By Lauren Newman, Chief Revenue Officer, Button
The 2025 holiday season is going to be an interesting one, shaped by broader macroeconomic conditions, politics, and prices. Regardless of what the news is telling you, creators and influencers are going to be the driving force for brands, though maybe not in the way you think. You need to ensure that you are giving them sufficient attention to make them effective.
Anyone can tell you that creators are important. If you do a quick Google search, you’ll see why. According to various online sources, you will see that 9 out of 10 users say social platforms influence their gift-giving decisions, with 58% planning to buy products recommended by influencers and creators on Black Friday and Cyber Monday (source: LinkedIn).
In fact, you may consider creators to now be as important as search engines for driving new product sales. They may be even more important and could supplant search engines as the primary driver of commerce.
The Creator To Mobile Journey Is The Most Important
Influencers have a disproportionate impact on mobile, and mobile is estimated to comprise around 59-65% of all online retail sales in 2025 (source: Microsoft CoPilot). Social media, and specifically the influencers who drive social media engagement, are the primary drivers of gift ideas and gift giving this holiday season, and their influence is only going to continue to grow. As search declines, especially in mobile, creators rise in importance. You can quickly see where that nets out; creators in mobile are more dominant at influencing sales.
With that knowledge, you need to be sure you’re optimizing the entire experience and journey from creators to your brand.
Creator commerce is driven by affiliates, and affiliate links can be challenging when they jump across platforms. You need to know where that creator content is pointing to, and you need to harness that click to get the user from recommendation to purchase as quickly as possible. If you can identify the journey, control the content and reduce the steps, you drive higher conversions. This is experience optimization.
Let’s Chat Creator Experience Optimization
Creator Experience Optimization is something most retailers have never thought about during the holiday season because they are focused on traditional volume. Volume is a blunt instrument. Your success lies in being more focused and more granular with each user, and especially those users who come through a creator-driven journey. Creators drive extremely motivated, loyal, and highly conversion-focused customers. You need to be certain to get that customer from the creator recommendation into a stocked cart and a conversion as quickly as possible. Not only that, but you need to harness that customer and turn them into the same level of loyalty for your brand as they have for that creator.
To make that happen, you need to convert them quickly and then start catering to them. Bring them into your own experience, which is your website or your app, and do so understanding the source. Speak to them differently. Reference the fact that they came from a creator, and leverage that knowledge to help drive them to become a loyal customer for your brand. Understand the details of that customer, where they are, who they are, and what they were doing (or watching) before they came to you. You want to create a longer-term relationship and that information can help because it personalizes the experience even more to them.
Give the user the quickest route to purchase, but also follow up with them and become a trusted partner. Give them additional recommendations. Improve their experience. Give them specials, but try to do so without overwhelming them. You need to find the right balance of engaging and giving them space. This is all part of the experience you optimize for them. Too many retailers simply inundate each user with emails and notifications and offers with no regard for what drive them there in the first place. That treats everyone the same, and that creates wasted engagement. If creators are driving better customers, why not keep referencing them in that way. They pummel them daily, and that turns off the user. That is a negative experience. You want to optimise the experience and the best way to do that is to know more about them and use that information logically, rather than like a blunt instrument.
Why This Matters
Your relationship goes beyond simply selling them a product. You want them to buy from you multiple times. You want to increase cart size. The more you know, and the more you optimize each engagement, the more likely you are to create a higher lifetime value from that consumer. That is an optimized experience. Taking it that extra step and focusing on the creator who drove them to you, and catering that experience as if the user is part of a special community or group, can go a very long way to making them as loyal to you as they are to the creator.
