How To Build A Christmas Campaign – Plus Five Of Our Favourite Examples
We’re dropping the ‘C’ word already… But thank us later, because when it comes to holiday marketing the bells should already be ringing around your business. By starting to craft your Christmas campaign now, you can take full advantage of this golden opportunity to boost your brand and connect with your customers in powerful ways.
Of course, you won’t be the only ones trying to make noise and be heard at this time of year. So how can you cut through and deliver captivating content that inspires and compels customers during the holiday season? We come with gifts to help you go all in on your own memorable and impactful Christmas campaign – all wrapped up by some of our favourite campaign examples…
Planning
Follow these campaign planning steps to lay the essential foundations:
Unmask your audience
Get granular with demographics and create personas to understand your audience’s thoughts and feelings at Christmas time – after all, it’s an emotional time of year! Age, location, profession and income give insights into what they’re most likely to engage with.
Keep your eyes on the prize
Set clearly defined objectives and measurable goals to help keep your campaign moving towards your ultimate aim – whether that be increasing audience engagement or boosting sales. Only then can you start thinking about your campaign theme.
Get creative
Let’s say your audience personas describe a socially empathetic consumer at Christmas – this could be your opportunity to get creative with campaign theme ideas that pull on their heartstrings and embrace the spirit of giving. It’s about identifying the emotions, traditions, and aspirations that your audience will connect with.
Choose the right channels
Equally, you need to identify where will be best to reach these people. For Gen Z, you can’t ignore the influence of TikTok. If visual content is your priority, Instagram is your playground. Professional audience? LinkedIn all the way. Take the time to explore the pros, cons and specs of each social media platform. And don’t forget other channels like a campaign landing page or a targeted email marketing campaign.
Doing
Audience engagement, brand visibility, and customer loyalty are up for grabs. To win the lot, your festive content needs to stand tall and connect with potential buyers. And what better way to do so than to tell a good story!
Storytelling is all about engaging on an emotional level. No need to write a novel – just focus on a real-world scenario (preferably one that reflects the experience of your target audience), solve a problem that relates to them, and cleverly tie things back to your brand within the story.
Also consider eye-catching visuals to pull your audience in, and interactive elements that prompt them to act on their interest with your brand. Or give them the gift of something free – like an offer, discount, or limited-time promotion to create urgency. After all, they’ll already be in the shopping mindset, and everyone loves a freebie.
Optimising
What works in late October might not be so effective in early December. And you can identify trends like this by establishing and following KPIs specific to your campaign.
- For social media: Take note of followers, people reached, post likes, and page mentions. Running ads? Monitor effectiveness metrics from within the platform.
- For your website: Monitor traffic with tools like Google Analytics to check in on average session time and traffic from acquisition channels such as social media.
- For your emails: Analyse open rates to optimise subject lines and click-through rates to optimise body copy and CTAs.
Remember, your Christmas campaign is a ticking clock. Don’t be afraid to switch it up to ensure you can maximise your ROI before it’s too late.
Christmas campaigns done right
Get inspired by these five examples of powerful festive marketing campaigns, and see how they tell compelling stories, trigger emotive reactions, and prompt audience engagement:
- Airbnb makes ‘a holiday wish come true’ by offering a stay in the Home Alone house.
- Spotify uses data from their end-of-year ‘Wrapped’ compilations to create New Year’s resolution-style billboards.
- IKEA reminds parents of their children’s need for love (as well as toys), with their ‘Other Letter’ video experiment
- Patagonia facilitates the gift of giving with their ‘Give a Damn’ campaign
- OLIO highlights the landfill crisis with their ‘Let’s not waste our wonderful world’ TV advert
In the festive spirit yet? Before you go off and create your own impactful holiday marketing strategy, remember to: plan thoroughly, know your audience to a tee, and employ your most creative people to capture their hearts.
Need a helper in the back to support the planning and execution of your Christmas campaign? Contact us today.
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