Building Brand Awareness Through Inspirational Content: Holiday 2018

The Challenge

Many brands and their retailers depend on a strong holiday season to fuel their annual sales performance.  During this time of the year most of the marketing that comes with the holiday season is sales and promotional in nature, and doing so uniquely will help you to stand out. Your holiday marketing efforts should begin in the fall and continue to engage and inspire throughout the busy holiday season. Your brand should highlight its own unique twist on the holidays and share what your brand is doing to celebrate. The holiday season is the perfect time to form and reinforce a more emotional and authentic connection with your retailers and consumers beyond products and services.

The Solution

One way to form an authentic bond with your audience is by ensuring that your content continues to support the full sales funnel by sharing content with inspirational and educational brand stories that are seasonally relevant. Inspirational content engages consumers and should be shared all year round. During the busy holiday season, many consumers window shop on their mobile devices before heading in-store to make their gift purchases. Providing captivating inspirational content will increase brand awareness and create more brand favorability. They’ll keep you top of mind when they’re ready to shop if they’ve resonated with your content online. 

Business Impact

We analyzed 2018’s Promoboxx Industry holiday content (November and December) and found:

• Total Facebook organic reach = 1,130,545
• Total Facebook  engagements (likes, comments, shares) total: 28k +
• Total Retailers engaged: 2,726
• Top Engaged Vertical: Flooring and Automotive both tied for 30% retailer engagement rate

Holiday content can increase retailer engagement

For example: We looked at the Pet Care Industry Content campaign success reporting between Oct. 1, 2018 – Jan 31, 2019.  We can see as more campaigns were launched (dark blue) the number of engaged retailers steadily increased (light blue).

Creative

These content examples celebrate a specific holiday with consumers and use positive messaging in the copy such as “Wishing you a fantastic Thanksgiving..” and “Happy Holidays from your friends here at {retailer}.” One retailer even customized the copy to include a personalized message wishing customers the “best year of their life” for New Years Day.

Engage consumers with entertaining content. Notice these examples aren’t directly celebrating the holiday, but they do provide an opportunity to talk about some of the themes surrounding the holiday. These relatable themes can garner a lot of enthusiasm from excited consumers.

Key Takeaways:

• Make holiday-specific campaigns available to your retailer network
• Provide plenty of options for those who want to opt in to “Happy Holidays” vs “Merry Christmas”
• Use friendly, inspirational messaging
• Share a laugh
• Connect to themes surrounding the holiday such as family, travel, food and winter weather (regionally)
• Encourage consumer participation by asking them to comment

Theses campaigns were made available to retailers a week before the month of the holiday so that they had plenty of time to plan ahead and schedule posts in advance. Create some of your own inspirational holiday content using these tips!

Interested in Learning More?

Learn how Promoboxx can help you engage your independent retailers with brand-compliant digital marketing, driving better business outcomes. Fill out the form on the right and we’ll be in touch!