How to win this holiday season with festive marketing: Last-minute guide for marketers
The holiday season is a magical time because of the holiday presents.
But, also, it’s quite hectic when it comes to searching for these gifts.
Customers are pretty serious about spending money this time of year. The National Retail Federation (NRF) forecasts 2021 to have the highest holiday retail sales, amounting to almost $8.5 billion (this is a 10.5% growth in comparison to 2020).
And if you’re a marketer working during the holiday season, you probably have a lot of work to do.
To-do checklists usually help, so let us spare you a couple of minutes this stressful season. Have you…
- Already prepared a festive sale with discounts?
- Decorated your website, banners, and pop-ups using a festive color palette?
- Figured out what social media messages and emails you should send to your customers?
Even if you answered ‘Yes’ to all three of these, that’s still only half the battle. For a magical holiday season, your strategy needs to be thought out.
Here are some powerful holiday marketing ideas that will help you:
Start a holiday giveaway campaign
Customers adore participating in giveaways because they love presents.
Giveaways are fantastic for brands and businesses because they increase sales, provide leads, expand digital presence, and revitalize your community.
What’s better than presents during the holiday season? More presents, of course! One helpful thing to know about giveaways is that you can scale them up to the size of a campaign, and target as many people as possible.
Here are the types of giveaways you can use to engage with your audience through holiday campaigns:
- Giveaway for every purchase. Gift a product, service, discount, or even merchandise to gain more trust from your customers.
- Giveaway for every action. Encourage people to follow your social media profile, subscribe to your email newsletter, create a festive season post, leave a comment, or perform any action your business can benefit from.
- Every-day giveaway. Start a new contest every day for a certain period — for example, a 12 days of Christmas promotion.
- Major giveaway. Arrange the most rewarding contest dedicated to the end of the festive season and your giveaway campaign.
Arranging a few giveaway contests simultaneously will increase your chances of winning this season.
Focus on video content and experiment with live commerce
If you take a look at what people are watching these days, you’ll probably see a video from YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. According to Hubspot, 96% of consumers say the amount of video they watch has increased.
This record is mind-blowing and can be pretty helpful during the holiday season, considering the number of video formats you can use for your marketing — short videos that last seconds, long videos, and video advertising.
Not to mention that you can go live alone to create authentic and engaging video content. Live video is a new promising channel that is transforming the shopping experience.
McKinsey Digital reports that live commerce increases conversions up to 30%, ten times higher than traditional e-commerce.
Here are some live video ideas that will help your holiday promotions get noticed:
- Create an environment for an interactive discussion. Ask people to leave comments, make enticing offers, or show how they use your products or services.
- Tease your community before the event. Post about the live stream on your social media pages, target people with paid ads, and send email newsletters.
- Experiment all the time. Set different schedules, target different audiences, and promote different products or services.
- Send follow-up messages to potential customers. After the live stream happens, keep in touch with viewers engaged with you.
Of course, don’t forget to test your equipment regularly.
Collaborate with nano- and micro-influencers
The influencer market has increased dramatically from $900 million in 2016 to almost $3,7 billion in 2021. The number of influencers is so enormous that they now operate in nano- and micro-environments.
According to eMarketer:
- 90% of marketers in the United States want to work with influencers with 5,000 and 100,000 followers
- Over 70% of influencers with 1,000 to 10,000 followers charge up to $100
- Nearly 77% of influencers with over 1 million followers charge $1,000 or more
If you’re a small or medium business, this sounds great because you don’t need to spend big on influencers who will mention your holiday marketing slogans.
Luckily, the total number of influencers worldwide varies from 3 million to 40 million, which means that your business or brand shouldn’t have any difficulty finding an interested influencer.
The rest has to do with the search. Find the right creators to become the best ambassadors for your company, and your audience will undoubtedly start feeling festive.
Offer free shipping
In recent years, free shipping has become one of the hottest holiday marketing trends used to generate revenue and reduce the number of people who will abandon their shopping carts.
In the 2021 Holi-Data Special report by ZMG, nearly 47% of consumers say they will spend more with a brand or retailer if they offer free shipping.
Here are the types of free shipping promotions you can use for your company:
- Free shipping to loyal people. Motivate potential customers to become members of your community and grow your lead generation network.
- Free shipping to select products. Different products have different shipping costs. Choose products with a golden medium between low shipping cost and a good profit margin.
- Free shipping to a combination of products. The shipping cost is more critical when a customer adds more items to their cart. Use free shipping when up-selling and cross-selling products.
- Free shipping as a reward. Please customers with an excellent alternative to a discount.
- Time-limited free shipping. Ship for free during a certain promotional period.
Interestingly, even though nearly half of customers fear delivery delays, they aren’t ready to pay more for fast shipping. In Deloitte’s 2021 Holiday Retail Survey, 85% of customers choose free shipping rather than fast shipping.
Launch paid advertising campaigns
Creating holiday ads is one of the most apparent holiday marketing tips. However, it’s the best way to simultaneously promote your marketing activities among current and potential customers on multiple platforms.
You can create an authentic holiday advertising campaign from scratch. Or suppose you’re planning to be active across your social media channels and create a lot of publications during the holiday season. In this case, you can save your time and boost them for money to achieve your holiday marketing goals.
Run retargeting advertising campaigns
If you decide to target multiple audiences with paid ads, retargeting these audiences is the next thing you should do if you want to benefit from your holiday advertising campaigns.
After you collect your results from these campaigns, segment your retargeting audience into several groups according to your necessities, and follow up with them via your communication channels.
Also, keep in mind that holiday season shopping is a marathon where customers visit many stores before deciding on their purchases. Unfortunately, this means that only a few customers will make it to checkout when visiting your store. If you set up your analytics, you can detect these customers and retarget them.
Save resources on producing visual content
Realizing the holiday marketing strategies above requires creating a lot of appealing content such as holiday cards, flyers, posters, infographics, videos, and beyond. On a large scale, it can be challenging and time-consuming.
VistaCreate offers numerous templates to save time and effort on creating engaging holiday branding. After you choose your template, you can insert graphics, add festive music, write powerful phrases for marketing headlines, and animate your design elements in minutes.
Spend the resources you save on finding influencers you can rely on, launching paid ads and retargeting ad campaigns, and other special activities.
Happy holidays!
