So your ads killed it during the holiday gift-giving season, but now that creative is out of date and unusable, right? Well, what if we told you that isn’t necessarily the case…
While the holidays may be over, gift-giving lasts all year long. From Valentine’s Day to Mother’s and Father’s Days to birthdays, there are continual opportunities to advertise your products as great and timely gift ideas. Take the learnings and even clips from your holiday gift-giving-themed ads and turn them into evergreen success stories.
Evaluate the winning creative from the holiday season
After the holidays, it’s important to assess what worked and what didn’t in your digital marketing strategy. That applies as much to your creative as it does to your campaign budgets and every other aspect of your program.
When reviewing your creative performance, ask yourself:
- What hooks worked best?
- What CTAs drove the highest results?
- What audience had the strongest response to gift-giving? (Spoiler: on social media, women tend to love shopping social ads)
Take these learnings and apply them to an evergreen gift-giving ad! Do you have any B-roll of someone unwrapping your product? Unless it’s explicitly holiday-themed (as in, directly in front of a Christmas tree), you can likely repurpose that with different messaging to be a birthday or Valentine’s Day-themed ad.
Lean into the themes and trends that worked
Once you’ve evaluated your creative performance, iterate further based on the hooks that worked best during the holidays. Was it calling out to your audience by an identifier—“Hey Parents!”—or was it starting with a question like, “Still haven’t found the perfect gift for your loved one?” If it appealed to the right audience throughout Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the rest of the holiday season, it likely will remain effective for those groups with some contextual adjustments to be applicable year-round.
Then take a look at the CTAs that worked best. Did adding a timeline, like “order by X date to get before Christmas” help drive urgency and move the needle on your holiday sales? Lean into that and create urgency for other holiday ads. This could mean pushing gift cards for the last-minute Father’s Day gift-givers and finding what other holiday or seasonal moments are a good fit for your audience throughout the year.
You can also narrow in your targeting to those that are most likely to gift your products or services year-round. If you’re a baby brand, this might mean grandparents. If you make products that go great in a dorm room, that likely means targeting parents of a certain age throughout the college year. While many companies have a great understanding of those who buy products directly from them, there’s often an untapped audience of those who buy them for others. Find your market and narrow your messaging to speak directly to that audience that is most likely to convert for gift giving.
Generate evergreen promotions
If you have the audience and the products to advertise gifting, then it’s worth pairing those ads with any evergreen promotions you offer. If your brand offers:
- Free gift-wrapping for gift purchases, then highlight that in the ads you direct to your gift-giving audience year-round
- Free shipping over a certain spend amount, make sure your audience knows that as they are building their cart. Suggesting to users that they buy a second item to share with a friend—and help reach the free shipping minimum—is a convincing approach, for instance.
- Free seasonal gifts as part of total purchase promotions or discounts? Push that message out to your gift-giving audience.
The holiday season may be over, but there are always more holidays to follow. While it probably isn’t a great idea to run your Christmas-themed ads in June (unless you have a Christmas in July promo), there are always lessons you can take from this year’s holiday sales push and apply to the next small holiday.
You may even cause some users to kick themselves for not gifting your product this past December—and throw it on the early list for next year. More than half of holiday shoppers report beginning to purchase gifts before Halloween, and 12% report doing so in August. With those trends, it’ll be time to gear up next year’s holiday push before you know it.
Want to learn more about how Accelerated Digital Media has won over gift-givers through paid social ads? Sign up for our email list or reach out to the ADM team to receive more information about successful social strategies we have deployed for our clients.
