The end of Halloween opens a floodgate of holidays that run through to the New Year. And then brands begin their wild rush to win their customers over with the sweetest deals.

Online shoppers have more than enough options to pick from during the holiday season. But many holiday ads are noise without substance. How do you make customers choose your brand? It is not enough to simply post ads promoting discount offers.

Neither is it enough to center the pandemic. Though the circumstances of this year’s holiday are different from those of previous years, you don’t have to dwell on COVID-19 to make your ad successful.

In this article, you’d learn that holiday advertising boils down to simple, smart strategies. Use lessons from brands that have gotten holiday advertising right to build your own solid strategy to engage your audience and win more customers.

Restate your Value Proposition

Amidst the inevitable sales rush that occurs during the holiday season, it is essential to remind your customers why your brand stands out. Your value proposition is “the value a company promises to deliver to customers should they choose to buy their product.” The UK snack brand, Walkers, banks on the guaranteed fresh taste and unbeatable quality of its crisps.

Therefore, it launched a perfect video, All Mariah Carey Wants for Christmas during the holiday season last year to introduce a new range of products and restate how irresistible its crisps are.

In the ad, Mariah Carey finishes shooting a music video for her hit song, All I Want for Christmas is You, and then drags the last bag of Walkers crisps with an elf character. The scene clearly contradicts the idea that the holiday season is a time of giving, caring, and sharing. Carey forces the boy to give up the bag, portraying the message that a bag of Walkers’ crisps is too good to share.

The video is an excellent combination of humor and wit while introducing a new range of limited-edition flavors for the festive season.

Engage your Customers’ Emotions

In general, Christmas ads in 2020 have been more heartfelt, retelling realistic stories of the lives of real people. Brands recognize that this year is radically different and are incorporating people’s experiences in their ads, instead of practicing escapism. According to an analyst at Gartner, “acting like this is a normal holiday season is not going to be a strategy that resonates with consumers, for whom life is incredibly different.”

Asda’s That’s an Asda Price Christmas is one ad that recognizes this. The ad features a real family preparing for Christmas and making the most of a generally unpleasant situation, the pandemic, of course. Asda’s message is that they are giving customers “the Christmas they need at the prices they want.” In her comments, the Chief Customer Officer at Asda, Anna-Maree Shaw says the company recognizes the impacts of the pandemic on everyone and has chosen to keep prices low.

Another worthy mention is Amazon’s The Show Must Go On ad. The ad showcases the feelings of disappointment and frustration that has accompanied COVID-19. More importantly, it preaches a message of hope. This widely successful ad does not center Amazon; rather, it connects to the audience by putting their experiences in a deeply emotional video.

Irrespective of the year though, companies must show that they care about the concerns of their customers. Positioning your brand as a caring brand is a great way to win the trust of your customers. It’s in the emotions that your ads elicit; use ads that feel more ‘human’.

Find Ways to Stay Relevant

Certain products are holiday traditions. But for products that are not, position them as integral to the holiday culture. You can achieve this by using messaging that highlights your brand/product’s role during the holiday and how the customer stands to benefit.

For instance, how does an online learning platform find relevance during a holiday, when people are supposed to take breaks from working and studying? Masterclass checks all the right boxes with their holiday email marketing.

  • Sending an email with the subject line, “Thanksgiving Reimagined”. That subject line elicits intrigue and makes a recipient want to learn more right away.
  • Offering recipe suggestions for holiday menus. Food features heavily in the holiday culture. And during Thanksgiving and Christmas, it is easier to convince someone to learn a new recipe than to learn the art of negotiation.
  • Offering a gift that lets the receiver access your other products/services. At the end of the day, the recipes are the means, not the end. The end is to make customers enjoy lessons from 90+ classes in various categories.

Facebook Ads

Is your holiday ads strategy really complete without including the most popular social network during the holiday season, and otherwise?

If you’re marketing via a website, you’d need a Facebook Pixel, or Facebook SDK if you sell through an app.

Facebook Ads (which include Instagram) features a wide range of opportunities and tools to create, optimize, and measure your campaign.

For instance, wine company Josh Cellars used a combination of video ads, Instagram, ads in stories, and measurement to drive ad recall and brand awareness up by 11.5 and 6.1 points respectively.

Another company, Black Swan Catering used Facebook Automated Ads to generate a 2X return on ad spend over one month, as well as a 57% increase in sales, compared to the previous year.

To make your Facebook ads effective, start running them weeks before. That drives awareness before the actual event. But prior to that, first, determine the metrics against which the performance of your ad would be measured. The metrics you would target depend on the purpose of your ads, which may be from driving awareness to lead conversion, and more.

Sustain the Momentum

A practical, well-optimized strategy can transform the seasonal bump in sales into a consistent experience, which leads to another, higher sales increase the next season. The success of one season’s ads begins with the performance of the previous season’s ads.

What do you do after a festive period of intensive advertising? Sit back? That’s wrong!

Surely, people shop less when the festive period is over. Then, your focus should be strengthening the relationships you have established during holiday campaigns. Strategies that can help you achieve this are:

  • Promotions: don’t make the mistake of ending promotions too early. For example, your Christmas deals can run for days after Christmas.
  • Retargeting/Remarketing: take advantage of the bump in brand awareness from the holiday season. Display ads to people who have recently interacted with your brand.
  • Cross-selling and upselling: during the holidays, there’s a frenzy for a limited variety of items. Post-festivities, that’s the right time to bring customers into full awareness of your brand and products.

Conclusion

You don’t have to be a big-name brand before you can create a successful holiday ads campaign. It’s about following the basic principles of engaging your audience. Before setting out though, ensure that you’ve gathered enough data on the behavior of online shoppers, particularly those in your industry.