If you’ve been thinking about the best time to start working on your Christmas ad campaigns for this year, let me tell you the answer’s pretty easy because it’s NOW. Yes, it’s time to get started as soon as the question pops into your head.
It’s important to notice that once the end of the year starts getting closer, it’s only a matter of time until the last three months of the year flash by faster than you can say “Merry Christmas & Happy New Year”.
Of course, we love to give you the answers to the matter when it comes to creating your next Holiday banner ad campaigns. This is why we’ve come up with this quick guide to help you through it.
Don’t stress out and walk with me through the echoing sounds of approaching jingle bells!
How to Start Preparing for your Christmas Ad Campaigns 2019
Within the OnlyMega app, you’ll be able to create some of the most compelling ad campaigns and won’t even have to do it from scratch. However, you will need a little bit of strategic planning before you get your hands dirty in banner creation.
- Define your Target Audience
You need to clearly know who you’re talking to. During Christmas shopping time (mid-November through December) everyone doing online Christmas shopping for family members big to small.
You will need to have your personas defined in order to tailor your creative banner and target them specifically. Conduct research, A/B tests, gather insights, competition, and data on your services or products. All this information is super useful for when the time comes to define your target audience.
Once you have a clear audience defined, this will make the rest of your campaign planning much breezier and ensures you keep your target and not deviate from your goals.
Likewise, it will be important to check if your target audience resonates with the season. And yes, you might think that anything and everything can be sold during Christmas and while it is true that people are spending more money, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will buy your product. This means that if you sell fuel for barbeque, for instance, it might be best to focus your campaigns for the summer season instead.
However, this doesn’t discount any efforts or promotions you might want to get running during the holiday season.
- Define your Theme & Message
The copywriting that goes into your campaign will be the backbone of it all. When you include powerful, compelling, and converting messages, this becomes your whole narrative and a successful branding tool for all your communications throughout the campaign.
- Be clear on what you want to communicate.
- What makes you better than the competition.
- Creatively say what you want to say, grab your audience’s attention when they see your ad through its copywriting.
- What are you about? What does your brand stand for?
- How is your brand different.
- What values are your customers going to enjoy if they buy from you?
- It can be Much More Than Christmas
Hey, it’s not all about the 25th! The Holiday season isn’t made up of a sole event.
Knowing this, your Christmas campaign shouldn’t just focus on Christmas. Remember, most Holiday campaigns are launched in late November and early December and also include holidays that surround Christmas. Your campaign should be able to speak to them as well if this is what your target audience is expecting.
Find out which holidays or special dates your holiday campaign can include.
- Start Making Your Creatives & Strategizing
Other than thinking about brand colors and the banner’s aesthetic and design, you’ll need to strategize your efforts tailored to your target audience. For instance, you can advertise for the same product with different banner ads in different segments. Within the OnlyMega app, you can create multiple banners for each of your products and make separate campaigns for different family members.
During this step, you’ll need to start segmenting your target audience as well as your banners and ads, while strategically delivering them when the time comes.
Focus on how to deliver your creatives and ensuring your campaign stays on schedule.
- The Customer Experience is Important
Christmas and the Holiday season are the most competitive times of the year – and the most fortuitous. Most companies make enough money to make it through another year due to the results of high season sales. This is why you need to take advantage of your Christmas Campaign planning and strategizing as soon as possible.
Apart from selling, make sure you are delivering Christmas campaign ads that create a positive customer experience. Meaning designing ads that are on-point on branding, aesthetics, copy, and hit close to home (speak to the people).
Make sure your messages are not only loyal to your brand’s narrative, but also nice to read when serving them to your audience.
Creating fantastic campaigns that drive customer’s joy and contentment deliver incredible results and your brand will resonate with the people behind the screen. Whatever the approach you create with your campaign, making your audience feel content should be an essential part of your strategy.
5 Examples of Killer Christmas Ads for your Inspiration
- Cairo Festival City Mall
This campaign is visually exquisite and appealing. If you’re interested in making your Christmas ads look absolutely amazing, invest in an illustrator. Your ads will never be forgotten, just take at how sleek this looks!
In this example, Cairo Festival City Mall is communicating the activities happening at the mall during the Christmas season and all the activities people can enjoy – all in a creative way.
- McDonald’s
McDonald’s are experts when it comes to advertising their products in creative means. This is cheeky, quirky, and just plain festive! Can your products have shapes like traditional holiday figures and colors? I guess you’ll have to find out!
- Black & Decker
This ad campaign is delightful because of its simplicity. It is not overwhelming and communicates the value of the products in a direct way. Colors are on point with Black & Decker’s branding while adding their own take on Christmas.
- Alka Seltzer
Don’t be afraid to be entertaining and wacky throughout your holiday campaigns. Ensuring a good customer experience, even if your audience is just viewing your banner ads, is being insightful and making observations that resonate with them.
- Animated Santa – Nike
This charming animation of Santa running for Nike (or any other running shoe brand) is delightful and completely appealing for a banner ad.
Make a Killer Christmas Campaign and Kick Back on New Years
To conclude this very merry article, I’d like to offer a piece of advice: Don’t stress about your Christmas Campaigns. Everyone gets through it, especially when you have the right tools to work with, plan and strategize along the way. Make sure you scratch the banner maker off your list and try the OnlyMega Animated Banner maker for some killer Holiday Season banners.
Let’s get creative!
