How To Improve Your Holiday Marketing Strategy In 9 Simple Steps

Seasonal marketing never goes out of style. From Valentine's to Easter to Christmas, every holiday worldwide is another opportunity to get creative with branding.

Holiday periods often bring in the largest number of sales for a business. Whether online or in-store, seasonal branding is the key to maintaining high conversions all year round, even when your brand experiences low spending periods.

In fact, according to experts at the National Retail Federation, more than $276 billion of revenue was generated during the Christmas holiday season alone in 2023. According to Adobe data, consumers spent $77.4 billion from 1 November to 24 November, which is 9.6 percent more than the previous holiday season.

How do you ensure that your business receives a cut of holiday sales profits? The key is to focus on your seasonal strategies months before your holiday campaigns go live.

With that in mind, let's examine how to build a holiday campaign and ensure that your 2024 seasonal branding takes your business to the next level.

How To Approach Holiday Marketing In 2025

A well-executed holiday advertising strategy could see your business rake in sales from all angles in 2025.

One thing that unites all demographics is the holiday season. Whether that is a religious holiday, an independence day, or an annual seasonal event, holiday event spending continues to rise every year.

These moments provide brands with a brilliant opportunity to profit from mass shopping for holiday gifts, holiday decorations, and holiday-themed goods. No matter your business or industry, if you have a product to sell, there's always a way to gear it toward early holiday shoppers.

From innovative in-store campaigns to seasonal manufacturing, there are many ways to approach the holiday season as a small business owner.

Here are some of the key things to consider when preparing your business for the holiday season through special offers, rewards or personalization communication for holiday marketing plan:

• Your campaign objective: Before you begin your seasonal campaign, define a clear objective. This includes creating KPIs and specific campaign goals that you can strive towards when creating and releasing your holiday marketing efforts.
• An original angle: Seasonal shopping days are overwhelmingly common, which often means that brands compete to create and sell the best seasonal products. If you want your seasonal promotional opportunities to shine, look for a gap in the market or a new angle you can take with your campaign to reduce competition and attract new customers. 
• Your channels of communication: Before you start crafting a seasonal strategy, it’s important to consider what channels you’ll use for your holiday marketing campaign. Leveraging more channels, including social media platforms,, provides more opportunities to target and capture holiday leads.
• Methods of lead nurturing: Holiday marketing campaigns are a great way to capture consumer attention. However, once you generate a new lead, how do you plan to carry it through to the checkout? Ensure that your campaign is backed with retargeting strategies and a brilliant festive funnel for a more significant number of sales.
• Your monitoring strategy: Last but not least, once your holiday campaign is live, it’s vital that it is monitored from all angles. From social listening to analytics, your monitoring and reporting help your business understand what works and, more importantly, what needs to be changed before you release your next seasonal campaign.

How To Improve Your Holiday Marketing In 9 Simple Steps

Now that you’re ready to launch your next holiday marketing campaign let’s examine how you can improve it in 2025.

When optimizing your seasonal strategy, it's crucial to think outside the box, from tapping into nostalgia to leveraging SMS marketing.

1. Establish Your Target Audience 

First, you must focus on your campaign planning stage. While it can be exciting to start creating innovative content and seasonally themed products, too often, these are targeted at the wrong demographic on the wrong channels.

The more information you can gather about your target audience, the more successful your campaign will be. 

One way to do this is to create a buyer persona that you can model your marketing efforts. This is an ideal candidate for conversion and exhibits all the characteristics of your target demographic.

During the audience research stage, consider age, location and the platform from which they access your brand. For example, if your demographic has a stronghold on social media, targeting your campaign across your social platforms is a great way to ensure it is visible to your most likely leads.

Better still, monitor how your audience interacts with your brand. What device are they using to access your content? Is your campaign accessible to all target audiences? Consider how your content performs on different screens and in different locations. The more thought you put into this process, the more likely your campaign will thrive exactly where it needs to.

2. Tap Into Nostalgia Marketing

Once you’ve delved deeper into your target audience’s needs and gratifications, you can start tugging at their heartstrings. 

Nostalgia has recently become one of the greatest marketing weapons across the globe. As we see household names like Coca-Cola turn back the clock to nostalgic ad campaigns of the past, many brands have followed suit during the holiday season.

The holidays are defined by nostalgia and memories of childhood magic. For brands looking to improve the traction of their seasonal campaigns, tapping into this concept is a great way to get their target audience on the side.

If you want to tap into nostalgia during the holidays, try creating a remarketing ad campaign with old black-and-white ads or vintage-style designs. These throwback elements can really trigger emotions and bring back fond memories for your audience. It’s a great way to build stronger connections with your brand, especially around the holidays when people are feeling extra sentimental. 

Using different marketing channels to share this nostalgic content can help stir up those feelings and create a sense of warmth and familiarity, making your brand stand out and resonate even more with consumers.

Consider rejuvenating viral adverts from past campaigns and turning them into a modern take on brand nostalgia. Whether you’re revamping your online store or brick-and-mortar display, finding new ways to get your customers talking about ‘the old times’ is a brilliant way to increase your seasonal conversions.

A great example of this comes from Google. Their 2018 Home Alone campaign was a Christmas comedy based on nostalgic Home Alone films from the early 2000s.

(Image Source: Unilad)

In an attempt to advertise their Google Home Assistant, they devised a skit starring Macaulay Culkin, which saw him relive classic Home Alone moments as an adult.

This appealed to the audience's heartstrings and leveraged nostalgia, quickly encouraging mass sharing and engagement as holiday tech sales soared.

3. Strengthen Your SMS Marketing

Next up, let’s talk about how you can leverage SMS strategies to improve your seasonal marketing.

In 2024, 96% of businesses claim that SMS marketing aids their overall sales. In a smartphone-dominated generation, leveraging the power of SMS in any sales campaign is vital. However, brands can take this one step further during the holiday season.

From last-minute gift discounts to holiday shopping reminders, a text message could be all it takes for a customer to convert during the holidays. The key is to find creative ways to advertise your brand via text messaging.

Take this example of quick-fire SMS campaigning from Round Table Pizza. During the Valentine’s Day holiday, the pizza house sent a text message with a Valentine’s Day-only offer code to all existing customers on file. 

(Image Souce: Screenshot)

Cleverly offering 14% off all pizza for one day only, the brand created a sense of urgency and encouraged couples to easily make last-minute dinner plans.

SMS marketing targets consumers on the go, meaning that it is one of the greatest weapons to add to your arsenal during a busy holiday season.

4. Prioritise Your Local Customers

While you may be eager to capture new leads, the most effective way to breed success for your holiday campaign is first to target your existing customers. 

If you plan to release a new seasonal product or holiday-themed design, did you know that loyal customers are 50% more likely to invest than a new acquisition?

With this in mind, why not create a campaign around your loyal customers next holiday season? Offer them discounted offers, exclusive products and a reason to stay for another year.

Brands that focus on their loyal customer base enjoy greater sale retention, positive reviews, and mass engagement across their social platforms. If you want to expand your business during the holiday season, your existing customers are a surprisingly perfect starting point.

5. Hold In-Store Holiday Events

While online shopping continues to take off around the globe, holiday seasons often paint a very different picture.

In fact, according to Statista, 43% of holiday shoppers prefer to browse the highstreets for inspiration and an in-store seasonal bargain.

One way to attract more customers to your small business this holiday season is to expand your Christmas marketing campaign to the shop floor. This includes holding in-store events, offering personalized discounts at your point of sale and revamping your merchandising for greater engagement.

Take the Saks Light Show in New York City, for example. The NYC flagship store invites members of the public to its doors every night for a month during the festive period. Each year, the shop windows are decorated with seasonal treats, elaborate displays, and a synchronized light show that encourages passersby to stop and stick around.

In 2023, the store partnered with high-end fashion house Dior, calling the campaign Dior’s Carousel of Dreams at Saks. 

(Image Source: Forbes)

The display aimed to “tell an enchanting story of Monsieur Dior’s dream journey from Paris to Saks’ hometown of New York City, featuring quintessential scenes and iconic landmarks from both cities, along with playful elements inspired by the Dior’s Carousel of Dreams at Saks theme,” according to Delphine Arnault, chairman and CEO of Christian Dior Couture.

As a magnificent light show lit up the streets of New York, the store-bound event encouraged viewers to not only enjoy the show but navigate their way into the store afterward to purchase holiday-themed products from the Dior X Saks partnership.

6. Don’t Forget Personalisation 

A powerful personalization strategy is key to creating any successful marketing campaign during the holiday season.

As brands compete to win consumer attention, customization is crucial in product design and promotion.

The key here is to learn as much as possible about your consumers and use that information to inspire a string of personalized targeting. This could include customized offers and discounts, original product designs based on preferences, and clever social content.

Take Spotify, for instance. Their personalized seasonal ‘Wrapped’ playlists have become an annual tradition consumers look forward to. Leveraging personalized platform data, the music app can curate original playlists of each user’s favorite songs and artists over the year.

(Image Source: Spotify)

This shows the customer that Spotify is very much connected to their tastes and preferences and keeps them engaged with the app for another year as they await their next annual ‘Wrapped’ gift. 

7. Report Your Holiday Marketing Findings

Once your campaign is live, the work doesn't stop there. Once your promotions have gained some traction, it’s time to delve deeper into your campaign analytics.

If you set goals at the beginning of the campaign, it’s time to measure your success. Gathering as much data as possible about your campaign, from social listening to in-store conversions, is the key to creating an even better one next year.

Tracking your campaign failures and successes is essential to ensuring that your profits continue to rise. By incorporating these points, you will become closer to your demographic and take another step toward mass seasonal conversions.

8. Holiday Video Marketing

Have you ever considered it? Do you enjoy watching holiday video ads, or do simple holiday image ads grab your attention more? Most of us are naturally inclined toward visuals that tell a story or spark an emotional connection. That’s why videos can be a powerful way to engage with consumers, helping them feel more connected to your brand.

Coca-Cola consistently delivers extraordinary campaigns that grab consumers' attention and build a strong emotional connection.

If your audience is millennials, they might want to “experience” a product before deciding to buy it. That’s where videos come in! You could create user-friendly videos, festive holiday video ads, or even a fun holiday campaign that fits the season's mood.

Want to connect with your consumers or audience on a deeper level? Try sharing some behind-the-scenes clips. These kinds of videos make your brand feel real and relatable, which can help people trust you and feel good about choosing your product.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes video from a Canadian brand that perfectly showcases how authentic and relatable content can strengthen its connection with its audience.

At the end of the day, videos aren’t just a way to show off what you’re selling. They’re about building trust, creating lasting impressions, and inspiring people to take action—especially during the holidays.

9. Partnerships and Collaborations for Holiday Marketing

Think about teaming up with other brands or local organizations. You could partner with a brand that resonates with your business and create special holiday bundles or exclusive offers. It’s a win-win situation. You both get exposure to each other’s audiences and give your consumers something new and exciting to look forward to.

If you want to build even stronger connections with your audience, consider collaborating with a non-profit. The holidays are all about giving back and partnering with a cause that resonates with your consumers can make a significant impact. Whether donating a portion of your sales or creating a co-branded product, this kind of collaboration shows your brand cares and adds a personal touch that people will appreciate.

Influencer partnerships are also huge during the holiday season. If you’re working with influencers who share the same values as your brand, it can help you reach a wider audience and build trust with potential customers. For example, if you own a clothing store, you can partner with a fashion influencer.

Partnerships and collaborations aren’t just about reaching more people and creating genuine connections. You can build trust, show what your brand is really about, and create something memorable for your audience.

Are You Ready For The Holiday Season?

While Christmas is still a few months away, holiday campaign planning must start now.

Brands that map their ideas early are better positioned to release the all-important festive product ranges.

Take the time to learn more about your audience, the topics that appeal to them, and the personal preferences they will likely interact within 2024.

In a competitive marketing landscape, the brand closest to its consumers will remain victorious as the festivities end.