The holiday season is here – which for many of your advocates means that it’s time to party, plan, shop, and celebrate. With all the hustle and bustle, it’s easy for non-critical tasks and obligations to fall to the wayside until January. Don’t let your advocates “Grinch out” on your advocacy marketing efforts over the holidays. Keep them engaged and excited to be a brand advocate with these holiday-themed advocacy marketing program incentives.
Benefits of an Active Holiday-Centric Advocacy Marketing Effort
For many businesses, the Holiday season is the ultimate sales-driving opportunity. Fortunes are made in the weeks between Thanksgiving and New Years. To be successful, your business needs to use every channel available to them, including their advocates!
Advocacy marketing is more than just people talking about you online. It’s a supercharged program that incentivizes what people are already doing online – talking and sharing. A strong advocacy marketing effort can produce a 650% ROI for every dollar invested.
During the holiday season, an advocacy marketing effort can help:
- Build trust across new audiences
- Provide branded touch points for advocates and potential advocates
- Facilitate engagement and sharing of your branded content
- Drives brand awareness and store traffic
- Increase sales
Bottom line, your advocates can be your secret weapon this holiday season, but you need to ensure that you incentivize them to prioritize participating in your program over their other holiday obligations.
The Perfect Holiday-Themed Advocacy Marketing Program Incentives
Have you decided that you’re ready to show your advocates some swag love for the holidays? Here are some of our favorite incentives our clients are using this year.
Cold-Weather Care Package
The days are shorter and the nights longer. Which is the perfect recipe for catching cabin fever. The holidays happen during the first part of winter, and with more cold days to follow, a cold weather care package can be just the thing to warm up those chilly January and February nights!
A cold-weather care package is a small gift mailed to brand advocates, but don’t worry, they are relatively inexpensive to put together, which will allow you to send care packages to multiple advocates for maximum exposure. There are two different type of care packages you can send:
Cold Weather Care Package for Staying In
In this care package, you can include items like
- Fuzzy blanket
- Comfortable socks
- Sweet treats
- Hot cocoa
- DVDs or subscriptions to binge-worthy television show providers
Cold Weather Care Package for Going Out
At some point, we all must brave the cold weather (even when we don’t want to). With this care package, you create a fun reason for your advocates to get out of the house. This care package gets your advocates out of the house and on your dime. In this care package, you can include
- Jackets, scarves, and other warm-weather accessories
- Gift cards to restaurants and movie theaters
- Invitations to private in-store events and shopping experiences
- A winter-weather toy of some sort (sled, snowmobile, etc.)
Make sure that you include a product or service that you offer in the package! Did you know that 67% of consumers are more likely to buy an item or service they see on their social media feeds? Showcasing your product in this bundle is a prime opportunity for getting your best sellers or new products seen by your advocates.
Beach Vacation Destination
The weather outside is frightful and the fire is, well… it’s alright. But what is everyone really dreaming about in those cold, dark winter months? Sunshine, warm sand, and a cool drink with a tiny umbrella.
Winter is long, and for many people, it’s often a source of moodiness and fatigue. Drive high levels of advocate participation by incentivizing your advocates with the dream of getting away from all that blustery weather! Or catch their eye by using images of green water, blue sky, and white sand on your social media during the winter months.
The top warm or tropical travel destinations in 2018 ranged from Barcelona to Maui to Bali (which all sound great to us). But, you don’t have to break the budget on an international trip. You can also keep your customers domestic with sweepstakes for stays at local beaches or even a trip for two on a short cruise.
Regardless of where you choose, sending your advocates on a winter escape is a pretty big deal. So, you want to make sure you’re structuring your incentive in a way that drives maximum ROI! How?
- Promote your best sales-driving content during the program.
- Create and offer unique promotions.
- Share customer experiences and testimonials.
- Encourage your advocates to create user-generated content as part of their entry.
- Award advocates that recruit their friends and family into the program.
While winning an all-expense paid trip is awesome, you want to make sure that your winning advocates understand all the rules that apply. They need to be made clearly aware that they’re responsible for taxes on the prize and for any food, transportation or gratuity that is not explicitly outlined in the incentive.
Pro TIp: Gifting your advocates a major prize like a partial or all-expense paid trip is a big deal. Even the biggest brand names might have trouble keeping track of everything that goes on throughout the contest. Using a platform like SocialToaster can help you manage everything from contest management to awarding prizes.
Home Cleaning Service
During the holidays, it’s hard to decide whose list is longer: Santa’s “Naughty & Nice” list or your own to-do list. Between shopping, cooking, traveling, and holiday parties making time to clean is almost impossible. Incentivize your advocacy marketing efforts by giving your advocates the opportunity to earn the most alluring gift of all, more time!
Gifting a home cleaning service is a gift anyone would be stoked to receive. You don’t need to be in the service industry or even in the home cleaning industry to select this incentive. Once you pick an advocate you can easily find a local cleaning service company. Many sell gift certificates and offer a wide variety of price ranges and services. With the average cleaning service costing between $100 and $175, you can gift this stress-relieving service to several advocates in your program.
Grocery Gift Card
It’s not just gifts that make the holidays so expensive for your advocates. It’s all the food and beverages purchased during the holiday season. Whether they’re bringing an appetizer to someone’s house or cooking an entire meal for their extended family, all those grocery bills add up. In fact, it adds up to be about $123 billion.
Take some of the stress out of your advocate’s meal budget by offering grocery gift cards as your advocacy marketing incentive. Just like a cleaning service, a grocery gift card is a useful incentive that can make a real difference in the lives of your advocates.
Being able to help your advocates feed their friends and family is totally brag and share-worthy. And with the average person having about 400-600 friends, family, and followers online and across multiple platforms, you’ve got the chance to reach a broad range of potential advocates.
Heat Things Up with SocialToaster!
Ready to start 2019 on the right foot? Don’t let the last two months of 2018 slip away. SocialToaster stands ready to make your 2019 marketing dreams come true. Send us an email or call us at 855.62.TOAST to connect with one of our program managers, or schedule a free demo today!
