Your Perfect Holiday Marketing Campaign: 15 Successful Strategies (+Meta Holiday Checklist) 

U.S. Census Bureau data revealed core retail sales during the 2023 holiday season amounted to a record $964.4 billion and 8.2% online sales growth. This is the perfect time for businesses to boost brand awareness, attract customers, and drive sales. To achieve these goals, brands should leverage effective holiday marketing strategies. In this article, we will guide you through 15 successful holiday marketing strategies to ensure the festive season’s success.

Table of Contents:

1. What exactly is Holiday Marketing?
2. Why is Holiday Marketing Important?
3. 2023 Holiday Marketing Statistics in the US
4. When to Start Holiday Marketing?
5. 15 Successful Strategies to Boost Your Holiday Sales
6. Reach Out to VIDEN to Make the Holiday Season Work For You

What exactly is Holiday Marketing?

Holiday marketing is a type of marketing with companies seeking to attract customers through various digital marketing channels and present them with special offers before the start of the holiday season. This season is marked by major events such as Cyber Five (Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Small Business Saturday, and Super Sunday), Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. No wonder that consumer demand and spending are at their peak. It’s an opportunity for buyers to purchase a lot and please their loved ones by celebrating and enjoying the festive season.

Why it’s so important to design your holiday marketing campaign? Let’s find out!

Why is Holiday Marketing important?

Holiday marketing is a perfect opportunity for businesses…

Firstly, to increase brand awareness. For retailers, the holiday season is a booster for brand visibility. They implement different holiday marketing ideas to attract more customers and enhance their brand image.

Secondly, to attract new customers. Businesses have a great chance to reach new audiences embracing the holiday spirit.

Thirdly, to boost customer engagement. To stand out from the crowd, brands put various creative holiday promotion ideas, such as gift guides, giveaways, countdowns, digital advent calendars, and others.

Finally, to drive sales and grow your business. Thanks to the high consumer demand, businesses offer sales and promotions to capitalize on the holiday season.

Regarding small businesses, festive marketing is as important as Thanksgiving turkey. Statistics show that 75% of retail SMBs heavily depend on holiday sales to meet annual revenue targets. Additionally, 58% of small businesses report that holiday season customers are “extremely important” to their overall success. Forbes notes that 89% of retailers see the holiday season as crucial one to their financial performance. So, can two or three months make or break an entire year? For some brands, the answer is “Yes!”.  Let’s explore the data from the US Census Bureau.

The statistics indicate that some retailers rely on the holiday season more than others. For example, if we spread retail sales evenly throughout the year, the holiday period will account for 25% of total sales. However, the US Census Bureau graph shows that most of all retailers exceed this benchmark during the holidays. For instance, hobby, toy, and game stores generated 34.5% of their annual sales in the last three months of the year.

2023 Holiday Marketing Statistics in US

According to Adobe Analytics, during the 2023 holiday season, consumers spent $222.1 billion online from November 1 to December 31, up 4.9% YoY. In November, $123.5 billion was spent online (up 6% YoY), bolstered by a strong Cyber Week, which drove $38 billion in spend online (up 7.8% YoY). In December, consumers spent $98.6 billion online (up 3.7% YoY), partly driven by discounts past Cyber Monday.

Of the $222.1 billion spent online during the 2023 holiday season, 65% was driven by five categories: electronics ($50.8 billion), apparel ($41.5 billion), furniture ($27.3 billion), groceries ($19.1 billion), and toys ($7.7 billion).

51.1% of online sales were done on mobile devices. The highest period for mobile shopping was Christmas, driving 63% of online sales.

As we can see, not paying attention to the marketing side means missing the chance to capitalize. To succeed during this festive season, brands competing to grab the attention of every customer should initially implement a great holiday marketing strategy.

When to Start Holiday Marketing?

Forget about last-minute planning. Holiday marketing is not a one-off process. It’s a concerted effort that requires many weeks of planning and execution to build deep relationships with customers and make them return later for more holiday purchases.

The most successful brands plan their promotions and sales events well ahead of time. Retailers start their holiday marketing planning two or three months before the holiday season (in August or September). As a business, you need to start your marketing campaign at least a month before the holiday season. Don’t miss this opportunity to start your campaign at the right time.

Need help configuring your Holiday Marketing campaign?

• Book a consultation today
• Read our success stories

15 Successful Strategies to Boost Your Holiday Sales

Our ads experts provide 15 holiday marketing tips for your excellent holiday season:

1. Define your goals

Every campaign should start with identifying the sales goals your business is willing to achieve during the holiday season. To do that, look at your sales figures for the last year. Once you analyze these numbers, write your goals for the next year, considering the competition and economic factors. Additionally, revisit critical performing sales days for your business, numbers in the abandoned cart, discount coupon redemption, and the percentage of new acquisitions vs. retention.

2. Ride the seasonal waves

AI will continue to influence marketing and media.

• More than 80% of marketers worldwide integrate some form of AI into their online marketing activities.
• 47% of US, UK, and Canada marketers trusted AI with ad targeting.
• In 2027, 15% of apps will be generated by AI.

People discovered on social medias shopping more and earlier.

• Holiday shopping is now starting as early as October.
• Consumers discovered on socials spend more ($964 million in 2023, up 3.8% YoY).

Auction trends.

• Cyber 5 (the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday) proved to be efficient for advertisers. In 2023, CVR increased dramatically, while CPA was well below October levels.
• Businesses not bound by shipping restrictions had extra runaways. CPMs stabilized, creating opportunities for a final end-of-year push.
• Advertisers found more opportunities in Q5. CPMs fell to their lowest levels of the season.

3. Spotlight products for a holiday promotion

Spend time focusing on your products and stock. Try to understand which ones should be featured in discounts and holiday deals. When selecting the products for your holiday promotions, consider the following points:

4. Craft irresistible discount deals

Choosing suitable discounts depends on your business goals and audience’s expectations. When it comes to the most popular holiday season discounts, we can highlight the following top five:

• Coupon codes
• Site-wide discounts
• Offer free shipping 
• Specific product discounts
• Discounts on new products or holiday collections

Once you have made your choice, select a discount strategy that meets your business needs.

5. Unleash your creativity

Develop a creative concept including the theme of your holiday marketing campaign. Consider what colors and props your business requires and approve the overall design.

Another important step is to plan the emotions you want your users to feel when looking at the design theme—giving, happiness, or joy. That is where your theme comes into play. Music, branding, and color psychology can be good attributes to your central theme.

6. Design eye-catching marketing materials

The key element of marketing collateral is your special offer. For example, are you providing a free gift with every order? Or are you offering 40% off your entire store during the holiday marketing campaign? Create an offer that will make your viewers or readers convert into customers. Afterward, create a checklist for all marketing collateral you need. This includes landing pages, brand stories, blog posts, infographics, presentations, proposals, email newsletters, and more. Add a holiday cheer to your website and landing pages to make them more attractive and relevant.

7. Ensure a seamless mobile experience

Mobile marketing has become essential for e-commerce in recent years. To capitalize on this trend, create mobile-friendly campaigns and optimize your online store for mobile users.

While designing your mobile app or enhancing the existing one, remember the golden UI/UX design rules:

• The design should be that the users can reach their thumbs wherever on the screen comfortably.
• Keep it simple; dynamic functionality across the app will help.
• The size of the target on the touch screen should be big enough to capture the user’s action.
• Minimize the data input options. Users do not like to type a lot on a tiny screen.

8. Holiday planning 

While creating your holiday marketing campaign, planning is crucial. There are a few primary steps you should take while planning your holiday marketing campaign:

1. Planning campaign launch date;
2. Scheduling final assets for launch;
3. Reviewing final assets;
4. Uploading blog posts and other marketing materials;
5. Creating automated newsletters;
6. Creating design assets;
7. Drafting content for social media and newsletters.

Think about optimizing your holiday marketing campaign weekly to give you the expected results. 

9. Set a budget

When planning the annual budget, always consider the expenses for holiday campaigns. Analyze data from previous holiday campaigns to determine what was effective and what wasn’t. Allocate the budget accordingly, specifying how and where the funds will be spent (social networks, Google ads, influencers, etc.).

10. Launch a social media campaign

According to Statista, 4.59 billion people will use social media in 2025. People turn to social media to look for offers for the holiday season and scroll through reviews about products and services. That’s why social media should take the lion’s share of your holiday marketing campaign.

To understand which social media platform to use, go back to your target audience. Do you know where they are from and what their gender is? Understand how often they use social media platforms and how they interact with content. Once you get the idea, choosing where your content should go will be easier. 

Another secret weapon of a successful holiday social media campaign lies in delivering personalized and extra-personalized experiences. During the holiday season, you can use lookalike audiences on Facebook and Google, creating an inclusive feeling for new customers. 

Don’t forget about user-generated content. People love when they are asked what kinds of services they would like to see. For example, you can ask them their preferences for a product and design a product based on their response. In this case, they are more likely to buy it.

11. Boost with social media ads

If you already use social media marketing, investing in social ads is a guaranteed way to reach new customers. Every platform has advertising tools and audience targeting capabilities. So, when crafting your holiday season content, pay attention to how that content can be repurposed into social ads. The latest and greatest social media ad types are:

Meta ads formats. 

• Add catalog items in Advantage+ creative to upload a “hero” asset, and let Al automatically show people relevant products.
• Use creative overlays to highlight holiday-specific products, discounts, and shipping cutoffs.
• Upload videos into your product catalog to provide more detailed and engaging information.
• Try local inventory ads to help drive in-store sales, particularly after shipping cutoff dates.
  

Building seasonally relevant creative is essential for festive advertising. Make sure to implement these solutions to grab customers’ attention.  

Diversified creatives enable AI to deliver the right message. For example, a coat sale: “My son wants a coat that is trendy, stylish, and warm.” or “I want to get my sister a high-quality coat she can wear skiing!”

Text variations, image expansion, and background generation, available in Meta Ads Manager today, can help maximize results and save time.

• 32% increased efficiency when using diversified creative;
• Five hours per week was anticipated time-saved by marketing managers when using generative AI.

Adding creative that is built for Reels improves overall campaign performance:

• 79% of people say they’ve purchased a product after watching Reels;
• 16% improvement in CPA;
• 29% higher CVR;
• 23% higher ROAS.

It’s also worth using AI-powered automation solutions. Salesforce reported that a noteworthy 17% of all holiday orders, totaling $199 billion, were influenced by AI during November and December 2023. Cyber Week alone saw $51 billion in online sales influenced by AI.

Meta Al-powered automation solutions enable eCommerce advertisers to achieve the best performance. These solutions can be used individually but are intended to be used together for maximum performance. Meta provides the following AI solutions:

Advantage+ shopping ads. Use budget scheduling to automatically meet spikes in demand without resetting the learning phrase.

• 17% improvement in cost per conversion;
• 32% increase in return on ad spend cost.

Advantage+ catalog ads. On average, ecommerce businesses added a new Advantage+catalog ad to Advantage+ shopping campaigns, with Shops ads seeing a 27% higher return on ad spend.

Shops ads. They send holiday shoppers where they’re most likely to buy (to your website or to your Shop on Instagram or Facebook).

• 30% higher average incremental ROAS, compared to website-only campaigns;
• 29% higher average incremental ROAS when using Shops ads and Advantage+ shopping campaigns together.

Advantage+ app campaigns

• 26% improvement in average cost per acquisition compared to business as usual;
• 9% improvement in cost per action compared to business as usual.

Additionally, our Meta Ads expert recommends to apply the following solutions: 

Partnership Ads. Let creators bring new, unexpected approaches to your Holiday messaging to appeal to their audiences.

• 53% higher click-through rates when adding partnership ads to business-as-usual;
• 19% reduced cost per acquisition when adding partnership ads to business-as-usual.

Partnership Ads with Shop Ads. The advertiser and partner accounts are featured in the ad’s header, and the ads leverage signals from both accounts for improved ranking and Incremental performance.

Highlight your promotions. Automatically show offers when customers click through your ad, enabling easy redemption.

• 10% increase in conversion rates for businesses that used promotion ads.

Run Reminder Ads (for Engagement and awareness objectives).
Deliver timely reminders about a sale or event to help move shoppers towards purchase.

• 10% increase in awareness for businesses that used reminder ads.

X (Twitter) ads formats. Vertical Video Ads can help you drive engagement and unlock incremental reach.

• Vertical videos account for more than 20% of total platform usage;
• X (Twitter) users are 7X more likely to engage with an ad in a vertical video compared to the same ad on the Home Timeline.

TikTok ads formats. Video Shopping Ads can help you drive promotional messaging.

• 32 % more efficient CPA vs non-Shopping Ads campaigns.

This platform rolled out interactive add-ons for ads, including stickers, pop-ups, and other gestures that can help brands better engage with their customers. Countdown and gift codes are the top ones for festive advertising.   

12. Leverage influencer power

Influencer marketing is a win-win strategy for reaching new audiences and driving sales, especially during the holiday season. Nowadays, every micro-audience has a ‘persona’, which is great for marketers. 

Collaborating with the right influencers lets you dive into a relevant community of shoppers. It also provides your customers with high-quality content you can share on social media. Finding a creator who cares about your products and believes your community will do is best.

13. Send personalized email campaigns

Email marketing campaigns are still working. Emails attract people in many ways. For marketers, it means they should create outstanding newsletters so people not only open them but also click to visit your website.

Segment your existing customers and send them emails notifying them about the offer. Do not create duplicate emails. Everybody needs special care, so add a pinch of creativity to each message. Remember to segment your audience based on the amount of interaction they’ve had with your brand. 

14. Keep the momentum post-holiday

The holiday season is over, but the shopping season is not yet. Customers are still spending lavishly. End-of-season sales, discount offers, and minimal shipping costs are some strategies that you could use to please your buyers. These activities aim to generate more revenue and attract an audience in the following pipeline when the market is not so crowded. This is crucial to increase brand awareness and speak louder on the market.

15. Analyze and report your success

The final step to executing a successful holiday marketing campaign is analytics. Sit down and check how your content is performing. Go back to those goals you set in step one and determine if you reached them and what prevented you from doing so. Analyze where people dropped off, blog posts that performed poorly or find areas of your offering that fell flat. Write down the details, and use them to improve your next holiday marketing campaign. 

Work smarter, not harder, is the mantra throughout the holiday season. If you are already planning your holiday campaign, make sure you’re implementing these holiday strategies.

Reach Out to VIDEN to Make the Holiday Season Work For You

Our goal has always been to help businesses grow globally by applying the best industry practices. We’ve created the Meta Holiday Checklist to help you prepare for the busiest time of the year and run intelligent promotions.

Tick these points off your marketing checklist to ensure you’re all set. Contact VIDEN to elevate your holiday marketing efforts and make this season your most profitable!