Influencer marketing allows your brand to work alongside a trusted community leader, paving the way for more engaged followers and greater credibility for your brand. With a large number of reopenings occurring through the summer, influencer marketing is slated to work alongside experiential marketing, creating a confluence of awesome possibilities for brands.

How do you create an advanced influencer campaign tailored to the summertime? Start with these tips.

Find the Right Influencers for Summer

What elements make an influencer partnership season-specific? Start with individuals living in your hemisphere, of course, so your seasons are synced. On this note, you can also target influencers close to home with location-specific influencer discovery tools. This is helpful for brands with in-person retail locations or selling area-specific products. Using an influencer marketing tool like Pixlee’s CRM is a great way to narrow down influencers in your niche by location.

Once you have your eye on a few influencers you’re interested in working with, check out how they’ve spent their past summers. If you’re marketing an outdoor activities brand like Yakima Racks, focus on social users who love adventuring out in the world. Yakima’s RackPack ambassador program features photographers, professional athletes, and outdoor fanatics to create an authentic influencer-brand fit.

Rackpack member Brock Keen spends his summers car camping and road tripping, showing off how he uses Yakima’s versatile car racks.

Reach out to influencers via DMs or their preferred contact method, and make sure their values align with your brand’s. The most successful influencer partnerships are those that value the creativity and expertise of the influencer, so begin designing your campaign with their online personality and style in mind.

Designing a Summer-Specific Influencer Campaign

Summer looks different for every consumer, so it’s crucial to be familiar with your online community and target audience when starting to build a campaign. Take cues from how your potential customers spend their summers, what events they’re interested in, and what unique angle your brand can take to stand out from competitors during the season.

Celebrate Pride with Diverse Influencers

Pride festivities celebrate the LGBTQ+ community annually, throughout the month of June. Many brands use Pride month as a time to celebrate their LGBTQ+ community members, often launching influencer partnerships to raise awareness, contributing to related charities and nonprofit organizations, or designing Pride-themed products with a charitable angle in mind.

Makeup brand Morphe collaborates with Broadway star Todrick Hall to promote its 2021 Pride Month makeup palettes, “Live with Love,” and shares the brand’s commitment to supporting the LGBTQ+ community by donating to The Trevor Project.

Showcase Diverse Summer Looks

For apparel and makeup brands especially, showcasing influencers from diverse backgrounds and with different skin tones and body types is a great way to show off unique summer looks to inspire social users

.Swimwear brand Jolyn gives its shoppers and social followers a chance to see how their suits look on a diverse group of influencers. Reflecting more variation in the brand’s summer looks allows consumers to identify with the influencers they relate to most.

With vacations and changes in the weather comes more motivation to try out new summer trends — remember that summer everyone was dying their hair with Kool-Aid in 2012? Or the summer Euphoria-themed makeup was all the talk? Consumers’ excitement to change up their look in the new season is an opportunity for your influencers to inspire them, like this influencer for lash brand Xtreme Lashes does with a colorful eye look.

Inspire Summer Vacations with Influencers

Summer is the official vacation season, but you don’t have to be a swimsuit or sunglasses brand to benefit from using influencers to create buzz about traveling. Work with an influencer to showcase vacation inspiration with your product or service to generate excitement within your customer base.

Delta shares picturesque images from travel influencers, garnering comments from enthused fans looking forward to their next trips.

Take advantage of influencer marketing in the summertime by striking up a relationship with individuals who not only share your brand’s values but are enthusiastic about sharing what you have to offer during the summer.

‍Emily Andrews is the marketing communications specialist at RecordsFinder, an online public records search company. Communications specialist by day and community volunteer at night, she believes in compassion and defending the defenseless.