6 Ideas to Boost BFCM Sales with Influencer Marketing

Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are huge for DTC brands, and influencer marketing. It’s when shoppers are ready to buy and influencer can significantly boost your sales during this period.

If you've been working with influencers who've delivered results, now is the ideal time to discuss creating custom content for your BFCM campaigns. New to influencer marketing? Don't worry – you still have time to start building relationships, running initial campaigns, and securing influencers for your BFCM promotions.

This guide will show you 6 actionable ways to use influencer marketing to increase your BFCM sales.

1— Reach out to your current influencer network

BFCM is a hectic time for everyone. Don't wait till the last minute to tell your influencers about your Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) plans.

Why communicate ahead of BFCM

Communicating your plans helps both you and your influencers avoid stress and rushed decisions. It gives influencers a heads-up allowing them to plan their content creation and fit your brand into a busy BFCM schedule. Early communication also shows you respect their time and see them as important partners in your campaign.

When should you reach out

Reach out 2-3 months before the holiday rush kicks in. Tell them your brand will offer special discounts during this time and ask if they want to be part of it. Influencers get many offers during BFCM. By reaching out first, you're more likely to secure their participation. You don't want them to partner with your competitors instead.

You don't need all the details ready when you first reach out. Just let them know you're working on BFCM plans and want them involved. This open communication builds trust and sets the stage for a successful campaign.

Find your ideal influencers

If you're looking for influencers, you can easily find them via SARAL. Our platform allows you to search through a vast database of over 200 million creators, helping you find the perfect match for your brand and BFCM goals. You can narrow down your search based on specific criteria such as niche, audience demographics, engagement rates, and location.

The popular collagen brand, Obvi uses SARAL for finding and collaborating with influencers. Here's what their co-founder said about using SARAL —

Claim your free trial of SARAL and find your perfect influencers in a few minutes.

2— Send products in holiday-themed boxes for unboxing content

During BFCM, shoppers are on the lookout for presents for friends, family, and colleagues. If  influencer can showcase how your product or bundle would make an awesome gift, you're tapping into a huge market.

There are 3 things you'll need to take care of here:

Designing Attractive BFCM Packaging

Your goal is to make your package the one that influencers can't wait to open and share. By putting in this extra effort, you're giving them great content material.

Curating Special Holiday Bundles

Don't just send a single product. Think about how your products naturally group. If you sell bodycare, put together a winter pampering set with hand soap, body wash, and moisturizer. For a coffee brand, you might bundle a special holiday blend with a festive mug and some gourmet cookies.

Timing Your Product Shipments for Maximum Impact

Send influencers your freshest products or specially curated holiday stock for BFCM. Fresh products look better on camera, creating more appealing content. Plus, holiday-specific items or new releases creates extra excitement, giving influencers something unique to talk about when everyone's fighting for attention.

Here's an example of Poppi, the soda brand, sending a wow-worthy package to its influencers —

Wild, the perfume brand also does a good job of packaging its products in a way that motivated influencers to to show it to their audience —

Ensure your products reach influencers well before BFCM to give them ample time to create and post their unboxing content. This might mean starting your production and shipping processes earlier than usual.

3— Organize influencer challenges to boost motivation

When there's a contest or a prize to win, people tend to put in extra effort. The same goes for influencers. By offering rewards for top performers or hitting certain goals, you're giving them a reason to talk about your brand more often and more enthusiastically during BFCM.

Here are some influencer challenge ideas:

Sales threshold bonus

Offer a $500 bonus to any influencer who generates 20 orders during BFCM. This gives everyone a clear, achievable target to aim for.

Top performer gift

Award the influencer with the highest total sales value a luxury experience, like a weekend getaway. This encourages influencers to not just focus on order numbers, but also on promoting higher-value items.

Creative content contest

Run a competition for the most creative or engaging BFCM-related content. The winner gets an exclusive product bundle or a feature on your brand's main social media accounts.

Tiered commission structure

Set up increasing commission rates for different sales milestones. For example, 10% commission for the first 10 sales, 15% for sales 11-20, and 20% for any sales beyond that.

Here's an example of a tiered reward system from Obvi. They use it throughout the year, and not just during the BFCM —

Flash challenges

Announce surprise mini-challenges during BFCM. For example, the first influencer to make five sales in the next hour gets a bonus. This keeps influencers on their toes and actively promoting throughout the BFCM period.

Remember to make the rules clear, the goals achievable, and the rewards worthwhile. You want your influencers to feel that putting in extra effort during BFCM is genuinely rewarding, not just another obligation.

4— Give specific guidelines for BFCM-related content

During BFCM, your products might not change, but the way you want influencers to promote them should. It should focus on the sale, talk about discounts, and give people a compelling reason to act 'now.' Creating specific guidelines for this period is crucial to ensure your influencers are aligned with your BFCM strategy.

Key Elements of BFCM Content Guidelines

Provide a creative guideline document that helps influencers create content that drives sales without stifling their creativity. Your BFCM guidelines should focus on the unique aspects of holiday shopping: the deals, the urgency, and the gift-giving angle.

In your guideline document, you can include:

• Specific posting dates and times
• Required content formats (e.g., Stories, Reels, feed posts)
• Key messaging points about your BFCM deals
• Pre-designed graphics or templates
• Instructions for including tracking links or discount codes

Real-world example: HexClad's Detailed BFCM Brief

For example, HexClad created a detailed brief for their influencers that shows how to effectively guide content creation for BFCM. The brief specified exactly when influencers should post: one Instagram Story a week before Black Friday (November 14), and another during the peak shopping days of November 24-27. The brand also specified the format: both stories should be a minimum of 2 frames each.

Real-world example: Outway's BFCM Assets

Outway created a library of ready-to-use social media content for their affiliates. This approach has several benefits:

1. It maintains brand consistency across all influencer posts, which is crucial for brand recognition and trust.
2. It makes life easier for influencers, encouraging them to post more frequently and with higher quality content.

Both these examples show how providing clear, detailed guidelines and resources can set your influencers up for success during BFCM, ultimately driving more sales for your brand.

5— Use influencer-generated content in cart abandonment ads or emails

During BFCM, shoppers are overwhelmed with choices and deals. This is where influencer-generated content can make a real difference in your cart abandonment strategy. When a customer leaves items in their cart, they're showing interest but hesitating. Influencer content can provide social proof, which can be the final push someone needs to complete the purchase.

What type of influencer-generated content should you create?

Use influencer content to address common objections or hesitations buyers might have that can be used for retargeting ads and cart abandonment emails . For example,

• If people often worry about product quality, have influencers showcase the durability or premium feel of your items.
• If ease of use is a concern, influencers can demonstrate how simple your product is to set up or use.

Give influencers prompts like "What I'm picking up at this BFCM sale" or "Girl math - how much you'll save if you buy now." These angles tap into the BFCM shopping mindset, highlighting deals and creating urgency.

For your cart abandonment emails, include influencer testimonials or short video messages. These could address common concerns or highlight the benefits of your product.

SARAL can help you collect all the influencer generated content, without you having to manually screenshot and track posts. SARAL listens when your influencers post and auto-tracks the content.

You can request for UGC rights right within the platform, download content, and re-purpose it to maximize impact. Try SARAL for free and test it out for yourself.

6— Adjust influencer's discount code for BFCM promotions

If you're running a site-wide 20% off BFCM sale, and your influencers are also offering 20% off, their audience has no incentive to use the influencer's code. This can make influencers feel like their promotion efforts are pointless.

You need to adjust your influencers' discount codes to make them more attractive than your general sale. If the site-wide offer is 20% discount, let influencers give their audience a 25% discount. It incentivizes influencers to promote your brand more actively, as they can offer their audience exclusive value, leading to higher conversion rates.

Preventing Discount Code Leaks with Dynamic Codes

During BFCM, discount code leaks can be a major headache for brands. When influencer-specific codes end up on coupon sites or deal-hunting forums, it leads to unintended discounts, skewed attribution data, and potential overpayment to influencers who didn't actually drive those sales.

To solve this problem, you can use SARAL's Dynamic Discount Codes feature to generate unique, time-restricted coupon codes each time a customer clicks on an affiliate link. This not only protects profit margins but also ensures accurate attribution of sales to the correct marketing channels.

Make sure influencers understand that this increased discount is specifically for the BFCM period and not a permanent change to their agreement. Tell them exactly when their unique discount code becomes active and when it expires. Explain any restrictions, like minimum purchase amounts or excluded products.

Streamlining Your BFCM Influencer Campaigns with SARAL

BFCM gets bigger and more competitive every year. The scrappy methods — manual tracking, spreadsheets, notes or even tools that are not built specifically for DTC brands' influencer marketing — that worked last year might not cut it this time around.

You need tools like SARAL — an all-in-one influencer marketing tool.

Here's what you can do with it:

• Find ideal influencers
• Vet influencers with detailed analytics
• Reach out and follow up with influencers
• Ship and track products sent to influencers
• Create dynamic coupon codes
• Generate affiliate links and track commissions
• Send payments to influencers
• Collect UGC, request rights, and download content
• Calculate ROI for influencers and campaigns
• Create brand ambassador application forms

… and so much more.

By bundling all of these functions into one tool, you can save a whopping 70-80% compared to subscribing to all those individual services.

Try SARAL for free so you can unlock the full potential of your influencer partnerships this BFCM season.