10 Holiday Video Marketing + GIF Ideas To Drive Up Clicks
Every year, the holiday season puts a spring in everyone’s step. But for marketers, it gives them hot wheels, to say the least. This period is full of golden opportunities for brands to amp up their awareness, reach out to existing customers, and build up their lead bank for the coming year.
And you don’t want to miss out on any of it!
In this pursuit of all things sales and revenue-related, marketing teams leave no stone unturned. If you’re preparing to do the same, and want some tricks to drive up engagement this holiday season, you have come to the right place.
Video marketing gives you amazing results throughout the year. The last five years have shown us this format is the king of content and rules consumers’ hearts unabashedly. But it becomes even more special during the holiday season. When the world hits the gas on marketing and is speeding up its efforts, Holiday Video Marketing techniques can be your flashy sports car.
And yes, you can leverage the power and popularity of video for your holiday marketing campaigns too! It will get you attention with speed and style. In fact, you can even become a household name if you get the holiday video marketing game right.
And that is why the Kimp Team has compiled a list of Holiday Video marketing and GIF ideas for your brand to try. Take a look and get cracking!
What’s so special about Holiday Video Marketing?
Everyone you talk to, from marketers to social media experts, keeps telling anyone who will listen to create videos. It seems to be the magical answer to all marketing woes.
At some point, you may wonder, is this all really true? Can creating videos during the holiday season make such a big difference?
Turns out, the data says it does.
The holiday season is primarily a shopping season. Anything that can make customers favor your brands for products and gifting choices, is vital to your marketing efforts. And videos do this brilliantly.
In fact, over 50% of consumers get their product recommendations from YouTube, the largest video platform worldwide. And videos have a higher watch/engagement rate compared to other B2C marketing formats.
From a business perspective, videos bring in a higher ROI and help you make a serious difference in the trillion-dollar holiday industry.
10 Holiday Video Marketing + GIF Ideas To Drive Up Engagement
1) Tell a story via video ads
Holidays are incredibly personal for everyone. People have a heightened sense of emotion, generosity, and togetherness during this season. As a brand looking to connect with your customers, tap into that emotion well. What better way to do that than via video storytelling?
All content works better emotionally when it is positioned as a story with your customers being the prime focus. Video storytelling goes a step ahead and brings the story alive with splendid visuals and audio.
For your holiday video marketing campaign, you can choose heartwarming customer accounts, a community event showcase, or a fictional story that features your product in a holiday setting.
If you notice, the best holiday ads of all time use this proven formula to become the talk of the town.
Kimp Tip: Video ads can feel intimidating to conceive and produce because of the expense and complications they carry. Thankfully, the COVID-19 pandemic, and working from home, have made homegrown videos and animated videos more common. So all you need is a team that can bring your story alive with illustrated characters and well-designed animations.
Need some help in this area? Well, you can get both with a Kimp Graphics + Kimp Video subscription!
2) Gift guides
What do you think of when someone says the holiday season is here? Time to shop for gifts, right? With Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas one after another, customers get into a gift-shopping frenzy. There are just so many people to shop for – friends, family, colleagues, and even customers at times.
Every year, brands come up with gift guides as part of their holiday marketing campaigns to help make customers’ decisions easier. By reducing the friction from the shopping process, they aim to improve their conversion numbers.
But there is a large section of the consumer world where mere images on a guide just won’t work. So if an ecommerce brand wants to cross this barrier, we suggest video gift guides.
You focus your product beyond the 2D level, showcase it in use, improve the presentation 100x, and engage the audience for a longer time. The enhanced engagement time matters because the longer customers see the product, the more details they notice.
Video gift guides are easy to share across social media, landing pages, newsletters, and webpages. You can also create short-form content such as GIFs for Instagram Stories and Snapchat from these guides. Reach customers at every touchpoint with video gifting guides and see the magic happen.
Kimp Tip: Gift guides are a staple of holiday marketing campaigns. And with video you are giving your potential customers an upgrade on an old classic. Include closed captioning, text overlays (for pricing, product descriptions), and quality stock audio to enhance your video gift guides.
The Kimp Video subscription allows you to create stunning video gift guides with no hassle. We bring your vision to life. Ask us how today!
3) Video Greeting Card
Holiday seasons are incomplete without greeting cards. Personal or business greeting cards are important. Now you may wonder how a greeting card helps you with sales in the holiday season?.And why is it in a blog about holiday video marketing ideas?
Well, if you think that greeting cards are just meant to exist in a static image form, you are missing out on a lot. The holiday season is the time to go all out and indulge in your most creative ideas. It is the time for blingy animations, GIFs, and flashy video greeting cards.
Videos get 3x more attention, such as clicks and engagement, so these greeting cards are a silent advertisement for your brand and your holiday promotions.
Below is an animated greeting created for a Kimp client that combines custom illustrations and animation.
Kimp Tip: People share greeting cards widely. You can use this consumer behavior to your advantage. Create GIF greeting cards that carry your brand’s visual identity subtly. Add it to the GIPHY keyboard with all the right tags and it could become a household name overnight.
You can also include a footnote about your sales and discount campaigns on the greeting card with an exclusive discount code. Two birds with a stone, right?
4) Sale Teaser and Promo
Holiday marketing campaigns have a singular goal of driving traffic to a retail/ecommerce store, or website, and giving momentum to the ongoing holiday campaigns. So the holiday video marketing content you create also has to follow the same pathway. Traditionally, teasers, trailers, and promos work the best for this marketing intent.
These short-form FOMO generating sneak peeks tick a lot of boxes off for garnering attention and generating traffic:
- Raises awareness about the sales you have planned for the holiday season.
- Encourages customers to check your newsletters, social media handles, and website for more updates.
- Sign up for early access to avoid missing out on favorite products.
As a result, you end up building a highly engaged community that is ready to engage and transact when you finally go live.
Kimp Tip: Teasers, trailers, and Promos are about 80% presentation + 10% content + 10% distribution. So, if you nail the presentation, you are golden. Choose an exciting thumbnail, opening image, and audio to hook people in. Keep the length short so that customers reach the CTA and the sign-up screen quickly.
You can choose an elaborate production like Shopee Singapore did above, or choose a simpler animated format as did their Philippines branch.
With Kimp Video, you can create unlimited teasers and promos for your sale campaigns to reach a wider set of customers. We also help you repurpose your videos for each platform. Everything is under a single flat monthly fee plan.
5) Sale countdowns
So, the teasers and promos are out. Your customers, followers, and email subscribers are waiting with bated breath for the sale day. Or so you think! But the harsh reality is that there are thousands of brands with promos out and sales on the same day.
So it’s important to consider that a single post or email will not keep you on everyone’s minds. No matter how great it is.
You need constant presence and engagement to ensure that people fill their carts when the sale goes live. And that is why we suggest creating Sale Countdowns. A Black Friday countdown, or even a Christmas sale countdown, ensures that customers are constantly aware of what’s in store.
Now, you have to be as creative with the countdowns. Create timer-related GIFs, product reveal GIFs, short-form videos to post on Instagram Reels, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram stories.
Kimp Tip: Sale countdowns are also ideal for newsletters. But at the risk of cluttering inboxes, you can start by T-5 day for email subscribers. Ensure that your sale countdowns follow the respective holiday theme, such as a particular color scheme for BFCM weekend or Christmas, so that the spirit is always intact.
6) Educational videos
There is always value in educational content such as How-To-Videos, tutorials, product demos, and explainer videos. This is true during the holiday season as well. Customers look for party ideas, decoration ideas, gift wrapping guides, recipes, demos on cooking appliances, tips for oncoming winter, and so on. Just about anything and everything to make the holidays as joyful as possible.
If your brand and its offerings intersect with these topics at any point, this is your cue to step up and create educational videos on them. You can repurpose existing blogs, long-form content pieces, carousel posts, and more for this purpose too. But ensure that the holiday design theme features across all the videos.
Even if your brand does not explicitly deal in these topics, there is no harm in creating helpful content just to help your customers. It might earn you brownie points. You can also create tutorials on the holiday shopping process, coupon code application, or delivery processes. Things that will make purchasing from you easier.
Kimp Tip: If you have existing videos on these topics and want to reuse them, we can make it possible for you with some editing. Also, if the video you create is longer than a minute, we strongly suggest breaking it down for platforms like YouTube shorts, Snapchat, Instagram Reels, Tiktok, and Facebook for wider reach.
Looking to maximize the value of your video content? Work with the Kimp Video team for high return-yielding ideas. We can help you optimize, and repurpose your videos to get the most out of them!
7) Holiday company video
Our first point spoke of how the holiday season is a very personal and community-building season. Today’s customers want to see the real and unpolished face of a brand they support and engage with. Experts argue it is one reason why Snapchat and TikTok have become preferred places for them to follow brands.
Even if you are not on these platforms, you can achieve this by creating company videos such as holiday celebrations, employee spotlight, or the initiatives you have in place for the team this holiday season.
Company videos during the holiday season help customers connect with you and see the genuine face of your brand. This will surely speed up brand awareness and sales in the holiday season.
8) Create a year in review
Creating a year in review concept has been around for a long time. But Spotify revived this trend with their recent #SpotifyWrapped series. Their unique curation of playlists from customers and the streaming numbers of individual artists has been an instant hit.
You can replicate this for your brand too. Create a holiday video montage of your best moments from this year and tailor it to the holiday. Some examples of this holiday video marketing idea are:
- “Top 10 moments we are thankful for”.
- “Our best numbers/moments from the past year”.
- “The top-selling products of this year”, and so on.
You can create these videos for each holiday marketing campaign you run. They will help you showcase your achievements to your customer and also establish your value in the market.
So build your trust in the market amongst your target audience base and speed up your growth with a “year in review” video.
9) Thank your customers
Besides the “Year in Review” series, you can also take a beat to thank your customers. Now, this can be for the entire calendar year, or after a particular sale campaign to celebrate your sale numbers or other milestones.
You can share it via your newsletters, social media posts, or even billboards, as most major brands do. While this is going down the beaten path, you have every opportunity to spruce it up. Animated billboards, GIF newsletters, or even resharing customer interviews and announcing a special giveaway for them are just some ideas.
The sky is truly the limit.
Also, when you thank your customers who worked with you this year, it generates goodwill among potential customers too. But for that, they must hear the message, and that is why we suggest a video format for this holiday marketing idea as well.
10) Product showcase
Beyond the traditional gift guides, there is merit in creating an exclusive product-centric holiday marketing campaign. Most brands have product launches specifically for these holidays, and you don’t want to hide those on a curated list. No, they deserve their 15 seconds of fame.
A holiday-centric product showcase can take many forms, such as:
- A product-reveal GIF or short video on social media, newsletter, and your website.
- Feature breakdown videos of the product to explain its USP and value to the customer.
- Animated explainer videos for your YouTube channel.
Since this product showcase is happening in the holiday season, it is best if the video/GIF carries holiday-related design elements such as color, font, imagery, and overall design style.
Choose Kimp for engaging Holiday Video Marketing
Videos can be really expensive and laborious to produce. But they are almost indispensable for any major marketing campaign and more so for a holiday marketing campaign. When content promises to deliver exceptional results, it bodes well to invest in it with the right team.
With Kimp Video’s unlimited video design service, you can create unlimited videos for a variety of platforms and use cases at a flat monthly fee. And you get only the best quality from us because you get unlimited revisions until you are absolutely happy.
Have multiple brands in your company, with different styles? We’ve got you covered. All for that flat monthly fee.
So what are you waiting for? Sign up for the free trial now and start creating.