Can you hear it? Off in the distance?
Fire crackling, sleigh bells ringing, your extended family bantering-the signature sounds of the season are slowly but surely growing in volume. If you already perfected your holiday marketing campaign before the leaves started to change, these sounds should bring nothing but joy. But if your holiday campaigns need a dash of tinsel, read on.
The Simple Secret to Mastering Holiday Marketing
What makes memorable holiday marketing campaigns? It's simple yet complex: Emotion. Picture some of the most successful holiday marketing campaigns, some may have even left a tear in your eye. From Apple's nostalgia-laden short film to Amazon's emotional sledding ad, these campaigns tap into the emotions the season stirs up.
So, how do you build a successful holiday marketing campaign that evokes powerful emotion? Start with a powerful goal.
Think Big With Your Campaign Goal
Although the holiday season lasts only a few months, it presents a unique opportunity to create lifetime customers. Having that as the ultimate goal of your holiday marketing campaign sharpens the focus from conception to conversion. A dash for discounts might make sense if it were just about the next few shopping months. But pursuing a lifelong relationship sharpens the focus. Your team must center emotions in your holiday marketing strategy to secure a consistent customer.
Finding Your Emotion
Some of the best holiday campaigns center on goodwill, nostalgia, and positivity because those are the emotions most people associate with the holiday season. However, these broad emotions might be difficult to convey in an ad if they aren't tailored to your brand's customer base. You'll have to identify your audience first, then the emotion.
An evocative holiday marketing campaign must also come from your brand's core values. Apple or Facebook tap into emotions that come from their core values of connecting people. As a result, the emotions stirred up feel authentic and resonate with their target audience.
Define Your Audience
Start with your brand's core values. Then, compare these to your audience personas' core values. Audience personas are composites of critical segments of your customer base. They represent typical customers and the purchasing decisions those types of customers make. Combinations of ages, genders, locations, etc., all create these audience personas.
Audience personas are particularly useful when they incorporate generational data. Gen Z shops very differently than Baby Boomers, not just in where they start their search but also in how they make a purchasing decision.
Understanding the values of each persona can help your holiday marketing campaign highlight the emotion each persona is likely to appreciate. If possible, your campaign should include materials for each audience persona. For example, 50% of Gen Z shoppers want the brands they buy from to take stances on social issues. However, as age increases, that desire decreases. One common trend across generations is the value they place on a brand's charity efforts.
Aligning Core Values With Emotions
Once you've defined the intersections of your brand's core values with that of select audience personas, you can think about which emotions these core values stir in people. For example, say your brand's core values include innovation. And one of your audience personas shares a similar core value of creativity.
A successful holiday marketing campaign might invoke the nostalgia of opening childhood gifts and thinking of the possibilities the gifts unlocked. It highlights the brand's innovative aspects while tapping into the drive for creativity your potential customers value. All the while, it surfaces emotions that drive decisions.
With an emotion rooted in shared values between you and your customers, you're ready to start spreading your holiday marketing campaign.
Creating Campaigns That Convert
A great idea goes nowhere without an intentional plan to get that concept before potential customers' eyes. Your holiday marketing campaign must use an omnichannel approach to ensure your target audience sees, hears, and remembers your brand this holiday season.
Avoid Common Pitfalls
A successful holiday marketing campaign understands consumer habits. Recent studies show that 40% of consumers plan to start holiday shopping in November. That means a profound campaign released on December 7th will miss almost a majority of holiday shoppers, blunting its impact.
The reverse temptation can be just as detrimental. Rolling out a holiday marketing campaign early and often. This approach risks becoming easily ignored and lost in the barrage of advertisements consumers navigate around the end of November. Communicate too early, late, or too frequently, and you'll push away potential customers.
Well-Timed and Well-Placed
Regardless of the audience personas your holiday marketing campaign targets, you'll need various touch points to ensure success. Short and long-form videos provide an excellent format for engaging your audience and centering emotions.
Consumers agree. Recent data shows that 41% of Millenials have discovered a product through a YouTube ad in the past three months, and 55% of Gen Z consumers prefer to discover products through short-form videos like TikTok or Instagram Reels.
A well-crafted long-form video that your team can edit into equally effective short-form options maximizes return on investment for that video. If the marketing budget is tight, you can reach various audience personas with a single video posted across TikTok, IG, YouTube, and Facebook.
Don't Forget Emails
Another crucial touchpoint is your target audience's inbox. Remember not to be spammy with your approach, though. Hundreds of millions of emails are sent out to potential customers just between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. The sheer quantity pushes many consumers to opt out of email communications altogether.
A successful email campaign is a well-read email campaign. Your holiday marketing campaign must include email copy that consumers want to read. That starts at the subject line—34% of consumers in a study marked the emails by subject line alone. You'll need an alluring hook and an emotional email body to keep customers engaged.
Brands can consider mirroring what friends and family do around this time of year and send a holiday card from your team. This provides a perfect opportunity to raise awareness of a new offering or discount while building trust in a heartfelt message.
The emotions the email raises should lead to a call to action button, whether that drives purchases, subscriptions, or another form of action. No email campaign is successful without a solid call to action. The language should strike the same emotional tone as the copy above.
Optimize Web Content
A complete holiday marketing campaign should drive traffic to your website. Your campaign must update, refresh, or create new content for your website to accomplish this feat. You may also need to optimize the website for mobile users to ensure ease of use.
Your campaign should recognize that an increasing number of consumers combine online and in-store shopping during the holiday season. Content on your website should help customers progress from considering options to heading to the store for purchase.
Holiday gift guides, for example, can alert customers to special promotions and new offerings. They also provide a vital source for search engine optimization. Utilizing the exact search words your potential customers will use helps them find your website and their answers quickly.
These gift guides should still employ the same emotional messaging as the rest of the campaign to drive maximum impact. Recognizing that charity is popular across audience personas, a brand could pair products and services with particular charities. Your blog could highlight how each offering relates to the work of a particular charity and why purchasing the product should encourage supporting that charity.
Remember, though, that this content needs to be optimized for mobile use. Over three in four Gen Z consumers shop online through their mobile devices. Any inconsistencies or difficulties using the mobile site will push customers away, regardless of how well-coordinated your holiday marketing campaign is.
Cross Holiday Marketing Campaigns Off Your Wish List
Creating a coherent, deeply emotional holiday marketing campaign can reverberate into the new year and beyond. It's not an opportunity to take lightly. Optimizing a holiday marketing campaign from concept to conversion requires understanding your audience, their values, emotions, and where they are online.
If your brand has thoroughly developed audience personas, established goals, and clear core values, you have an advantage in building your holiday marketing campaign. Even then, finding an emotion that will strike a chord with consumers may elude your team.
If you want to put your best foot forward this holiday marketing season, trust the creatives at CMG Local Solutions to develop campaigns that convert. Our team has incisive consumer intel across various industries and specialize in building successful omnichannel campaigns that drive action, no matter the season.
