How to Boost Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns with AI

Seasonal holidays are the foundation for most marketing calendars, especially for the B2C segment. Holiday marketing refers to limited-time campaigns to promote businesses and specific products during holidays such as Christmas, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Easter, etc.

The idea behind holiday advertising is to seize the moment when consumers are looking for gifts, holiday attributes, or services related to a holiday theme; all in order to boost sales by offering them exclusive deals or limited-edition products.

Festive marketing often includes tailored campaigns focused on celebration, holiday spirit, gifting, or showing gratitude to others. At this time, brands use a mix of communication channels such as email, social media, paid advertising, blogs, and more. AI tool integration—like those presented in Creative Suite API by Depositphotos—has great potential to help businesses craft a winning strategy, distribute marketing budgets wisely, and stay relevant to their audiences.

When should I start holiday marketing?

Successful holiday marketing campaigns have proper timing, consider their local audience’s holiday traditions, and offer customers the products and services they need most during the holidays.

Let’s take Christmas marketing campaigns as an example. Christmas campaign planning often starts early—around September or October. Since this holiday is about gift exchange, brands start promoting relevant products in November to make audiences aware of them and create anticipation. Then, on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s time to offer them to customers with exclusive discounts and offers. In December, prices for the same goods and services may increase again to give users a last-moment deal and even more sales.

Holiday marketing campaigns may start later if your business provides services or specific products that people don’t need months before the festive event. For example, in HoReCa and food production, customers make purchase decisions in the middle of December. On the contrary, people buy exotic trips, cars, or luxury products months in advance because they need time to collect money or compare similar market propositions.

If you are new to seasonal campaign planning, read our article to simplify some of your tasks using technologies—AI Marketing: How to Enhance User Experience Through Automation.

Holiday marketing strategies by platform

Seasonal campaigns on social media

Captivating visual storytelling matters most on social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, or even LinkedIn. The best strategy is to tell users a holiday-related story using eye-catching images and videos where your products appear.

To expand your reach, include holiday hashtags and user-generated content. Thematic polls, contests, and quizzes will help you boost engagement—significantly, if they are leveraging the spirit of a specific holiday. Plus, include time-limited deals with countdowns in your social media plan. AI Image Generator can help you create more unique visuals and produce content with fewer resources.

Holiday trends in email marketing

The key to successful email marketing is segmentation and personalizing your marketing messages. One-deal-for-all is a bad idea when you work with audiences of different ages, professions, genders, and nationalities. AI tools can help you personalize customer experiences by making your segmentation more precise and studying user behavior on your website.

You can also craft campaigns for loyal customers, early buyers, and last-minute shoppers. If you plan to distribute more than one offer email, focus on building user anticipation first. For example, you can tease sneak peeks of your holiday-only products or offer subscriber-only access to early deals and pre-sales.

Holiday marketing ideas for websites

The traditional kit for seasonal marketing campaigns on commercial websites includes holiday-tailored landing pages, offer banners and pop-ups, and blog activities. Most often, brands promote one deal in all of these placements to avoid confusing customers with various deals with different terms. However, AI for user segmentation and dynamic content allows businesses to develop separate offers for their customer groups.

Seasonal website campaigns involve limited-edition products, holiday bundles, and time-limited deals. To make deals even more attractive to audiences, you can also add free shipping. Regarding blog articles, we recommend you publish more about gift ideas and seasonal How-tos.

Paid holiday advertising on third-party websites

Social media, partner websites, and search engines can help you promote your holiday offers. To maximize results and save money, choose platforms where you can specify your audience and target ads to customers similar to your best-performing groups on social media and websites.

Advertising becomes more expensive during the peak holiday season, intensifying competition for user attention. So, if you are not ready for big spendings, opt for early and post-holiday campaigns. Moreover, you have better success with users who have visited your website or followed your social media page. Use paid ads for retargeting and personalized discounts for those who haven’t converted yet.

Holiday marketing campaign ideas to start your planning

#1 Gift guides

Guides full of ideas on what your customers can gift their friends, relatives, and colleagues helps with boosting their loyalty and selling more relevant goods. Gift guides can be a part of your holiday email marketing campaign or blog activities. In your guides, try to provide audiences with insights and valuable advice.

#2 Holiday countdowns

Offer time-limited deals to your customers to generate urgency in your marketing messages. Promote your deals on all communication channels, including social media and email. You can have one deal for the whole sales period or offer something new daily (for example: Advent Calendars).

#3 Experimental holiday campaigns

Interaction with potential buyers makes your brand more memorable and helps you generate positive associations about your products. You can run a festive product activation campaign offline by allowing them to participate in quizzes or games during holiday events, or have a shareable interactive experience such as creating a custom post or gift card on your website.

More on this topic here—Experiential Marketing Explainer: Types, Tips, and Brand Cases.

#4 Limited-edition holiday design products

Most popular holiday marketing strategies are built around the sense of exclusivity associated with product lines tailored to specific events and holidays. Such items can even become collectibles! Offer users holiday products in a limited quantity and promote them through influencers on social media.

#5 Donating a product for each purchase

This type of holiday campaign can be charitable or family-focused. The idea behind it is to motivate customers to buy a product by giving them a second one for free. If you partner with a charitable foundation, you can donate a gifted product to someone in need. If not, you can emphasize that buyers will get a product they can gift to a loved one.

#6 Early-access offers for subscription

Motivate your blog readers and social media followers to share their contacts with you to get exclusive discounts, early-access propositions, and product offers for holidays. As a result, you could expand your subscriber base for future campaigns.

#7 Last-minute bargains

This is a good chance to eliminate products before the beginning of a new season. Reduce the price of product leftovers significantly and send promo emails to users who haven’t bought from you yet. Emphasize their opportunity to get gifts for friends and relatives on time by granting them super fast shipping or digital gift cards.

Final thoughts about the holiday time for brands

Holiday marketing is an exclusive opportunity for companies to sell more, gain new customers, and raise brand awareness. With AI-powered tools like AI Image Generator or Background Remover by Depositphotos, marketing teams can boost their metrics and save by automating and personalizing their seasonal campaigns.

However, around a holiday, brands can also utilize AI tools to analyze user behavior and predict social media trends to optimize campaign planning, achieve better audience segmentation, and tailor deals to specific audiences. Besides, AI-powered chatbots and tools for dynamic pricing can improve customers’ shopping experiences and motivate them to recommend your platform to their friends.

Mix and match AI tools to achieve better results. Explore Creative Suite API right now and use it during the upcoming holiday season.

Holiday marketing FAQ

What are examples of successful holiday marketing campaigns?

Some of the world-renowned holiday advertising campaigns are Coca-Cola’s “Holidays Are Coming”, Starbucks distributing their holiday cups, Amazon’s “Can You Feel It?” with signature smiling boxes coming to life, IKEA’s “Silence the Critics” featuring a rap battle, Burberry’s series of Christmas campaigns often starring prominent figures from fashion, movies, or music scene.

Find more inspiration here—The Most Atmospheric Christmas Ads Capturing the Spirit of the Holiday Season.

What are five marketing strategies that retailers spend half of their annual budget on?

The most expensive holiday marketing campaigns include digital advertising (PPC and paid ads on social media like TikTok, Meta platforms, and YouTube), content marketing activities, visual merchandising and offline experiences, customer loyalty programs, and omnichannel marketing.

How has the holiday shopping season affected Thanksgiving traditions?

Thanksgiving festive marketing—Black Friday and Cyber Monday activities —reshaped Thanksgiving traditions. The holiday season is now more associated with mass shopping and deal hunting than family gatherings and feelings of gratitude. Thus, modern families are building their celebrations around shopping plans.