The holiday season is an untapped source of video marketing potential.

Not only do the holidays offer countless content opportunities, but people are more likely to buy into your product, service, or creative vision during the holidays than any other time of the year. According to Ezoic’s ad revenue index, November and December amass the highest digital ad rates of the entire year!

Online video content offers you the chance to capture much needed ad revenue and traffic. It’s critical that when November rolls around, you’re fully armed with a content strategy to battle your way through the season’s high marketing traffic.  

So, how should you tailor your video content to take advantage of the holiday’s boundless marketing potential?

 

1.    Be Preemptive: What Drove Engagement Last Year?

 

Audiences will re-consume your content if you give them added value.

The holidays offer an excellent opportunity to streamline your marketing campaign, once you determine what content garners the greatest ROI. Using tools like Google Analytics, gather data to measure last year’s engagement to reflect on what worked and what didn’t.

 

Then the fun begins. Based on the metrics you gathered from last year’s campaign, you can reframe your best content and target the right audience. In doing so you can begin to understand what type of content resonated in the holidays last year to optimize your video content for 2019.

 

They’ve most likely already seen what you’re going to show them, but you can be sure they’ll want to know what the experts say is the most important or best content to remember into next year. The more holidays that pass, the more successful your video marketing strategy will be.

 

Analyze, streamline, implement, and repeat.

 

2.    Get Creative: Now that You Have the Data, Re-Envision Your Content!

 

When it comes to strategizing content for your video content, the ball is already in your court — during the holidays viewers are naturally more likely to not only click on seasonal content, but to continue watching.

 

Lifestyle videos garner particularly high engagement. How-to videos that are holiday-themed, or at least allude to the holidays, tend to have fewer bounce rates during this time of the year.

 

Some things to keep in mind when generating content:

 

• Don’t Hard Sell! The secret’s out. We’re not the only ones who know that the holidays have marketing potential. It’s a bit of a double entendre: while people are more likely to engage with videos during the holidays, they’re also more likely to be wary of the oversaturated market and innumerable ads targeted in their direction. Make sure your message is more authentic and personalized to your intended audience. What’s the message you want to deliver to viewers during this special time of year? Hard selling rarely works; this is even more so true during the holidays

 

•  Be politically correct. Christmas isn’t the only holiday! Be aware that not all your audience members may celebrate the same holiday. In fact, you can easily offend those who do not celebrate a particular holiday. Go broad in your messaging, referencing the “Holiday spirit”, for example, to allude to the festivities without inciting backlash.

 

•  Call Them to Action! We all know that the CTA is important at any given time of the year. Yet, during holidays, the CTA is peculiarly perplexing to navigate. Usually we’d advocate for being as direct as possible in your message. During the holidays, however your audience is already on the lookout for the hard sell and will avoid this with a blink of an eye. The key is being transparent, yet subtle at once. Consider using a call to action that invites your viewers to download a free eBook, or incentivize them with additional reading material.

 

What if my business or service is incompatible with the lifestyle videos?

 

Even if your asset is more abstract, there are ways to boost engagement. Offering a ‘holiday discount’ is the most calculable. However, viewers also see value in information. For example, now would be a fortuitous time to offer a free informative email series. Or, run a niche PPC ad campaign using the holiday as an apt prompt.

 

3.    Get Logistic: Factors That Can Cause Viewers to Bounce

 

If you have stellar content, it’s all too easy to forget about the small details. When it comes to video marketing, even one of those minute details can make all the difference in your CTRs, bounce rates, and overall ROI.

 

Things like a slow video load time, and redundant ads are some reasons viewers bounce. If you’re not aware of these potential quagmires, your revenue loss is bound to stack up. Other things you should also consider: video length, delivery method, and text on screen vs. voiceover.

 

As discussed earlier, running analytics on previous campaigns is the best way to determine which of these factors is the outlier causing your video engagement to flop. Set up an A/B test to decipher the issue. Testing a video with a voice-over vs. a video with script, for example, could render eye-opening results.

 

Of course, these logistics are a given for any video marketing campaign, but they’re especially true during the holidays when the video marketing pool is so saturated.

 

The stakes are high during the holidays. With so much competition, having top-notch content based on qualitative data is essential. A keen video marketer will recognize the lucrative potential of the season, and be prepared to ring in the New Year having met all sales goals..