9 Best Holiday Marketing Ideas to Outsell Your Competitors (2024)

holiday marketing ideas to drive traffic and rocket sales

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It’s that time of the year when everyone’s on the hunt for the best deals, and businesses are hustling to boost sales before the New Year. And to stand out this holiday, you need a solid marketing plan and lots of creative ideas, especially regarding the marketing strategy.

In the last blog, we have guided you through all the prominent trends and insights of this 2024 holiday. Now, it’s time to use those insights to craft holiday marketing strategies that work for your business. Let’s look at the 9 best holiday marketing ideas you can apply to drive more traffic to your online store and rocket your sales in 2024.

Take advantage of niche holidays

While Black Friday is a key event for holiday marketing, targeting niche holidays can help you reach a focused audience with less competition.

Small Business Saturday

Celebrated the day after Black Friday, Small Business Saturday encourages consumers to support local and small businesses. 

Therefore, it is a great opportunity to highlight your personal brand story and offer deals that appeal to shoppers looking for something different from big retailers.

Small business saturday
Holiday Marketing Ideas

Green Monday 

This holiday takes place on the second Monday of December and targets last-minute shoppers. It’s a great opportunity to offer quick deals or limited-time promotions to those scrambling to finish their holiday shopping. 

Giving Tuesday

The Tuesday after Thanksgiving is a global day dedicated to generosity and giving back. Businesses can participate by offering promotions where a portion of the profits is donated to charity, or by running special sales tied to causes. 

Cyber Monday 

This is perfect for e-commerce businesses. Falling on the Monday after Thanksgiving, this day focuses exclusively on online shopping. 

Create special digital promotions and discounts to capture customers searching for last-minute holiday deals online, even if they missed Black Friday offers.

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Provide solutions to common holiday issues

The next holiday promotion ideas for small businesses is that the holidays often come with shopping stress. But e-commerce businesses can help ease that by offering content that provides solutions to common holiday problems. 

Holiday styling tips

For instance, if you’re in the fashion industry, you can create holiday styling tips that feature your products, showing customers how to put together outfits for different events.

Gift guides

To further reduce shopping stress, offer gift suggestions, tailored to specific audiences, such as “Gifts for busy professionals” or “Last-minute gift ideas for parents,” or bundle related products into gift sets. 

These guides make shopping easier for your customers and increase the visibility of your products, helping drive sales.

Holiday gift guides

Decorate your websites & social pages

To make your e-commerce store shine during the holidays, give it a festive makeover. Decorate your website and social media pages with holiday-themed visuals, colors, and cool graphics.

A nicely decked-out online space creates a cozy vibe, drawing customers in to explore and shop. 

Take a peek at how Starbucks does it – they’ve infused their profile with that festive Christmas feel, getting customers pumped up when they drop by their social page.

Holiday website & social pages

Optimize email marketing

One of the best tools for small businesses to market their product is email marketing, so here are 5 promotion ideas you could take advantage of this holiday.

Cart abandonment reminders

A great way to recover missed sales is by sending cart abandonment emails with a holiday twist. 

Remind customers about their left-behind items, and add a festive offer, like a small holiday discount or free gift wrapping, to encourage them to complete the purchase.

Holiday cart abandonment reminders

Fun interactive content

You can also incorporate interactive elements, like clickable gift boxes or digital scratch cards. 

These fun elements engage customers and can reveal exclusive holiday deals, boosting interaction and increasing click-through rates during the festive season.

Stock alerts

You should highlight bestsellers and send holiday stock alerts. Notify customers about popular holiday items running low or alert them when fresh stock arrives. 

This urgency-driven strategy encourages shoppers to act quickly, driving sales of in-demand products.

Holiday email stock alerts

Post-holiday upsells

Keep the momentum going by suggesting complementary products like accessories or holiday-themed packaging to encourage additional purchases.

Email automation to simplify email marketing

Pro Tip: Consider adopting an automated email flow to increase your store’s efficiency during the holiday weeks. Here’s an example:

  1. Use a seasonal welcome email: During the holidays, look for new subscribers. Send a welcome email with a promotional code or a holiday greeting.
  2. Use lead scoring to target leads: Send emails to prospects who are likely to purchase based on user behaviors.
  3. Create abandoned cart automation workflows: Send abandoned cart emails to secure holiday sales.

If you want to take advantage of email marketing, we suggest you take a look at NestSend – a one-stop email marketing automation solution to win customers for life & drive sales. 

Simple but effective, NestSend is available for free, so grab the offer now.

Make your ads worthwhile

Running ads during the holiday season is essential for boosting sales, but to truly make them worthwhile, you need the right marketing strategies.

We’ll help you understand how to get the most out of your holiday Google Ads, TikTok Ads, and Facebook Ads marketing campaigns.

Google Ads 

Use holiday-themed shopping ad extensions like “Free gift wrapping” or “Extended holiday returns” to gain an edge over competitors.

Target keywords such as “Gift ideas for men” or “Halloween gift guide 2024” and direct ads to landing pages with curated product collections to improve holiday marketing conversions.

Holiday google ads

Run countdown ads like “Only 2 days left for free shipping” or “Last chance for Holiday discounts” encourage shoppers to act quickly during the hectic holiday season.

Use tools like Google’s Auction Insights to monitor competitors. If they’re outbidding you or offering better deals, adjust your bids or add perks.

TikTok Ads

Use TikTok’s interactive features like polls or Q&A to create UGC content. For example, a holiday poll asking users to vote on gift ideas boosts engagement and marketing visibility.

This kind of engagement helps your ads feel more organic and increases visibility on the platform. 

You can check out our blog on the most trending TikTok products this season to find inspiration for your holiday sales.

Businesses should leverage TikTok Spark Ads to promote UGC from influencers or users, creating authentic ads that resonate with holiday shoppers.

Lastly, use TikTok Shopping Ads to let users shop directly from the app, streamlining the buying process and driving holiday sales.

Facebook Ads

To boost performance during the holidays, create segmented holiday ads for different audiences. For instance, offer “New Customer Holiday Discounts” for first-time buyers and “VIP Holiday Perks” for loyal customers.

Next, leverage Facebook Shops for seamless shopping. Set up a Facebook Shop and link it to your ads, allowing users to shop directly from the platform without leaving Facebook.

Finally, run a series of retargeting ads, instead of repeating the same ads.

Start with “Holiday gift ideas,” followed by a “Last chance for free shipping” reminder, and finish with “Final call for holiday discounts” to guide shoppers through the marketing buying journey effectively.

Holiday marketing strategies: Facebook ads

Use an analytics tool

Running ads during the holiday season is crucial, but without the right tracking and optimization, you could be missing key opportunities. 

To make your ad efforts truly effective, you need a tool that provides real-time insights and helps you adjust marketing campaigns to maximize performance during this holiday season.

NestAds offers e-commerce businesses a comprehensive dashboard that centralizes data from platforms like Facebook, Google, and TikTok. 

This dashboard allows you to monitor all your key metrics, such as CTR, conversions, and ROAS all in one place. So you can easily pinpoint which ads are driving results and where adjustments are needed.

Another powerful feature of NestAds is its ability to track the overall customer journey. NestAds gives you a complete view of how customers interact with your ads across multiple platforms and touchpoints.

NestAds Customer Journey

Partner with the right influencers

Collaborating with the right influencers can significantly boost your holiday marketing campaigns by connecting your brand with their trusted audience. 

However, it’s essential to choose influencers wisely by considering three key factors: expertise, demographics, and reach.

Holiday marketing strategies: influencer partnership

Livestream your holiday sales

Live-streaming can create excitement and urgency around your holiday marketing campaigns and here’s a quick guide on how you should roll out your livestreams this holiday season.

Before the livestream

Start by generating excitement well before the livestream. Tease the event with sneak peeks of the products you’ll feature, share behind-the-scenes footage, or run countdowns across your social media platforms 

To further hook people before the event, create pre-livestream giveaways. For example, offer a chance to win a product by sharing or tagging friends in your promotional posts. 

During the livestream

During the livestream, it’s essential to create a high-energy, interactive shopping experience that keeps viewers engaged. Encourage participation with polls, contests, and audience shoutouts to make the experience more engaging and fun 

To build excitement, keep energy high by answering live questions. Incorporate time-sensitive deals like flash sales, and use countdown timers to remind viewers that these offers won’t last. 

Repurpose livestream content afterward

After the event, repurpose content by sharing highlights on social media or using key moments for Instagram Stories or TikTok clips. Embed the full video or snippets on your website or product pages to showcase your products and engage customers who missed the livestream.

Livestream holiday marketing ideas

Offer exclusive holiday discounts

Data from Statista shows that 89% of Millennials and 78% of Gen Z in the US would try a new brand if they were offered a discount. 

Here are three typical types of holiday promotion ideas that work like a charm for small businesses.

Quantity breaks/volume discounts

The more you buy, the more you save! Think of it as a tiered pricing strategy, based on how many products a customer buys. 

For example, holiday shoppers could buy three bottles of wine and get a discount on each bottle, or they could buy six pairs of socks and get a discount on their overall total.

promotion holiday marketing ideas

Multi-product bundles

Product bundling is selling a combination of multiple products at a discounted price. For example, if you sell clothing, offer specific shirts and pants that match up well in the bundling widget. 

Maybe you have products that aren’t converting as well separately, so you could try to create bundles with other popular products to sell more of your inventory. 

Product bundling not only maximizes revenue from each customer but also provides an exciting experience for your customers. While saving money with good deals, they can try other items they may have not originally purchased or even new ones that you want to introduce.

Buy one, get one free (BOGO)

66% of shoppers like BOGO the most out of any type of discount promotion. It’s a win-win for you and your customers, after all. Holiday shoppers can stock up on gifts while you can move inventory effectively.

If you have excess inventory after Christmas, make your end-of-year sales BOGO-centric to clear your shelves and make room for exciting new products in January. 

However, please keep in mind that if an item can sell multiple units at full price, you don’t need a BOGO sale to roll these sales out once.

Buy one get on (BOGO) holiday promotion ideas for small businesses

During the holiday season, get ready to juggle multiple promotions to meet customer demand. No matter the offer – be it product bundles, volume discounts, or BOGO deals – you’ve got to keep a close eye on their performance.

To make your life easier, we suggest leveraging our Shopify solution. Enter Nestscale Bundles, the all-in-one solution for handling all your holiday marketing campaigns. 

With Nestscale Bundles, you can craft and customize your promotions, and monitor their performance, all in one user-friendly platform. It’s a convenient and efficient choice for the bustling holiday season.

Run contests on social media

Social contests have shown to be an excellent way to increase holiday sales. Hence, you can consider putting it into your holiday marketing campaigns. 

Whether it’s a giveaway, a photo competition, or a video creative challenge related to your products, contests are a fun way to involve your customers. People love the chance to win something special during the holidays. 

It not only encourages participation but also spreads the word about your brand as participants share their contest entries with their friends and family. 

Lastly, remember to measure the contest result. to see how your engagement activities are impacting your business performance.

Ready to utilize these holiday marketing ideas to boost your sales this season?

For retailers, the holiday season may be the busiest time of the year but it’s also a great opportunity to boost end-of-the-year revenue and brand awareness. From optimizing your store design to planning social commerce, email marketing, and holiday promotions, you have a lot of things to do. 

We hope our comprehensive list of ideas helps you build perfect holiday marketing campaigns & strategies to drive more traffic and rocket your sales. Now it’s time to turn your holiday marketing strategies into execution with NestAds.

NestAds holiday marketing campaigns

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