The holidays are the noisiest time of year for businesses and shoppers alike.
However, there is one thing retailers and brands can do to break through and set themselves apart – tapping into insights from their customers and communities to create campaign creative that resonates. According to Meta's2022 Creative Forecast, consumers are hungry for bold and insightful content that can entertain, provide utility and align with culture and society.
Here are four creative strategies to help retailers and brands create fresh and insightful online marketing campaigns. By implementing these strategies, retailers are better positioned to engage current customers and uncover new online audiences during the most significant sales moment of the year.
Shop the moment
Shopping has become “always-on,” with social commerce leading people to purchase items at the moment of discovery, rather than waiting until major sales or shopping holidays come around. This holiday season, businesses can drive more impact with creative assets that relay a sense of urgency and provide shoppable capability to help people make a purchase instantly.
Video assets, for example, can bring a product or service to the forefront of the story, lean into clear brand messaging, tap into trends, or create an original moment to inspire audiences with visual cues to improve message recall.
Consider driving a brand message further through a mix of visual and text cues in social content. By focusing on ideas and entertainment, retailers are rewarded with instant action while building lasting relationships with their customers.
Empower audiences
When it comes to connecting with businesses, audiences want to go beyond the two-way conversation and feel empowered to shape their experience with brands. This is especially true around the holiday season; it's a time when shoppers aren't so much influenced by promotional content but by emotion.
Emotional creativity can turn a passing glance into a meaningful discovery. In a Metaanalysis of 10 conversion lift studies, creatives focusing on a product's emotional benefits outperformed those focusing solely on product features with 89% confidence.
For example, to connect with the parenting community, Pampers used its recent social media campaign to ask its community of experienced parents to provide tips to new parents who may struggle to navigate the challenge of staying up late with young children.
By empowering the crowd and sharing advice in its campaign, the global baby and toddler brand was able to help people feel less alone in their nighttime struggles and better navigate challenging moments.
Elevate unheard stories
As culture diversifies and identity becomes more fluid, representing audiences with inclusive casting is no longer enough. People want more— they want to be inspired and refreshed with original and authentic stories—especially from groups that they don’t typically get to hear from.
Retailers and brands should work to identify untapped groups and communities who are already doing amazing things with, or who might benefit from a product to help tell stories in new and genuine ways. By creatively elevating unheard stories that are not only meaningful to the communities whose stories are being told, but also inspiring and energizing to a broad audience too, brands can unlock a new level of growth.
Combine campaign formats
Retailers and brands need to diversify the creative mix in their marketing campaigns to express the different motivations that influence holiday purchases. With so much holiday content starting early this year, consumers can feel fatigued by the same creatives, resulting in declining ad effectiveness.
Businesses should consider using mixed formats for their social campaigns, including short-form videos and static images, to connect with audiences with different viewing behavior.
Meta has found that mixed-format campaigns tend to drive better performance compared with single-format static or video campaigns. Our analysis showed they outperformed by 86 percent in confidence. There's no one-size-fits-all approach, and the more you test and learn, the more opportunities you have to unlock new audiences - and new sales.
The holidays are the time of year intended to celebrate, look back, regroup, and collect energy toward the future. Your campaigns can be a source of light and joy and your brand can benefit from bringing smiles to your audience, especially after a year that has challenged many.