As the holiday season approaches and the Covid-19 pandemic deters consumers from shopping as they normally would, brands are leaning into social selling more than ever. We are watching brands get creative and use shoppable features within social platforms to reach holiday consumers. We wanted to highlight a few of our favorite shoppable options, in hopes that we can spark some ideas for upcoming holiday campaigns for your brand. Below we discuss Instagram Checkout, TikTok’s Shopify integration and Youtube shoppable ads.

Instagram has migrated seamlessly into a commerce platform. Because the most popular content on the platform includes fashion, beauty and lifestyle products promoted by influencers, it’s a natural step for Instagram to offer purchase options for its users. Brands and influencers alike have been utilizing the swipe up feature on Instagram for quite some time now. More recently though, Instagram rolled out a new feature called Checkout. The feature allows users to view a product from a shoppable post and purchase, all within the Instagram app. The feature is now available to all eligible businesses and creators in the U.S and Instagram is waiving its selling fee for the remainder of the year. With the holiday season on the horizon, now is the perfect time for brands to partner with influencers and utilize Checkout. While the feature makes the process easier on the customer, there are also benefits for your brand as well, including:

• Blending Engagement with Conversion
• Moving Followers Across the Funnel
• Listening to Your Customers’ Needs

Warby Parker was one of the early adopters of this feature and have since been using it consistently on their channel – see below for an example.

Influencers have access to this feature as well, opening up a great opportunity for meaningful brand collaborations. Below you can see an example of Kyle Jenner using the feature to promote her brand KylieSkin, however this can be applied to any brand and influencer.

TikTok’s Newest Partnership
Last month, Shopify announced a partnership with TikTok that will help its one million-plus merchants easily advertise their products on the video-sharing app. The new partnership allows merchants to sell products in the form of shoppable video ads, where TikTok users can click on an ad to buy the product. Brands are using this feature to attract younger consumers in a way that they haven’t been able to in the past. TikTok has been a place where brands are experiencing immense growth and visibility. With this new feature becoming available to brands, the creation of ads on TikTok will become much more streamlined. UGC is driving more ROI than ever before and with the algorithm on TikTok still pushing new content, this is the right time to advertise on the platform. With the holidays just around the corner this is the perfect opportunity to do an influencer campaign and then use the supplemental UGC to create meaningful ads. Recently, E.L.F Cosmetics activated their first TikTok campaign, the #eyeslipsface challenge. The influencers E.L.F initially chose to start out the trend, had so much influence that it created a spiral effect, consequently having creators around the world create their own version of the TikTok, making it the most- ever user generated videos in a TikTok brand campaign. This is a perfect example of UGC that the brand can now utilize to create shopable ads on the platform. Check out some of the UGC this campaign generated below.

Shoppable Options on Youtube

YouTube is rumored to become the next website to introduce a shoppable feature for use on the platform. The feature is in the testing phases, so as we wait for it to be rolled out worldwide – let’s talk about ads. In June, we saw the introduction of an advertising format for YouTube that lets retailers turn their video ads into shoppable experiences. The direct response format has a “shop now” button which adds browsable product images underneath the ad to drive traffic directly to brands’ product pages as well as the ability to buy instantly from a retailer’s website. This aspect of Youtube ads is now reaching more consumers than ever before and we are seeing brands taking full advantage of this. In addition, brands can utilize influencers to create UGC (user generated content) for use in ads. Due to pandemic restrictions, it is much harder for brands to go out with a full production team and create an ad. To rectify this, brands are creating ads using UGC, which according to Social Media Today is 5x more likely to convert customers than non- UGC. State Farm recently utilized UGC for their ad placements on BuzzFeed’s Worth It series. Using the three hosts and a popular segment of the show, they created an engaging ad at the beginning of the video promoting State Farms low prices. The ad felt almost like a part of the video and easily engaged those who know and love the show. While this particular ad didn’t utilize the “shop now” feature that would have been a perfect addition to drive more traffic to their site. This process can easily be applied to any brand and influencer UGC collaboration.

The holidays are just around the corner, so now is the time to get going on a holiday campaign. If you want to explore any of the ideas discussed above or are interested in discussing the types of holiday influencer campaigns we are able to create for you reach out to us at parter@sostandard.com