It’s that time of year again! The holidays are upon us, and social media feeds are already swamped with endless offerings from brands. As a marketer, it’s crucial to plan your seasonal advertising with targeted creative placed in the right social channels to reach the right audiences. Here are a few ways your brand can stand out from the pack during the year’s biggest selling season and make sure your advertising performs during this busy time.
Seasonal Color
One key component to any successful holiday campaign is using seasonal color to ensure holiday relevancy and signal your seasonal message. Enhance your creative with a festive, vibrant color palette that corresponds to the appropriate holiday. Traditional reds and greens – perhaps with eye-catching metallic pops – for Christmas; orange, black and brown for Thanksgiving/Black Friday/Cyber Monday; blue and silver for Hanukkah. You get the idea.
Every year, Starbucks puts on a masterclass in how to win the holidays with a multichannel approach and their iconic, festive colors and designs are a big reason why. Last year’s “Carry The Merry” campaign included three 15-second digital videos, social activations on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat, and desktop and mobile banners to encourage the use of the mobile app when COVID-19 lockdowns were on the rise. When customers used the mobile app to order a handcrafted drink, it was served up in collectible, limited-time-only cups with whimsical snowflake, holiday sweater and polka-dot patterns in brand greens and reds.
Energetic Imagery
Alongside a seasonally appropriate color palette, bold typography, an original wordmark and unique iconography can help your holiday content pop. If budget permits, add energy to your campaign with animation, video, funny GIFs, or even sharable content like digital e-cards or curated shopping lists. Engaging audiences with deeper interactivity and breakthrough creative will elevate your brand above the usual holiday social media noise, leading to click-throughs and, ultimately, sales.
Engaging Copy
Hand-in-hand with energetic, vibrant imagery and color is strong messaging. Stay true to your brand’s voice and tone while giving your copy a unique holiday spin with a strong call-to-action. In the social space, leverage hashtags – this is a great opportunity to create a unique one that encompasses your campaign and showcases your offer (#CarryTheMerry has a nod to the holidays while encouraging customers to order to-go products through their app). If you plan to use an existing hashtag, ensure it makes sense for your overall messaging and steer clear of co-opting a hashtag that’s irrelevant to your brand just because it’s popular. A word from the wise: A hashtag search for an innocuous seasonal saying might have a completely different use than you anticipated, so do your research.
Strategic Spend
An important consideration during the holidays is the higher cost-per-action for impressions, clicks, conversions and other metrics. Because it’s selling season, many retail brands allocate a large portion of their annual budget to Q4, knowing they must pay more for a desired action than they would at any other time of the year. It’s wise to keep your budget in mind and assess not only what you can afford, but your selling goals and which social channels strategically work best to achieve those goals.
REI’s recurring holiday campaign #OptOutside is a best-in-class example of thinking outside the budget box. Seven years ago, they made a dramatic, unheard-of-before decision to close their doors and e-comm outlets on Black Friday to instead encourage time outdoors, with a microsite packed with ideas for outdoor adventures. Their consumer-forward approach emotionally connected with shoppers, transcended the competition and has become a meaningful social movement – all by leveraging their holiday budget and messaging in a unique and brand-relevant way.
Be Mindful of the Season
Although the holidays are a time for festivities and celebration, it’s important to keep the spirit of giving top-of-mind, too. If there’s an opportunity to support worthy causes that dovetail nicely with your brand purpose, do so with sharable content from nonprofits, donations to a favorite charity, or a simple awareness message. SodaStream’s holiday ads featuring Snoop Dogg promoted a great cause – reducing the use of plastic bottles – in a humorous way by celebrating small, meaningful moments that reflected last year’s smaller gatherings. Likewise, your offerings could reflect your core values while also connecting in a mindful, authentic way with customers.
The holiday season can be joyous for your brand when you have engaging and meaningful marketing that gives you high visibility in a stacked newsfeed. Very merry selling!
If you’re ready for a partner to help tighten up your social media strategy, we would love to talk. Please reach out to Barbara Wray at barbara@wickmarketing.com or (512) 479-9834.
