Holiday seasons bring happiness, desirable memories, and nostalgia.
- Christmas
- Thanksgiving
- Valentine’s Day
And when people feel heightened emotions, they loosen the purse strings.
That is, your business has better opportunities to sell products…
…but only if you prepare ahead of these seasons.
What do you need to take advantage of holidays to sell more?
That’s what I’ll explore in this social media holiday marketing guide.
Social media holiday marketing ideas
1. Create holiday collections
Holiday collections make shopping easier for your customers.
By grouping products people typically buy during holidays, you remove guesswork and guide them toward the right purchase.
When building collections, think of various holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year, and Black Friday. This way, shoppers can quickly find products for themselves or their loved ones.
For example, Jewelry brand James Avery curates a holiday-themed collection that showcases seasonal pieces.
This approach increases product exposure and positions the brand as a great destination for meaningful holiday gifts.
2. Offer holiday discounts
There are few better ways to hook holiday shoppers than offering a good deal.
Discounts stretch budgets, encourage more purchases, and make shoppers feel they’re getting more value for their money (they are).
Here are a few ways to structure your holiday discounts:
- Sitewide discounts: Apply a particular discount to all products.
- Product-specific discounts: Offer discounts for specific products, especially popular holiday items.
- New product promotion: Use a discount to boost awareness and sell new products.
- Abandoned cart offers: Sweeten the deal for shoppers who left without buying.
- Free shipping deals: Encourage shoppers to buy more with free shipping for orders above a specific amount.
For instance, Jet2 offers $60 off flights to popular holiday destinations, a strategy that drives both urgency and sales.
The key to holiday discounts is simple: present relevant and timely offers so customers feel like they’re getting the best deal possible.
3. Run giveaways and contests
People love the thrill of winning, and they’ll gladly interact with your brand for a chance at free products.
That’s why running giveaways and contests is a great way to boost engagement and following during the holidays.
How do you run effective giveaways?
- Set a clear goal. Do you want more followers, leads, or sales?
- Use an attractive prize. Make sure it’s desirable enough to attract participants.
- Define entry requirements. For example, following your account or submitting details on a giveaway page.
- Promote your contest. Use paid ads or influencer shoutouts to reach more participants.
- Pick and announce winners. Be transparent about winners to build trust for future giveaways.
Using a social media giveaway platform makes managing entries, picking winners, and collecting leads easier.
For example, Boohoo runs a TikTok giveaway, and what’s the entry requirement? Signing up to their Black Friday waitlist.
This giveaway will help Boohoo generate more leads and sales during Black Friday.
4. Encourage user-generated content
What’s more convincing than a customer proudly sharing your product during the holidays?
User-generated content (UGC) builds trust, creates social proof, and expands your brand’s organic reach.
To organize UGC creation;
- Create a holiday-specific hashtag and promote it in posts, stories, and bio. The hashtag helps you easily collect UGC.
- Ask customers to tag your brand in their holiday posts.
- Feature their content on your account to encourage participation.
For example, luxury beach club Peligoni regularly re-shares customer posts on Instagram, showcasing holiday experiences and motivating others to do the same.
Encouraging UGC results in more authentic content, stronger brand credibility, and a ripple effect of free marketing.
5. Scale with social media ads
Organic reach is powerful, but social media ads help you scale what’s working.
With precise targeting, you can reach people who match your ideal profile, whether they’ve visited your site, interacted with your content, or share similar demographics.
Running effective ads involves many steps, including:
- Setting your campaign goals (awareness, traffic, sales, etc.)
- Defining your target audience
- Uploading compelling creatives and copy
During the holidays, ads can push your campaigns to a much larger audience. This is the quickest way to get your offers in front of people looking for good deals.
6. Collaborate with ideal influencers
Ideal influencers are influencers who create content in your industry and can help you reach your ideal audience.
Since many of your ideal prospects already follow influencers, collaborating with influencers will help you effectively promote your holiday offers.
To collaborate with influencers;
- Find the right influencers in your circle or with an influencer marketing tool.
- Create a shortlist of influencers to collaborate with.
- Reach out to influencers to discuss your campaigns.
- Launch your campaigns.
In this Instagram post, Te’a Cooper promotes FashionNova’s holiday discount offer:
With over 60K likes, it’s clear FashionNova got more awareness for its offer.
Influencers provide ready-made audiences that can buy your products during the holidays.
7. Create product tutorials
Product tutorials show your customers how to perform more tasks effectively to get more value from your products.
These tutorials can also work for product tasks related to holidays.
Apart from customers getting more value, prospects can also see the value they’ll get from your product.
For example, Expat in Croatia provides information about the Croatian national holidays:
This post delivers holiday information that its customers will find useful.
8. Take your audience behind the scenes
Great products provoke curiosity about what goes on behind the scenes.
What’s the production process? Who are the people behind the product? What’s the thinking process behind the product’s creation?
You can answer these questions with behind-the-scenes content of your holiday products.
Doing this increases the product’s awareness and value in the sight of prospects.
Here’s Panos Panay sharing behind the scene images for a holiday video shoot:
This is an easy way to engage and build stronger connections with your audience.
9. Run flash sales
Flash sales provide discounts of at least 20% and last for a few hours to a few days.
It differs from traditional discount offers because it offers a bigger discount and runs for a shorter time.
Because of this, flash sales trigger the fear of missing out (FOMO), which can help improve sales, clear out old inventory, and create product awareness.
So, do flash sales for holiday products and promote the offer to your audience.
To get the best results possible, run your flash sales as close to the holidays as possible.
See a flash sale by Birddog Lighting:
This flash sale offers 20% off some products for 2 days.
10. Share unboxing videos
Unboxing products makes people feel good because it’s their first contact with the product.
And a lot of unboxing goes on during the holidays because people give and receive gifts.
Sharing unboxing videos creates a mental picture of what happens after people buy your product.
When creating unboxing videos, ensure they mirror the customer’s experience, starting from receiving the box from a delivery person.
Hello Kitty shares an unboxing video of its holiday collection:
This video created awareness about the brand’s holiday collection.
Create a holiday marketing calendar
To execute social media holiday marketing, you need a holiday marketing calendar.
In this calendar, you can plan various ideas for dates before and during the holidays.
This lets you stay consistent and reach as many shoppers as possible.
Check out content calendar for Instagram, X (Twitter), and LinkedIn to see how to create content calendars for these platforms.
Or use social media management tools.
These tools help plan all your content for the holiday season.
But even more, they let you schedule posts to go live on multiple social media platforms.
Then, you can perform other social tasks with these tools.
Once you decide on the ideas to execute for the holidays, create a holiday marketing calendar to plan content for specific dates.
Conclusion
Ready to launch your social media holiday marketing?
Use these ideas to plan social content weeks before the holidays.
Then get on your customer’s minds before they start their holiday shopping.
Disclosure: When you buy something through one of the links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. We only recommend products we use and/or believe will deliver value to you.
Samuel is a freelance SaaS writer. He has written for top SaaS websites like GetResponse, SweepWidget, and Hopper HQ to raise awareness, attract users, and drive monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Get in touch with him to rev up your content engine.