8 Best Practices of Instagram Holiday Marketing
With the festive season approaching, it’s time to learn more about Instagram holiday marketing and draw inspiration from eight best practices. Cover photo by Callum Blacoe.
For most ecommerce companies, the holiday season is one of the most productive as your customers begin their holiday shopping before December and you have enough time to acquire new clients and boost sales. In fact, 61% of people start talking about the holidays as early as August.
Looking for new channels to reach your holiday shoppers, consider giving Instagram holiday marketing a try. According to Meta’s own data, Instagram has 2 billion monthly active users and 83% of them discover or research products in-app.
If you haven’t started hinting at your Instagram holiday messaging just yet, now’s the time to get started.
Why Should You Implement Instagram Holiday Marketing?
The fourth quarter of the year is easily the busiest time for retailers and ecommerce businesses. With holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and major sale days like Black Friday coming up, your customers are raring to spend.
According to Adobe Analytics, shoppers spent over $200 billion over the 2022 holiday season, and that’s expected to increase by 3.5% year on year.
Here’s why you should prioritize your Instagram holiday marketing:
- Make holiday purchases online. More than 60% of people plan to do their holiday shopping “mostly online.” This is because online shopping is undeniably more convenient. Plus, shoppers expect to get better details online.
- Spend much time on Instagram. Unlike malls and in-person stores, which people have to go out of their way to visit, everyone is always glued to their phones and on social media. According to data by Statista, U.S. users spend an average of 33.1 minutes per day on Instagram.
- Discover products and services in-app . Instagram has evolved from a photo-sharing social media platform to a multi-hyphenate platform where users can connect with friends, discover new products and services, and shop all in one app.
All in all, it helps to create a data-driven marketing strategy when you optimize your Instagram account for the festive season. The closer you get to the holiday season, the more people are inclined to shop. Running an Instagram holiday marketing campaign can help you stand out from competitors and trigger your customer’s sense of urgency to get ahead of the holiday rush.
We’ve listed eight tips to help you launch a successful Instagram holiday marketing campaign.
1. Leverage the Holiday Spirit
Seeing a mall all decked out for the holidays with lights, reindeer, and Christmas trees somehow makes the idea of spending so much during the holidays feel like a great idea. Holiday decor doesn’t just bring in a festive mood, but it also reminds people that it’s time to shop for their loved ones.
Awaken your customers’ holiday spirit by adding iconic holiday elements to your marketing efforts.
With a strong focus on visuals, it’s a great idea to use a holiday color palette. Use recognizable visuals like wreaths, Christmas trees, and ribbons to drive the holiday traffic to your Instagram page. Think about how inviting a well-decorated brick-and-mortar shop is and try to recreate that online.
Furniture and homeware brand Crate and Barrel started posting holiday-themed photos in October. This encourages its audience to begin thinking about their Christmas plans.
Aside from posting photos with holiday elements, it’s also a good idea to create shopping guides, countdowns, and infographics to help your customers prepare for the holidays and build excitement for your brand.
2. Create Instagram Videos for the Festive Season
Many brands release holiday-themed videos to ring in the festive season. Unlike regular promotional videos, holiday videos tend to focus more on storytelling and the spirit of Christmas. These videos usually tug at viewers’ heartstrings and help build brand affinity.
Canadian airline West Jet is famous for its heartwarming Christmas videos that show what the brand is all about—making its customers happy and fulfilling their dreams.
Taking inspiration from West Jet’s videos, your videos should focus more on your brand story rather than hard-sell content. Otherwise, your brand will quickly drown in the sea of sales-heavy videos.
Pro tip: When brainstorming for your videos, try to think of the role you’d like to play in the lives of your customers.
3. Promote Seasonal Products
The holidays are considered special times, which means you should create special products to match the season. Since these seasonal products are only available during the holidays, their limited-time nature will nudge your customers to make the purchase before they run out or the season ends.
Seasonal products are popular among customers, so promoting these goods on your account helps to spark interest in your business, get more web traffic, or even affect impulse buying.
A simple example would be Halloween-themed items. Since anything Halloween-themed will go out of style as soon as October 31 ends, shoppers will be in a rush to make the purchase in time for the Halloween season.
Take a look at Urban Outfitters’ limited-time offer:
The best thing? Even local businesses can roll out seasonal products and promote them on Instagram to reach a wider audience of holiday shoppers. For instance, sharing a seasonal product recipe is one of the most effective restaurant Instagram reels that increases interest and affects purchase decisions. Starbucks uses it actively:
4. Build Anticipation for Seasonal Sale
The hard thing about launching seasonal sales is that everyone’s doing it. To get ahead of the competition, make sure to hit your customers with reminders and teasers before the sale begins. Instagram has built-in features that can help you create hype for your upcoming sale.
You can use the countdown sticker on Instagram Stories to encourage your followers to set a reminder for your season sale. When the countdown ends, everyone who sets a reminder will be notified when the sale goes live.
You can also build anticipation through in-feed posts and hashtag campaigns. It’s a good idea to set your sale date a day or two before other brands go on sale for a better chance of capturing a bigger market share.
5. Publish Holiday Gift Guides
One of the disadvantages of online shopping is that your customers are bombarded with too many choices. The majority of your customers are likely stressed about choosing the perfect gift for their loved ones—ease their troubles by creating a thoughtful holiday gift guide.
A gift guide can make the decision-making process easier for your customers while at the same time giving you the chance to highlight certain products.
Australian-based travel accessory brand Bellroy publishes a yearly gift guide based on product recommendations by key team members. It also has categories “For him,” “For Her,” and “For Tech Lovers.”
Depending on your target market and products, you can also curate gift guides and seasonal shopping lists based on personalities or people your customers are likely to shop for, such as their mom, sister, and best girlfriend.
6. Organize Holiday Giveaways
Giveaways are a great way to boost your engagement, increase your following, and build excitement for the coming holidays. There’s nothing like free products and gifts to help you attract new customers and stay top of mind for your existing followers.
Since the weeks and days leading up to the holidays will be chock-full of promos and all kinds of come-ons from brands, it’s important to think about what your audience would really want and appreciate. Unlike during other times of the year when people would be happy to win any type of free item, reserve your holiday giveaway for something of higher value to make it special.
Take a look at how skincare brand Glossier did it:
Instead of giving away products that customers can easily find in-store, the brand decided to give away limited-edition sweaters that aren’t publicly sold. The result? Tens of thousands of entries and tons of requests to run another round of contests.
It’s important to make the mechanics as simple as possible to get more people to join. For example, a “like comment, and follow to win” type of contest requires little to no effort to participate.
The more people interact with your post, the more likely the Instagram algorithm will promote it in your followers’ feeds and recommend it to similar audiences.
Make sure to include branded hashtags in combination with generic hashtags like #holidaygiveaway to make it searchable. With the help of hashtag analytics, you will be able to find your participants or lookalike audience who can become your holiday shoppers this festive season.
7. Share Last-Minute Gift Ideas
According to the consumer insights by Google, 84% of holiday shoppers will keep an eye out for last-minute deals throughout the holiday. While a huge chunk of your customers will want their shopping done before the holiday rush, you will have just as many people scrambling to find last-minute gifts and maximizing sales.
Those looking for last-minute gifts are usually hoping to buy multiple of the same items to give to different people. It’s essential to include more affordable and “safe” products for those who need to buy in bulk.
8. Repost Seasonal User-Generated Content
Since today’s shoppers are more discerning when it comes to brand marketing, especially during the holidays, now’s a good time to take advantage of user-generated content (UGC). Combining UGC with tools like AI content generators can enhance the quality and relevance of your promotional materials.
Halloween is just around the corner and people want to boast about their costumes, so it can be a good idea to encourage customers to share their Halloween party photos sporting your products.
Reposting seasonal UGC will not only improve trust and make your brand appear more relatable, but it can also encourage more customers to share their own posts. All in all, it can help to collect customer feedback and understand your audience better.
Pet subscription box brand Barkbox compiles various UGC to create unique content for the holidays.
If you have UGC from other channels, you can also repurpose content for Instagram and maximize its value. Thanks to text summarizers, you can save time and always get the juice out of long user-generated copies.
Get Started with Instagram Holiday Marketing
As more people turn to platforms like Instagram to complete their holiday shopping lists, the pressure to stand out from competitors gets tougher. Use these Instagram tips to help you prepare for the busiest time of the year and create stand-out Instagram holiday marketing campaigns that will set you up for success.
