Your surplus inventory is nearly stocked, your holiday hiring process is underway, and your Q4 marketing and advertising budgets are locked and loaded. All that’s left is creating the perfect video content to promote all your holiday offerings and promotions!
Even though the holiday season is already upon us, it’s not too late to start thinking about your holiday videos. While Halloween is a powerful holiday in its own right, the “corporate” holiday season doesn’t technically start until Black Friday and goes through New Year’s. There’s still time!
Plus, who said the holidays have to end in December? There are tons of holiday marketing opportunities all year long. Whether its fireworks for Fourth of July, candy for Valentine’s Day, or beers, burgers, and hot dog buns for Labor Day, there’s always something coming up that your company can promote via video.
Today we’re going to dive into all things holiday video, from planning your content strategy to creating compelling videos that consumers actually want to watch. Let’s dive in!
So you want to make a holiday video… What do you make?
It’s only October and we’re already overloaded with holiday emails, TV spots, and social media ads promoting deals, deals, deals – and that’s not even counting all the festive decorations and the Christmas songs playing 24 hours a day in every shopping mall we visit!
Brands and marketers bombard consumers with holiday content, and it can be pretty overwhelming. So how do you make a holiday video that makes your business stand out?
There are three mains ways to stand out when creating your own holiday video and they all involve putting the viewer experience first:
- Be entertaining.
- Be heartwarming.
- Be valuable.
By being entertaining, heartwarming, and/or valuable, you have a better chance of connecting with holiday viewers. Want to create the perfect holiday video? Do all three!
Whatever type of video you create, instead of jing-jing-jingling for the crowd’s attention with holiday gimmicks, aim to evoke an emotion while providing value. We’ll get into what that content explicitly looks like below, but now that we’ve established the basics, let’s move onto strategy.
What should your holiday video marketing strategy be?
When it comes to creating holiday content, it’s important to focus on your main marketing objective. What are you trying to achieve, or what aspect of your marketing are you trying improve with this content? Do you want to better connect with customers with cheery content to promote your brand? Or do you want to focus on highlighting deals and promotions to maximize your holiday sales conversion rates?
While your honest answer might be “Yes, both, all of it!” it’s vital that you establish your marketing goal before you create any content. With any other marketing video, your goal should drive what content you create.
For instance, if you want to attract new customers, promoting your office holiday party isn’t going to do much to draw in the crowds. Instead, entertain your audience in a fun and creative way that is brand-relevant. Create a commercial showing your product in action or spread a viral hashtag campaign that involves your users directly.
If you want to engage your holiday visitors, add a holiday theme to a brand or product video. This type of video still makes your brand the focus, providing useful information your user has already shown an interest in, but is still festive enough to bring a smile to their face.
Want to nurture your leads? Your video content should be strong, working to close that sale. Try a customer testimonial video with a small holiday element – maybe festive decorations in the background or festive transition music – that will show your leads how impactful your product or service is.
Looking to delight your followers? This is the easiest to accomplish this time of year! Create a video promoting a holiday referral program or giveaway. This will not only encourage your followers to interact with your brand, but will create positive brand associations and greater brand recall.
Don’t stop with the New Year – create a year-long holiday content calendar!
While so much emphasis is put on the end of the year, there are holidays every month of the year that your business can take advantage of. Don’t sell your marketing efforts short by saving all your timely video advertising for November and December, when you can capitalize on events happening throughout the year.
Here is a sample content calendar featuring some of the year’s top holidays – with video ideas for each.
New Year’s Day
The shopping hangover is real, but so are the resolutions. This is a great time to nurture instead of attract, so focus on how your company can improve your customers’ lives for the better, like with a before and after video.
Groundhog Day
Though a silly holiday, you can use Groundhog Day to your marketing advantage by fully investing in the furry little creatures with social content videos to delight and nurture by participating in the jokes online. Or try our personal favorite: create an homage to the classic Bill Murray movie.
Valentine’s Day
Who says Valentine’s Day has to be all about relationships? There are all kinds of love out there, which is why Valentine’s Day is a great time to launch a referral video to spread the love to your customers and social media followers.
Presidents’ Day
A customer spotlight would be a great way to celebrate President’s Day, highlighting the “presidential” qualities of one of your favorite customers. Great for nurturing leads, especially during this slow retail period.
St. Patrick’s Day
While every holiday is a great time for a promo video, St. Patrick’s Day offers a particularly fun environment to attract new customers with a themed promo, especially if you have a product that can be easily turned green. There’s plenty of opportunities for creative content here (catchy limerick, anyone?) so get as creative as possible.
Daylight Saving Time
Even though all the transitions are digital, daylight saving time still throws people off. Whip up an educational video with a few facts your fans and followers don’t know about daylight saving – or your business.
April Fools’ Day
Everybody loves a brilliant joke – as long as it’s not mean-spirited! April Fools’ is a great time for a product video announcing a fake new product, or a day in the life video where you reveal something “surprising” or show your team up to some crazy office antics. This holiday is all about delighting!
Easter
Depending on the climate where you live, spring is a great time to host an event for an event video. If you have a physical location, why not host an easter egg hunt for the kids and a beer garden for the parents and capture the whole experience on film?
Earth Day
Earth Day is great for a bunch of video types, like educational, industry, or tips and tricks videos that show users how to be more eco-conscious. In particular, try creating an FAQ video where you answer questions about your company’s green efforts to contribute to sustainability and lessen your carbon footprint.
Mother’s Day
It goes without saying that Mother’s Day is a great opportunity for heartwarming video marketing. If your mother is an important influence to you, create a brand video celebrating her contribution to you and your company’s values. Or create a team video celebrating all the mothers on your team!
Memorial Day
Memorial Day is an important holiday for those who have lost loved ones who served. Besides the typical Memorial Day sales, try not to be too promotional on this holiday. Instead, try a thank you video to show your appreciation to your customers. You can include a discount code for a sale – but only if appropriate.
Father’s Day
If there’s one thing dads love, it’s a good product review video. Yes, you can create a commercial celebrating dads and fatherhood, but nothing beats a third-party review for a product they’re on the fence about buying. Bonus points: create a video with dads using your product for themselves.
Fourth of July
Minus the national pride, Fourth of July is really just a celebration of summer. You can create a brand video that evokes the feelings of celebrating Fourth of July, and use it all summer long. An event video would be good, too!
Labor Day
This holiday is great for promoting sales, so try a referral or promo video offering discounted prices and coupon codes that’ll nurture leads into making the jump.
Back to School
While not a national holiday, back to school is still a special time of year, and is a great time for social content focused on parents, especially if your product or service is kid- or academics-related.
Halloween
Halloween is a great time for a tips and tricks or tutorial video, especially if your company is product-focused. You can create themed tutorial videos on how to use your product in a spooky new way, or offer costume-related tips and tricks with your own branded spin to it.
Veterans Day
This holiday is a great time to honor any employees, clients, or close family members who are veterans, either in a testimonial, customer spotlight, or team video format.
Thanksgiving
There’s a no better time for a thank you video to your customers or to your internal team than right before Thanksgiving!
Black Friday and Cyber Monday
You’re definitely going to want to create a lot of social content and promo videos with a countdown to your Black Friday deals. This is also a great time for a crowdfunding video, as your potential backers are already at home in front of their computers looking to spend money.
Winter Holidays
Whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, there are plenty of opportunities to delight and engage with customers during the month of December. Try turning your company holiday party into an event video or create a day in the life video to spread holiday cheer!
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s is a great time for a year-end video, where you summarize your company’s accomplishments and reflect on the year to come. And why not turn a new year’s party into an event video?
Check out these quick holiday video marketing tips we created to help keep your marketing calendar organized!
- Plan early – create a year-long seasonal content calendar.
- Feature season-exclusive deals in your videos.
- Impress new customers with emotional or entertaining content.
- Personalize your holiday offerings when possible.
- Keep your videos focused on adding value, not just new introducing products.
- Track analytics for videos that work, and repeat a similar strategy for different holidays.
- Include videos in your holiday email marketing.
- Create short, seasonal video snippets for easy sharing on social media.
- Use video in the winter holiday season to delight and inspire repeat customers.
- Use video in the spring and summer season to better engage followers.
- Use video in the fall holiday season to nurture summer leads into winter sales.
Overcome with holiday joy? Let’s get together and create some videos!
If you want to share some of your own holiday video ideas, or are curious what we can come up with, schedule a call with our production team and we can start mapping out the perfect holiday video marketing plan for your company today.