So it’s September. BFCM is less than 90 days away.

And your plan is rock solid, right?

……right?

Okay, so you have no plan. You have no influencers booked. You have not even begun conceptualizing a campaign yet.

You just got the orders from higher up to start planning BFCM, but your brain is still on Back to School or summer campaigns.

Okay, breathe. That ball in your stomach is temporary. Instead, I’m going to give you a solid 13-week Black Friday plan that you can start right now to reduce some of that Black Friday chaos tax.

Here’s what you need to do:

Day Zero: Set up a minimum viable plan

Your first priority right now is to create the absolute minimum plan that you can feasibly stick to for the next few months.

First, what are your targets? Based on performance throughout the year:

• Historically, how much reach have you needed to reach sales targets?
• What kinds of collaborations/influencers get you the best ROI?
• Who are your most reliable creators?

If you invest time into your plan right now, you won’t have to second-guess your strategy later. This will also help you adjust down the line if you need to.

Day 1-3: Shortlist creators

First, contact the creators you already know and have worked with. First, these are people with whom you already have a working relationship, so they’ll be the easiest to book if they’re available. Also, you know what kind of performance they had for you in the past. So you’ll know more or less what to expect.

Not to mention, your message will resonate more with an audience that already knows your products and brand. During Black Friday, shoppers will be more likely to check out the brands they already know and love for their discounts, so your best bets fall in communities where they’ve already seen your products at least once.

Next, start searching and shortlisting new influencers. If you have influencers that have worked well for you in the past, you can try finding lookalikes. There are a few ways you can do this:

• Using influencer search software with a lookalike function: This will be the fastest way to find influencers similar to those you’ve already worked with.
• Scope out the comments under your favorite influencers’ posts (especially your sponsored posts): Look for people with similar followings, or sizeable communities from there. They might also be influencers, and with similar communities, it’s a better bet for you.
• Check who follows the influencer/who the influencer follows: Very often, those with similar communities, niches, and content styles tend to follow each other. There are probably gems waiting to be discovered!

At the end of each day, do a round of outreach to your favorites, but right now,  you’re mainly focused on finding influencers.

Day 4-10: Outreach, Follow-ups, and more Searching

Now, focus on replying, following up on your favorites, and continue searching.

You’ll want to shortlist more influencers than you actually need. And if, historically, you have an idea of how many creators actually get back to you, and how many you end up closing,  you’ll have a good idea of how many to reach out to.

For example, say historically, you get a 30% response rate, and of those that respond, you usually close half of them. If you know that you need 40 influencers to reach your BFCM goals, you’ll need to shortlist and outreach about 260 or more creators.

For the busy holiday season,  you’ll probably need to increase that by another 50%.

Okay, so now you need to outreach 390 qualified, vetted brand-fit influencers in a week.

Breathe.

Dedicate a few hours at the end of each day to getting it done, and break it into chunks. If you’re not working alone, distribute the work across your team so you can manage it all.

Be smart about your time and resources. You can absolutely reach out to the biggest influencers you find, but just be aware that they’re likely already booked, or their prices have risen dramatically. Nearly all of the marketers we polled said they’d missed out on booking an influencer for BCFM, and most of the time, it was due to budget.

It’s also a good idea to take your best outreach emails and template them so you can personalize each outreach message quickly. You don’t have time to waste, but at the same time, you don’t want an influencer to feel like a number. Templating your outreach with light personalization is a good compromise between the two.

Pro tip: Ask your best influencers for recommendations. Influencers are incredibly plugged in. If you have a great relationship with an influencer who’s unavailable, ask them if they have recommendations. They might just be able to do an intro for you!

Week 3 & 4: Continue with follow-ups & begin negotiation

By this point, hopefully you’ve got some bites and can start negotiating collaborations with your influencers. You probably don’t have your full list yet, so you’ll also be searching, outreach, and following up with those who haven’t gotten back to you yet.

But, for those who have come back, you’ll want to start the back-and-forth negotiations and start ironing out the details. Again, you’ll want to work quickly, because even during negotiations, influencers can be snapped up, placed under exclusivity, or otherwise collaborations can just fall apart.

So go back to your plan from Day Zero: what kind of collaborations are you going to need? What kinds of price points will make sense for your campaigns? Start from there and start filling up the slots you’ll need.

Pro tips for contracting quickly: 

• Template portions of your contract so you can move quickly and adjust what needs to be changed over the course of negotiations.
• Create contract templates for the different types of collaborations you’ll need. You don’t need to be exhaustive, but having a set template to work from will make this easier.
• Be sure you have legal looking over contracts before you send them out. You’ll want them to be airtight in case things go wrong.
• If you’re negotiating, especially with a new influencer, hop on the phone. It’ll go a lot quicker for you, and you’ll be able to smooth out any wrinkles that you’d otherwise encounter via email.

Pro tip: 63% of marketers from our Black Friday survey said that influencer content performed significantly better than other kinds of content.

If you can, try to negotiate for usage rights. If you can’t get as many influencers as you like, being able to repurpose content for other channels (ads, your product pages, emails, etc.) might just be a lifesaver.

And again, keep searching, outreaching, and following up with other influencers, even if you’re already negotiating with others. Things can always fall through, and you’ll want a second string in place just in case. If you’re finding that your outreach messages aren’t getting the responses you want, now is the time to tweak them.

Week 5 & 6: Briefing

By this point, you should have a working list of influencers you’ll be working with throughout the holiday season.

So now it’s time to get your briefs out to influencers.

For your briefs, again, you’ll want to work quickly. If you have certain kinds of collaborations running, perhaps create a brief template for each kind of collaboration. If they’re too different, consider a holiday campaign brief template for just your brand information.

Inside, include things like:

• Brand information and key talking points
• Holiday messaging (including the discounts you’ll be running if applicable)
• Common customer pain points that your product solves, or ways that you’re different from the competition
• Key information like brand disclosures, hashtags, etc, that are must-haves for the posts

You might have to customize the content creation section per influencer. But for affiliates or creators you’re giving a lot of freedom to, you can at least template the brand messaging part of the brief to save time and resources.

Note: if you’re sending products out to your influencers, now is the time to get those sent out. As we draw closer to the holidays, shipping times, delays, etc., will be a monkey wrench in your schedule. You’ll want to get these products out ASAP to avoid the rush.

Weeks 7-10: Content approvals, schedules, & contingency plans

By now, you’ve probably got your negotiations worked out (or well on their way). Briefs and products are sent out, and you’ve got a loose schedule worked out. Now, the fun stuff.

Content Approvals:

This is the time you build in for content approvals. Be clear with your influencers about when approvals should be happening, in what format, etc. Create clear guidelines, not only for your influencers but also for your internal team, around what gets approved and what doesn’t.

The last thing you want heading into Black Friday is an irritated influencer having to reshoot the content for the fifth time because your team wasn’t clear on what they wanted.

On top of that, now you should have a clearer view of exactly who will be posting what, and you can start to slot posts into your schedule.

Important note: Plan space for delays, hiccups, and missed deadlines. We all want to believe that things are going to go exactly as we planned. That’s just not realistic when you have a lot of variables at play.

Getting a B-squad in place:

We’re working from a minimum viability plan. But it would be a good idea to have some reliable backup influencers on standby in case there are last-minute issues. These would maybe be those you worked with in the past who maybe weren’t your top top performers, but who did reasonably well.

If you didn’t have to recruit them for your main campaign, it’s a good idea to have them as back-ups in case things go wrong at the last minute. One anonymous marketer from our recent BFCM survey said that a back-up last-minute influencer helped them save the day.

“I remembered when a major influencer collaboration fell through at the last minute due to a miscommunication about the content requirements. We had to scramble to find a last-minute replacement, but fortunately, our backup plan worked out, and the campaign still performed well. It was a stressful moment for us.”

If you have a second-string already in place, this is going to take a lot of the stress off of you.

This won’t work for everyone, because it's budget-, timing-, and recruitment-dependent. But if you have the space to recruit a few backups, it’s a good idea to do so.

Weeks 11-13: Content goes live

Now, while I’d love to tell you the hard part is over and you can sit back and relax, I’m sorry.

There’s no rest for the wicked. Or anyone working in ecommerce during BFCM.

But if your plan is solid, at this point, you’ll just be tracking and keeping up with your go-live schedule, checking in with influencers for any last-minute changes and tweaks, and reporting to other stakeholders.

Keep a checklist handy for quickly going through posted content for things like:

• Key talking points (if applicable)
• Discount amounts and codes
• Tracking links used (for Stories, bios, etc.)
• Ad disclosures
• And anything else that’s a must-have for content

This way, if anything’s missing, you can quickly ping an influencer and get the content reposted or edited.

You’ll also want to be on top of your tracking during this time. Keeping up with it all now, scooping up links to content, and downloading content will help you keep everything straight when things get hectic.

Keep in close contact with the people managing logistics for your brand. If a product sells out quickly, you may not need more content to go live around that product for the next few days. This is where your plan-Bs will come in handy.

More pro tips for Black Friday:

A minimum viable plan is just that – and if you end up being able to do more, you can build on it and expand on it.

Secure the resources you need right now: If you have the budget, think about outsourcing smaller tasks, and start weighing the potential of getting influencer software now. The last thing you’ll want to do is onboard new people or your team on new software during the week of Black Friday.

Most of all, you don’t have to do this alone. Influencer marketing tools like Modash can’t give you back the summer months for your campaigns, but they can shave hours off of each part of your campaign management process.

• Finding creators (and lookalikes) quickly, with their data at your fingertips – so no more messy back and forth for previously sponsored performance metrics
• Shortlist creators and add them to lists for quick outreach. Get in touch with creators easily by integrating your inbox and managing conversations team-wide. (Plus, template your best emails and send them in bulk for even easier outreach)
• Track your collaboration pipeline with statuses that make sense so you can see where you are at a glance. Add contracts and briefs, and send them out in one click.
• Capture metrics for all your campaigns – even when the influencer forgets a critical hashtag or tag. No more scrolling Stories at 10 pm on a Saturday night.

And much more. If you’re already behind the ball for BFCM, Modash can help you catch up quickly. The best part is that you can try it free for 14 days – without even getting out your credit card!