How Your Holiday Video Marketing Strategy Can Help Build Year-Round Growth

Gone are the days when marketers would start planning holiday campaigns a few months before the festivities kicked in.

Today, the only way to win at holiday marketing is to plan year-round campaigns and make some noise long before the holiday season. This is a shift from seasonal marketing tactics to a more organic, relationship-building approach.

In this article, we'll share our best advice on embracing year-round growth with your holiday video marketing strategy. Find examples and actionable tips below.

Beyond the Usual: 6 Non-Conventional Video Strategies for the Holiday Season

Conventional marketing boxes your holiday campaigns into a small window of a few months. But at a time when you’re competing against so many brands, it’s nearly impossible to maximize your ROI in this window.

That’s why you need to step out of the box with your video marketing game plan and create a year-round strategy. Let’s see how to build one.

1. Evergreen Content Meets the Holidays

Evergreen content refers to any marketing collateral or asset with long-term relevance to its intended audience. Unlike seasonal content—which becomes irrelevant or outdated after a period, evergreen content covers timeless themes to educate readers or viewers for an extended period.

One of the most significant benefits of evergreen content is its longevity. Since it stays relevant for your shoppers for several months (or years), you can drive traffic and gain visibility on search through a strong SEO setup.

And the best part? You can always infuse these evergreen content assets with a little bit of holiday magic to make them topical during the festive season.

For example, let's consider you have a home decor brand and have created a comprehensive guide on decorating different rooms in your home. You can make this guide relevant to the holidays by adding a section on 'holiday-themed decor ideas' and listing a few items relevant to each holiday, like Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and more!

Here are a few types of evergreen videos you can create for your brand:

• Explainer videos: Explainers and tutorials are your best shot at creating evergreen content. They introduce potential buyers to your brand and allow them to make a confident buying decision. You can create a library of videos explaining how to use your products, like Ava Estell.

This skincare brand created several how-to videos and embedded them as shoppable videos on their site.

Read the case study

• Product demos: You can also create product videos showcasing your product from different angles. These demo videos explain key capabilities, use cases, and benefits. During the holiday season, you can create a holiday-themed version and add a creative spin to your products.
• Storytelling videos: Retail storytelling can do wonders for your brand. This evergreen content can sit in your social media accounts and website to build an emotional connection with shoppers.

Here’s an example of Huckberry using storytelling videos as evergreen content on their YouTube channel:

• Testimonials: Customer reviews never go out of style! Collect review videos and user-generated content for your evergreen content library. Run these videos as shoppable ads during the holiday season to quickly catch buyers’ attention and stand out from the crowd.

2. Micro-moments: Maximizing Short-Form Videos

Micro-moments have become a critical part of every retailer’s video marketing strategy. A micro-moment essentially means a brief opportunity for brands to influence people to buy from them. You can create these moments at multiple touchpoints with a strong understanding of the primary driving force behind your buyers’ purchasing decisions.

You can create micro-moments with short-form videos if you know when and what motivates people to buy from you. Here's how:

• Optimized mobile browsing experience: Micro-moments can happen anytime. You have to deliver round-the-clock support, primarily through mobile, to make buyers tick. So, make your store mobile-friendly and double down on social channels.
• Location-based-targeting: Another great way to leverage micro-moment marketing is through localized ads, notifications, and content. Make customers feel heard and seen with a more personalized approach through location-based targeting. You can boost engagement rates by sending a notification written in local languages, nudging them to buy.
• Leverage shoppable videos: Micro-moments are all about quick decision-making and purchases. That’s why you have to shorten the path from discovery to purchase with shoppable videos. Let shoppers explore and buy any product as soon as they discover it.
• Analyze search behavior: One of the best ways to create a micro-moment video strategy is by studying the search data. What are your target buyers searching for? What information do they need to make a purchase? Find these insights to create more micro-moments across the buyer journey.

Here’s how Google explains the concept of micro-moments with a simple framework on how you can start creating them for your brand:

3. User-Generated Content as a Holiday Goldmine

Holidays are the perfect time to win over potential customers with emotional messaging. You want to gain shoppers’ trust and foster a sense of authenticity to drive more sales. That’s where user-generated content can help.

UGC videos add a real face to your brand. Think of it this way: instead of pushing your own narrative, you’re handing over the mic to your customers to educate and convince others to buy from you.

While UGC content works around the year to bring conversions, it can ramp up these numbers during the holiday season. Good UGC embedded on your website, shared via ads, and available on email is your chance to stand out from the crowd and make a lasting impact on your audience.

Brands like Nutr have embraced this playbook to get orders worth almost half a million! Nutr converted UGC videos into shoppable content and added them across their website. They observed that each website visitor interacted with almost 2 1⁄2 videos on average and watched around 86% of every video.

Read the case study

4. Building Anticipation: Year-Round Campaign Rollouts

Psychology plays a crucial role in online shopping experiences. One of the crucial psychological elements to consider is the feeling of anticipation. When shoppers anticipate something exciting, they look forward to a reward and eagerly wait for the big reveal.

You can create buzz all year round and build anticipation during the holiday season. Here are a few ways to do that:

• Influencer countdowns: Partner with influencers and niche creators to kick-start a countdown campaign. You can create teaser videos for a new launch and collaborate with influencers to create some hype around these launches. This will also help maximize your reach in a bigger community.
• Virtual events: You can also build anticipation with year-round events to engage existing and potential customers. Instead of hosting sales-focused events, create customer delight with interesting themes and fun ideas. For example, if you sell snacks and beverages, you can host workshops teaching people cool recipes using your products.
• Interactive calendar: Another great way to excite your audience is through an interactive holiday calendar. Host this on your online store or app and add various rewards to encourage participation. You can ask a few questions or add games and give reward points.
• Exclusive memberships: Want to maximize order value from existing customers? Create special holiday discounts and loyalty program perks for long-term customers. Give them exclusive access to discounts or early-bird entry to your storewide sale.

Remember that anticipation can enhance the perceived value of your products, incentivizing shoppers to buy more. With the right messaging and timing, you can leverage anticipation to fuel year-round growth.

5. The Power of Limited Editions: FOMO Marketing

Just like anticipation, another psychological element to consider for your holiday video marketing strategy is the fear of missing out (FOMO). It can surge demand based on limited availability and irresistible offers.

FOMO tactics also shorten the average customer's journey because they make impulse buying decisions. This is perfect for peak shopping season when shoppers are more willing to spend.

Let’s look at a few tactics to make FOMO marketing work for you:

• Highlight limited stocks available for every product to create a sense of scarcity
• Create an email drip campaign sharing frequent updates on your limited-edition items
• Offer free shipping to incentivize shoppers to purchase FOMO items at the best prices
• Add exit intent forms and checkout pop-ups on your store to minimize the bounce rates

Whenever you offer FOMO deals, you can publicize them on social media with shoppable videos to increase conversions. These tactics will work best with shoppable content since viewers have the option to watch a video, check product specifications, and place an order right away.

6. SEO and Holiday Videos: Beyond Christmas Keywords

SEO is an underrated aspect of most holiday video marketing strategies. You can enjoy the long-term rewards of SEO for all your video content. Plus, optimizing them for holiday-specific keywords means your evergreen content will bring more visibility during the peak season.

You can start your SEO process by finding seasonal topics and keywords to target during each holiday. For example, if you own a bakery, you'll see an increase in search volume for keywords like "spooky cake ideas" or "Halloween-themed cupcakes" and similar.

Once you’ve identified such keywords, it’s time to put your creative hat on and create engaging videos. You should also make a plan to repurpose and use these videos throughout the year.

Besides keyword research, you can also amplify holiday content through internal links. Identify your most important or popular holiday-themed pages and internally link them to several other pages across your website to improve PageRank.

Some technical aspects to win at holiday SEO marketing for videos would be:

• Improving page speed and user experience
• Creating a schema markup for easy crawling
• Designing mobile-friendly interfaces

All these factors can significantly impact your rankings on search engines.

Measuring Year-Round Success for Holiday Video Marketing

Once your video marketing strategy comes into action, don’t forget to consistently track performance and report on your progress. You can measure success with several KPIs, such as:

• View count
• Watch time
• Click-through rate
• Engagement rate
• Conversion rate

While these metrics will give you quantitative results, you can also conduct sentiment analysis to gain some qualitative feedback on your holiday campaigns. Comparing current performance against historical data is another way to get a perspective on this.

Get long-term ROI with holiday video marketing

It’s time to say goodbye to the same old holiday marketing tactics and say hello to a new approach to year-round growth. Focus on building meaningful relationships with shoppers through video marketing campaigns running all year round instead of going for the last-minute push.

Bookmark this guide to save our six unconventional tactics for embracing the year-round holiday marketing approach.

Want to see how it’s done? Learn the nuances of video marketing from industry-leading brands. Read our success stories.