Seemingly as soon as the Thanksgiving leftovers are put away, consumers rush to retailers online and off to get a start on their holiday shopping—at least in the US. But late November ushers in the biggest shopping season throughout the Western world, influenced by global digital retailers who have set a new pace by creeping the holiday calendar earlier and earlier. Still, it’s not too late to develop a relevant holiday campaign to reach consumers.

But don’t fear—it’s also the season of miracles, and brands still have time to get into the holiday spirit with influencers. Whether you need to quickly implement a campaign from concept to market or simply want to add a dash of spice to one that’s already in the works, there are still ways to cut through the blizzard of information overload in the cluttered holiday season with the aid of influencer partnerships.

They’re Agile & Up-to-Date

One of the biggest benefits that influencers bring to the table in a holiday campaign is that they are agile by nature; well-versed in what resonates with their audiences, influencers have strong, authentic and creative voices—and can deliver in short time. In fact, partnering with a handful of influencers is a great way to co-develop a robust collection of content needed to keep your brand at top of mind in the lead-up to the holidays.

But in addition to providing scale, the flexibility that influencers bring to the table can also give your brand an edge against holiday-season competition. Shoppers have a rising interest in searching for the most up-to-date recommendations: Google highlights that “Best” and “right now” searches have grown 125% over the past couple years. Influencers have the speed and agility to weigh in on the most current trends or topics that their audiences care about, engaging them with an authoritative voice that consumers trust.

They’re Authentic—If You Let Them Be

As they begin working with influencers, many brands become concerned that they must relinquish some control of the message to someone else. Trust is key to safeguarding campaigns from getting muddled in rework and repeated review cycles—and is key to ensuring the deliverables are made on-time in the short and competitive holiday season. Realizing this, we’re ardent supporters of the idea that influencers are their most authentic when they have creative freedom in developing their content in partnership with brands.

This is the approach we used in an influencer campaign for a major UK insurer. The brand wants to raise awareness amongst Millennial and Gen-Z audiences, because some of the products and guidance they offer—such as cybersecurity and travel—are highly relevant for these audiences.

“The challenge for this brand is that they have a super strong cyber offering for consumers but mental availability in the category and for the brand themselves is low among Millennials and Gen-Z,” says Alistair Vines, Business Lead at MediaMonks.

For the campaign, influencers were briefed on the desired content, which was planned out in a quick creative phase. Overall, influencers were able to create authentic content (within some guidelines) because they bought into and endorsed the message from the brand.

The result is a coherent campaign that tackles several cybersecurity issues, delivered in a way that relates to the target consumer groups (one piece of content generated over 4,000 likes in just two days). And because the influencers produced their own content, the whole campaign was developed from brief to launch in just five weeks.

They Offer Intimacy

In addition to expanding reach, partnering with influencers can also help tailor your brand to emergent search and shopping behaviors. According to holiday insights from Facebook, mobile shoppers are 1.85 times more likely to seek gift inspiration through Instagram. When focused on millennials alone, that number jumps even higher: they’re 3.19 times more likely to. The findings show how social media is increasingly important to consumers as they research purchases.

Google also presents interesting insight on digital shoppers’ search behavior. “People indicated they are more than 2X as likely to add items to their basket and 40% more likely to spend more than planned when they identify the shopping experience as highly personalized,” they note. When brands hear “personalization,” they might think about recommendation engines and highly targeted creative—essential components of any campaign, ecommerce platform or overall brand experience. But influencers can also accentuate personalization through the intimacy they provide to their audiences, helping online shoppers find the gift inspiration and ideas most relevant to them and their needs.

The statistics mentioned above might inspire practical KPIs that brands can achieve through influencers: gain mindshare, increase awareness and drive new sales. But it’s important to remember that connection is critical to influencer success; the branded content shouldn’t feel disjointed from that which an influencer routinely offers to their audience.

From delivering cross-channel content quickly to injecting intimacy and authenticity, influencers fit several strategies for brands to connect closer to audiences old and new. This can be with a campaign built from scratch, or an added layer on top of an existing one. Either way, influencer partnerships make a great way to build relationships in the season of togetherness.

The FTC recently released a set of guidelines informing influencers of how they should disclose branded content. They range from some of the more obvious points (definitely disclose that you’re being paid to promote something) to more stringent ethical concerns—for example, influencers can’t talk about an experience with a product you haven’t tried, nor can they praise a product that they don’t think is good.

These guidelines are not only useful to maintain transparency with consumers. In fact, they remind us how brands and influencers can—and should—form more meaningful partnerships that benefit them both. Doing so achieves a truer sense of authenticity, authority and integrity, exactly what a brand seeks to infuse in their story when working with influencers. Here’s how to make that happen.

Adopt a Community-First Mindset

The surest way to build authenticity into an influencer campaign is to center the story around the community you hope to connect with. Consider, for example, how many leading content creators interrupt or introduce their content with a scripted spiel about a product that doesn’t have anything to do with the content itself. For many in the audience, these ad reads might have a “it’s what pays the bills” kind of vibe, rather than a reliable endorsement from the influencer.

While such a tactic might increase reach and awareness, it doesn’t go far enough in creating a meaningful connection with the audience. “A lot of companies think about influencer partnerships like they would a media spend,” says Claudia Cameron, Head of Digital Marketing at IMA, a digital influencer agency that merged with MediaMonks in August. “Get at the heart of what the influencer means for their audience, rather than focusing on getting in front of as many people as possible.”

In an ANA presentation on how brands can retain relevance through influencer partnerships, Hot Wheels Sr. Marketing Director/Head of Brand Marketing Ricardo Briceno discussed the toy brand’s strategic, long-term partnership with vlogger Tanner Fox. As an automotive enthusiast, it was clear how Fox’s content overlapped with the brand’s mission to ignite a challenging spirit in children through cars. “What is the shared value between what Hot Wheels stands for and what the creator stands for?” Briceno asked rhetorically, demonstrating key questions that brands should consider in forming their approach to partnership.

Allow Creative Control for Added Authenticity

Defining this shared value and goals does more than ensure a brand’s goals and influencer’s audiences are aligned. It can also help build confidence and comfort in giving the influencer freedom to create content how they choose. Cameron advises that brands provide influencers this flexibility.

This enables the brand to achieve authenticity and relevance by building the story around the influencer’s audience. “Set the campaign to fit the feed, rather than the other way around,” Cameron says. “You can give influencers parameters in how you want to position the brand, allowing them to connect strategically with the audience.”

And no niche is too small or obscure to make a meaningful connection. In promoting its new navigation device, electronics company TomTom faced a challenge: how could they reach an audience of truck drivers, who are notoriously hard to reach with so much time spent on the road? Inspired by the insight that truckers combat loneliness through social media connection, IMA tapped into an online community of drivers and discovered 18 of its most influential users, paving the path for TomTom to engage with the community in a genuine way. It shows how the value of influencers extends beyond the glossy image that the term “influencer” commonly conjures up—and that even those without big followings can earn big user engagement.

Build Lasting Relationships and Trust

Brands can do more than give up some creative control to maintain authenticity. Cameron suggests they achieve a higher quality relationship with influencers by moving away from short-term campaigns and cultivating longer-term partnerships instead—at least six months at minimum. “You need an understanding of how the influencer talks with their audience, then apply that with your strategy,” says Cameron. “When connecting with niche audiences, this becomes very specific.” Nurturing a longer-term relationship helps build that understanding.

This also helps influencers feel more involved with the brand. “If you’re a makeup brand and there’s a new release, make sure your influencer gets it before anyone else,” says Cameron. She notes that gifting products alone is no longer an effective strategy for building social buzz, though brands can build involvement by offering influencers—and their communities—with an exclusive experience.

Keep Up with Evolving, Cross-Border Guidelines

Regardless of how deep your relationship is with an influencer, it’s important to keep abreast of regulations and guidelines like those recently released by the FTC. But this offers a challenge to global brands: each market has different rules to follow. A global partner like IMA can help brands and influencers alike ensure their message is within local guidelines while maintaining a global brand standard.

Cameron also notes that disclosure is quickly getting better on social platforms like Instagram, which offers a paid partnership tag that clearly labels branded content. Far from harmful to branded content’s effectiveness—“We don’t see any negative ramifications yet,” says Cameron—the tag offers greater visibility for the brand by highlighting its role in creation of the content.

With greater visibility for the brand, added authority for the influencer and transparency toward the user, it’s easy to see how improved disclosure offers a net positive for everyone and builds stronger relationships. And that’s what influencer marketing is about: forging a meaningful connection and offering real, relevant value to the audience.

With brands speaking directly to audiences in the same channels where they socialize with friends, the pressure is on for brands to speak more transparently and authentically to their audiences. But while “be authentic” sounds like it should be the easiest advice to take to heart, it’s anything but—especially for brands wading into a new market or showcasing a product without high market awareness.

The good news is that authentic messaging typically boils down to providing an honest portrayal of what consumers should expect from your brand, products or services. A Forrester report on customer experience highlights the importance of keeping your promises with what it calls the customer experience (CX) vision: “The CX vision should be an honest representation of the promises that a company makes through its brand image and messaging,” in terms of its values or its role in people’s lives.

A trendy solution for brands seeking a more authentic relationship with consumers is to forge partnerships with influencers: influencers showcase their relationship with the brand and its products, thereby providing an authentic CX vision to their audience who’s often heavily engaged on digital channels. While this method is effective, it may leave brands feeling wary about entrusting others with their brand image.

Ensure CX Vision is Accurate with Production Guidelines

L’Oreal faced a unique challenge when it sought to integrate influencers into its omnichannel campaign celebrating the launch of its Unbelieva’brow line of makeup in Italy. With no substantial eyebrow market in the region, the team used this white space to their advantage by focusing on regular, everyday interactions between consumers and the product.  While the overall campaign leveraged L’Oreal’s international reputation, the inclusion of influencers helped localize the content across the Italian market and provide viewers with a way to relate to the brand.

The four influencers—who each portrayed a different lifestyle like beauty guru, fitness expert or travel enthusiast—were given creative control over the scenes they would shoot themselves. Because portraying the eyebrow makeup was key, there were a lot of ways this could go wrong, like using improper lighting or putting the brows out of focus. That’s why we implemented a series of specific guidelines to ensure deliverables would remain authentic yet fit seamlessly into the overall campaign.

Guidelines were both general (stick to a neutral color palette to match the international campaign assets) and specific (shoot on an iPhone X to maintain the look and feel of a social media video, avoid artificial light which makes the makeup hard to distinguish). Content-wise, the influencers had relatively free rein outside of needing to shoot a horizontal and vertical video demonstrating each of the product “proofs”: that it’s waterproof, smudge-proof, transfer-proof and workout-proof.

From there, we were able to put on the finishing touches to optimize each deliverable for each channel, offering different glimpses of an overall narrative. “It was like a reverse-project,” says Willemijn Jongbloed, Project Manager at MediaMonks Amsterdam. “Usually you get the assets first and do the design after, but this time we produced while we were still getting the footage. Creative was never ‘done,’ it was a very intertwined process.”

Because of the guidelines in place, the influencer-produced work could be implemented with little rework and fast turnaround time. “It would have felt staged to ask them to reshoot,” says Madina Paulig, Creative at MediaMonks Amsterdam, “so we just focused on minor tweaking to keep that authentic feel.” The process, which required smart coordination between designers and editors, resulted in a relateable and eyebrow-raising campaign that clearly focused on the product value.

Provide Controlled Flexibility with Content Frameworks

The Unbelieva’brow campaign used an unorthodox approach, but it worked: “In order to get the full concept across in a manner that speaks best to our audience, we gave our influencers the freedom to communicate this in their own, authentic way using their personalities to resonate with our audience,” says Paulig. This is the crux of what organizations must tussle with in the social-infused, influencer-dominated environment that’s transforming the customer-brand relationship.

While the process outlined above worked well for a single campaign, a longer-term need for assets likewise requires a new creative framework. Inspired by the rise of direct-to-consumer brands’ leveraging of social, Avon (the direct-sale business) saw a need to empower its representatives to tweak and optimize digital content while safeguarding a consistent brand image and style.

“What we’ve got on the other hand is the advantage of 133 years of history and more than five million people’s worth of scale and therefore we’re trying to learn to move at the same kind of pace as those insurgent companies, while recognizing we’re a very scaled business,” James Thomspon, Chief Brand and Beauty Officer at Avon, told Marketing Week.

Partnering with Avon, we’re working with them to develop an always-on content studio that will deliver feed-ready assets on a weekly basis, amounting to over 12,000 a year. With the need for localized content at front-of-mind, deliverables will be available in multiple languages and tailored for specific channels, with space available for reps to customize the messaging to their local audience. This last point is key for ensuring that representatives can engage with their audiences authentically while maintaining a centralized design process.

Leveraging an online community of representatives or hiring influencers are just two ways to enhance marketing with authenticity. By rethinking creative and production processes, brands can safeguard themselves while placing greater trust in influencers and partners to accurately represent their CX vision to consumers. A well-defined process ensures that everyone involved can have fun with the freedom to express the brand’s relevance in their lives—and what more authentic message is there than that?