Who doesn’t like a holiday? Festive seasons boost happiness, restore bonds and bring people closer.

In times of these social celebrations, consumers are eager to spend more on products and services. No wonder, sales are high during holidays.

In fact, merchants from several sectors report that 30-40% of their yearly sales occur during the festive seasons alone, which in India starts from Dussehra, peaks on Diwali, and continues on to Christmas and the New Year celebration.

Last year only, the holiday sales increased by 3% to $626.1 billion. And, this figure is expected to grow year over year.  

To put it in a nutshell, festive seasons are shopping seasons across the world. And, as a business owner, you need to make the most out of it. So…

How do you maximise sales for your business during this festive season?

Visibility is the key.

The best way to increase sales is by being on top of the consumer’s minds. You can achieve this by spending more on ads for page #1 google rankings.

A majority of companies also set aside a huge budget for social media marketing too, because that’s where the consumers hang out.

Only problem is that holding the consumer’s attention is not as easy as you think.

Simple text-based posts and hashtagged greetings like #MerryChristmas fall short of hitting your bottom line.

After all, it’s not just about communicating your holiday offers, it’s more about making sure your brand message sticks in the consumer’s minds and wallets.

This is where visual storytelling comes into the play.

For brand recall and online visibility, nothing works better than visuals. Visual content like pictures, videos, infographics and gifs are the most effective way to grab consumers’ attention today.

Don’t believe me? Check this.

Case Study: Flipkart’s Festive Sales Skyrockets

A few weeks before the onset of the 2016 festive season, Flipkart, the Indian ecommerce giant launched their Big Billion Days marketing campaign.

The brand message was clever and resonating – “itne mein itnaaaa milega” (which means you can “buy soooo much in so less”).

The visual campaign, which involved a series of promotional pictures and videos, showed small kids acting as adults… now that made the ads stick out in consumer’s minds. And, sure enough, when the sales event went live, Flipkart saw a gigantic response:

“What makes it special is that the number of units sold in the first 6 hours of sale surpassed the total units sold in a day during the first day of The Big Billion Days in 2015!”

And, this success is partly because Flipkart’s marketing was splendid. 

So, are you ready to start visual marketing campaign for higher holiday sales?

Of course, right? Visual content can have a dramatic impact on your business sales and conversions. Here’s how smart businesses build visuals ads to influence consumer’s buying decision.

1st Step: Give Your Website & Social Pages The HOLIDAAAY Theme

It’s a festive season. Let your consumers know you too are celebrating by putting on a nice holiday banner image on your website. Go the extra mile to delight your buyers by highlighting special discounts on this special occasion.

For example, check Amazon’s website. They had redesigned their homepage banners to capture the holiday spirit and the appealing festive offers.

Same with your social media pages too… give them all a festive look. Upload a nice holiday cover picture on your Facebook and Twitter, highlighting your sales offer, event or promotional brand message.

And, yeah, don’t forget the logo. Put on a cute Santa hat over your site logo, and say ho ho ho!

Takeaway: Set up the stage for a buying environment; give your website and social media pages a festive look via a nice holiday banner highlighting festive offers/message to excite your customers. In short, create a mood for purchase.

2nd Step: Research Trending Holiday Keyword Hits and Plan Yours

Before you start producing visual content, do a quick search on the Google Keyword Planner and make a list of hot keywords that your consumers are googling for.

If you aren’t already using the Keyword Planner, which is a free tool from Google, here’s what it looks like:

You type in the keyword, and it gives you the hottest keywords for your business. At Crackitt, we make videos that help businesses drive conversion. So, when I typed in the keyword “business videos for holidays”, the keyword planner gave out some really good ideas like video ecards.

Once you are done with the Keyword Planner, do check out the Google Trends as well to understand what’s hot on the web, and then plan and optimise your visuals accordingly to target these highly-searched-for keywords.

Takeaway: Over the web, keywords still decide the flow of traffic to your site. So, do a research to understand what your consumers are searching for in the festive season, and lure them into your website by building attractive visual content and ads that are optimized for those same keywords.

3rd Step: Plan Your Marketing Campaign & Brand Message

With the keywords part done, call up your marketing team, and plan a killer holiday campaign theme.

With the theme and brand message set, you can then start producing visual content for social engagement and traffic.

4th Step: Building Visual Ad Stories That Resonate With Your Customers

Visual content like promotional pictures, videos, gifs and infographics – they all work fine over social media as long as there’s a story in it.

Storytelling is crucial because humans are an emotional bunch. The majority of purchases and interactions that we make are driven by emotions, and not by logic. (Logical reasoning is just to justify the amount of money you are about to spend.)

Emotional marketing is not a made-up story. Research by Corporate Executive Board back this up, stating that emotional marketing beats promotion by 2x.

Ergo, visuals that appeal to your consumer’s emotions will have a higher sales impact.

Here are some best practices for producing visuals that hit your consumer’s emotions right.

1. Images

Images are by far the most inexpensive visual content you can produce this festive season.

Start with the holiday banner images to replace your Facebook and Twitter cover images. This simple act would alert your audience about the onset of holiday season, and make them attentive towards your brand for special discounts and sales offers.

Also, the best thing about holiday graphics is that they are fun to design like this one from Toys-r-Us. Have your in-house designer make one or get some professional agency to craft one for you.

Remember that one picture is never enough. Continue the marketing by posting at least one holiday image for every day. You can even use the same picture with slight variations.

Over on Twitter, it’s a good practice to repeat your posts again as tweets appear in newsfeed in real-time, and by making repeat posts, you increase your chances to reach more consumers.

You would also do well to design images that capture the holiday spirit and lit up smiles on your consumers’ faces. This will get them to like and share your posts, and foster fondness for your brand and its services.

2. Videos

Video: https://youtu.be/cC9auzkKo4s

Whether you want to do a promotional holiday ad story or just want to wish your consumers a happy holiday, video can be the perfect medium for your brand message.

Not only do video ads have higher chances of reaching your consumers, but they also have the highest potential for consumer engagement and brand recall.

Nielsen led a research to find out how video delivers value to brands, and here’s what they discovered.

Source: Facebook Business

3. GIFs

Who doesn’t love a GIF? GIFs are the coolest thing on the social media today. They rack up instant engagement and are loved by the consumers.

Here’s one GIF we made for Molecules.

Source: Crackitt

Now you know what Santa’s reindeers do when they are not running errands for Christmas.

5th Step: Remarketing Will Help Pull Back Your Buyers

Ever visited a website, and then suddenly you start seeing its banner ads on almost every other websites you visit. Well, that’s remarketing, a clever advertising tool that lets you follow (or stalk) possible buyers.

Remarketing works fine just about any day. On holiday seasons, it works even better since consumers are are in the mood for purchase.

So, if you have a product or service to sell, then design a visual ad that highlights product benefits/experience, and put it over for remarketing.

Conclusion

Sales are high during the festive season. Using visual content, you can maximise your product sales in no time. Just make sure to research your target audience and design visual ad stories that resonate.

Have you defined a visual marketing strategy for the holiday season? Let us know what in the comments.

By: Deepasha Kakkar

Deepasha is an Entrepreneur, Visual Marketer and the Founder of Crackitt.com. Crackitt helps startups and enterprises harness the power of visual marketing to generate leads and close sales through Explainer Videos and Infographics.