Jingle All the Way to Sales: Holiday Marketing Tips That Work

The 2024 holiday shopping season is here, bringing both opportunities and challenges for ecommerce brands. As consumer attention shifts toward securing the best deals and holiday gifts, digital advertising becomes the key to capturing their interest — and their wallets.

But shopping this holiday season isn’t just about Black Friday or Cyber Monday. The sales landscape now spans multiple peak windows, from the Cyber 5 (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) to the last-minute rush in early December. For marketers, it’s critical to take a tailored approach to each of these shopping moments to ensure marketing efforts land with consumers. Brands that want to maximize their share of holiday revenue need to plan early, balance promotions with profitability, and leverage cross-channel tactics on platforms like Google, Meta, Amazon, and TikTok.

In this guide, we’ll cover actionable strategies to help marketers prepare for the remainder of the 2024 holiday shopping season. From ramping up campaigns for the Cyber 5 to optimizing for the December rush, we’ll explore how to reach more customers, boost profitability, and ensure your brand stands out during the most competitive time of year.

1. Prepare for Cyber 5 and beyond

Cyber 5 — the five days that span Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — are the biggest online shopping days of the year. Assuming marketers have planned ahead and gotten approval on holiday budgets before the snow started, it’s now time to start executing against them and strategically ramp up efforts. Begin by analyzing historical data to understand how much budget campaigns will need to sustain heightened buyer behavior, especially when this trend begins to pick up at the end of November. Use these data to inform paid search, paid social, and retail media efforts, ensuring budget limitations do not prevent your brand from maximizing revenue during this peak buying season. As most auction-based media platforms will experience increased CPM or CPC due to increased competitive pressure during this timeframe, it’s critical for marketers to evaluate each channel in the media mix to understand the expected inflation in costs and adjust bids accordingly.

Cyber 5 will serve as a beneficial kickstart to the holiday shopping season, which continues into December and peaks during the last few days before Christmas. While studying historical data, look for anomalies that may deviate from preconceived assumptions. For example, one Collective Measures client experiences exceptional demand and performance in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, which is a timeframe many brands ignore due to the sales strength of Cyber 5 and early December. With this insight, Collective Measures planned for increased budgets during this time period to capitalize on demand — when in years past, most media channels were dark. 

2. Diversify channel mix

Conventional wisdom in digital media often leans toward doubling down on tried-and-true channels. But with stronger buyer behavior during this time, diversifying the channel mix can work under the right circumstances. The 2024 holiday season is expected to be incredibly competitive across all digital channels, making diversification critical. To combat increased clutter, we recommend brands consider allocating more budget to platforms like TikTok, Snapchat, or Pinterest. Why? These platforms experience increased utilization and often kickstart a shopper’s journey during the holiday season. They also provide an opportunity to leverage short-form video content, holiday-themed influencer partnerships, and native shopping features to create an immersive shopping experience. 

However, for brands who haven’t yet tried these channels, we recommend thinking critically before executing. The downside of testing in one or two of these channels during the holiday season is mitigated by the sales strength of the overall shopping season. Ideally, getting one or two test channels in market during October or early November is preferred to get campaigns up to speed before Cyber 5.

3. Tactics to try this holiday season

This holiday shopping season, brands need to deploy targeted tactics to capture consumers’ attention and maximize revenue. Utilizing these holiday-specific strategies can make all the difference in standing out during peak moments.

• Promotions: Promotions are a powerful tool for driving sales during the holiday season, but they should only be considered if they align with your brand’s profitability goals. While deep discounts and enticing offers can attract shoppers — especially during competitive periods like the Cyber 5 — they also impact the bottom line. Calculate profit margins to ensure promotions are financially viable and consider setting minimum spend thresholds for discount eligibility, which can increase average order value. Strategically planned promotions, such as bundling complementary products or offering free shipping with a minimum purchase, can drive sales without significantly eroding profit margins. By focusing on profitability alongside sales volume, you can leverage promotions to achieve revenue and customer growth goals without sacrificing bottom-line profitability.

• Holiday-themed creative: While holiday-themed creative is not a novel idea, it has been difficult for some brands to achieve given the bandwidth and resources required to produce the requisite amount of high-quality assets for marketing channels. The proliferation of AI creative tools — both natively within the ad platforms and with third-party software — has made the ability to turn around holiday-themed assets to fit all ad platform specifications possible for advertisers of any shape and size.

Why marketers should care

For ecommerce brands, the holiday season represents a significant portion of annual revenue. In 2024, with consumer attention spread across more digital platforms than ever, it’s essential to have a well-rounded, data-driven strategy in place for both the Cyber 5 and the early December shopping window. Marketers who take the time to strategically plan will not only benefit from a holiday revenue boost, but also strengthen brand equity with new and returning customers. By leveraging historical data to understand granular holiday demand patterns, utilizing cross-channel tactics, and balancing promotional strategy with profit goals, marketers can set the stage for both short-term wins and long-term business growth this holiday season.