mumsnet have been popping up all over the web as a way for dads to give and take advice from one another, and break the traditional mold of stoic, workaholic dads.

With celebrities like Tom Fletcher from UK band McFly sharing heartwarming videos of himself with his son, and famous dads like David Beckham making front pages with adorable images of him and his children, dads are in the spotlight now more than ever.

Without getting too deep into the sociological side of things (that’s not why we’re here, right?), the way we perceive stay-at-home dads, and the roles of men in general, has changed dramatically over the years. This shift has fueled the fire for daddy bloggers to show up in the blogosphere in droves.

Mommy bloggers

Even though we just sang the praises of daddy bloggers, they’re not always as popular as their female counterparts. So, if you’re looking for a bigger reach, mommy bloggers may make more sense for your Father’s Day campaign.

A mommy blogger can be a real powerhouse for your brand, because most mommy blogs focus on more than parenting. They cover a wide range of topics that will interest their readers – making them perfect for a wide range of brands to utilise for father’s day.

Influencers in other niches

Think of it this way: No father is just a father. Most dads have other interests. They are football fans, outdoorsmen, scholars, crafters, community activists, writers, the list goes on. Father’s Day celebrates the multi-faceted men on the planet who happen to also have children. So, it’s wise to widen your net, so to speak, by thinking beyond fatherhood.

You may want to choose to work with an influencer who is in your brand’s niche, rather than in the parenting niche. A lot of people will be shopping for Father’s Day gifts, whether that means finding funny photos to share with Dad, or even recalling warming stories that tug at the heartstrings. Partner with influencers who can help you craft Father’s Day campaigns that focus on manhood, not necessarily fatherhood.

Choosing Your Audience

An important factor in creating any successful influencer marketing campaign is first determining your target audience. Without a specific audience in mind, your campaign will have no direction, and will most likely fizzle out without any real results.

Since we’re talking about Father’s Day, your audience is obviously going to have some interest in celebrating the holiday. But whether that’s the fathers themselves, those wanting to gift their fathers, or those without fathers of their own – knowing this will determine how you execute your influencer marketing campaign.

Marketing directly to fathers

Marketing directly to fathers is can be a simple as finding ways to bolster their confidence, boost them up, and make them feel appreciated, because sometimes, flattery will get you everywhere. The line between flattery and love gets sort of blurred around the holidays anyway.

Influencers who are fathers can talk about their own fathers, or about the challenges and the wins of being a father in a branded message. This is a good way to link your campaign to the holiday and tug on those heart strings to keep your brand top-of-mind without having to figure out a way to place your product in the shot.

Pitching gifts for fathers

Probably the easiest route to take for most product-based brands is to target people who want to buy gifts for their fathers.

You’ll really need to flex your creative muscles if this is your target audience. Most brands will shoot for this angle, so you need to do something to stand out from the crowd. With people-centric holidays like this, you want to be sure to make your marketing emotional.

You don’t have to make people cry, but giving personality and feeling to your campaign will help attract the right kind of attention. And, the best way to do that? Influencer marketing, of course!

One thing you will need to bear in mind though is that not everyone has a father. Whether they live with a single mom, two moms, grandparents, no parents, or any other kind of family structure – not everyone out there will be celebrating this holiday.

And those that do celebrate may not be celebrating in the traditional manner. If you aim your marketing at this audience, you’ll have to be a little more creative. But, it does mean your market will be less saturated.

 

A Few Ideas for Your Father’s Day Influencer Campaign

Father’s Day is on June 17th this year.  Whether your campaign happens before or on that day depends on what you’re selling. If you’re marketing directly to dads, it’s good to note that 37 percent of dads say they’re okay with getting gift cards and buying their own Father’s Day gifts after the holiday.

Timing

If you’re targeting your Father’s Day influencer marketing campaign at gift givers, then waiting until the big day will ot work in your favor. Many stores and consumer-focused brands will begin to advertise their Father’s Day sales a few weeks before the actual holiday. Using this kind of timescale means your campaign has more time to get visitors into your store.

This strategy works extremely well when paired with some solid email marketing. Sending out reminders for the holiday is a great way to keep your brand’s name at the forefront of people’s minds. This kind of reminder can also be really effective on social media. Get creative with your posts by having staff share memories of their fathers, or talk about what they’re getting their dads as presents.

Generating Content

If you’re not offering up the kind of product that would work as a Father’s Day gift, launching your campaign closer to the actual holiday. To make the most out of this, we have a few top tips to help.

• Use a holiday-specific hashtag. You want to make sure your content gets seen among all the tributes and throwbacks that people post of their own dads. So, you need to make sure you’re using the best hashtags possible. Including the popular #FathersDay hashtag (there are 6.6 million posts using this hashtag) will help to boost your reach. Pairing your hashtag with a brand-specific hashtag will help to further refine your audience.

• Encourage audience participation. People love sharing their happy memories on social media, and days like Father’s Day are the perfect opportunity for them to do so. Ask your followers to share photos, stories and anecdotes using your brand specific hashtag, and keep the conversation flowing throughout the day.

• Work with live video. With all the gifts being opened, this is a perfect chance to make the most out of some live video. Give people a peek behind the curtain with some gift unwrapping, or show them what your team is up to and how they’re making Father’s Day special for all the dads.

• Stand out from the crowd. The best way to market your brand on Father’s Day successfully is to stand out. The more individual your campaign, the more people are going to remember it. So, use this opportunity to try something new and take some risks. You might just see some amazing payoff.

Choosing your platform

Deciding the platform on which to host your Father’s Day campaign is just as important as choosing your influencer. Each platform has a different audience, different content types, and different ways of helping your campaign.

But that doesn’t mean you only have to stick to one platform to have a successful campaign. Cross-platform posting can be a useful strategy, especially if you have a more diverse following. Just respect the platform by modifying posts to align with the culture of each platform.

Instagram

When most brands think of influencer marketing, they think of Instagram or Snapchat. Instagram is a powerhouse of visual content, and the platform where most influencers hang out. You’re more likely to get the best bang for your buck, particularly if you sell fashion, gadgets, or other lifestyle, convenience, or luxury items.

The biggest market here is millennials. According to Sprout Social, 59 percent of adults 18 and 29 years of age use Instagram, and 33 percent of adults 30 to 49 years of age use the platform. So, aiming your campaign at users who will be shopping for gifts for their fathers is a good move. You’ll also need to make sure your influencer has a good handle on creating top-quality visual content.

Facebook

If you’re looking to market directly to fathers, Facebook is probably your best bet. This is where you’re most likely to find dads.

It’s also worth noting that thanks to the recent algorithm change it’s harder than ever for brands on their own to get noticed on this platform. So, if you do decide to employ an influencer marketing campaign here, make sure that your influencer really knows their stuff.

Twitter

Finally, out of the big three platforms, we have Twitter. This platform is not usually harnessed as much as the others when it comes to influencer marketing as the content is quickly lost in people’s feeds, so content doesn’t always get the penetration and engagement as brands would like.

According to the 2018 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, the average influencer post on Twitter gets 0.046 percent engagement, compared to 1.87 percent of Instagram. That’s why we typically seek out influencers who consistently generate engagement from their Instagram followers of around 2 percent.

If you’re going to leverage Twitter as part of your Father’s Day influencer marketing campaign, targeting Gen Xers or Boomers would probably be most effective. Twitter is actually a fantastic supplemental channel to cross-promote campaigns from other social media platforms, as Twitter offers the benefit of being able to post using searchable hashtags AND include live links in posts.

Creating the creative

It goes without saying that you should plan to be smart about targeting your audience (and especially segments of your audience), and be creative when it comes to developing campaigns and content for your Father’s Day campaigns. Unlike Mother’s Day, Father’s Day isn’t as heavily marketed, which provides a fantastic opportunity for the brands that do invest in marketing to stand out.

People don’t want to see ads

The age of the ad is long gone. We talked a bit in this post on marketing to Millennial men about the prevalence of ad blockers among high-income Millennials. Traditional advertising has died a quiet death, and as users get access to better tools to curate and customize the content they want to see, fewer and fewer ads will be shown.

Trust me. You don’t want your post to look like an ad. You want to look like an awesome piece of organic content, posted with care and awesomeness to your influencer’s feed.

Make sure that your influencer marketing campaign keeps things personal if you want it to succeed. Don’t fall into the advertisement trap – keep things original, fun, and individualised.

 

Personal wins every time

Using an influencer to help bolster your marketing efforts around Father’s Day helps to give your campaign a personal touch. Consumers prefer knowing that a product has been recommended by an individual – even if it’s someone they don’t know – over an ad from a brand.  This Father’s Day, crafting a highly personal campaign can do wonders for your brand.

There’s still time left to launch your influencer marketing campaign for Father’s Day. And we can help. We are The Shelf. We do influencer marketing better than anybody else. Find out how we can help you with your next influencer marketing campaign by clicking here.

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