• by Pau Sabria , November 21, 2018

Holiday shopping isn’t what it used to be, due to the surge in online retail and smartphone use. With phones always in hand, consumers expect brands will make it easier for them to discover, interact with and purchase the products or services they desire. Accordingly, competition for attention on digital is fierce.

This year, short-form video will differentiate successful campaigns from stagnant ones because attention spans are shorter, and consumers have grown partial to these formats.

The benefit of short-form video is twofold: it’s much easier to create, and it doesn’t overestimate the attention span of your viewer. Plus, it can help boost brand awareness, brand loyalty and conversions. Given this, it’s hard not to justify using it in your holiday campaigns. 

Begin by taking stock of your existing campaigns and audiences. Look at the campaigns that have performed well over the year, and assess top performing creative, most valuable channels, and most engaged audiences. Creating short-form video using existing creative that you know resonates with your audience is a great way to make old content new again, and customized for the holidays. 

Find Your Creative Spark on Social  

Facebook and Instagram Stories work well to build campaign momentum because they give your audience a glance at what’s to come. The temporary nature stokes interest and heightens the sense of urgency or exclusivity.

Social media and its varied formats are essential to engaging existing audiences, but you’ll also need to think about building new audiences before fully launching your holiday campaign. 

Discover New Leads, and Bring Back Old Ones 

Create custom holiday ad landing pages or update your homepage using short-form video that gets people excited to shop, so they’re engaged as soon as they land. 

To acquire new leads in a short time, you can use existing customer lists to create lookalike audiences on Facebook and Instagram. These auto-generated lists find people with interests or demographics that align with current customers, potentially tapping a new highly-qualified audience. 

Additionally, you’ll want to retarget existing or cold leads with ads or email campaigns. Finally, re-engaging happy customers when they’re shopping is a no-brainer. And when you do so with emails or landing pages that showcase engaging video, you can significantly increase conversions. 

Keep Audiences Engaged 

To keep momentum going beyond the holidays, refresh your creative throughout the season, creating custom messaging for each segment. For example, you may want to give special discount codes to loyal customers, or offer a free gift to a first-timer. 

Countdowns can also build anticipation and keep audiences interested, so consider how you can use short-form video to reveal new offers each day, or build urgency as the shopping deadline approaches. 

However you choose to do it, establishing your brand with dynamic creative makes an impression, particularly when it speaks directly to your audience’s wants and needs. Short-form video gives you the chance to present real use cases, whether that’s showing the progression of finding the perfect gift or evoking the warm feeling of Christmas morning. 

Connect Your Online and Offline Campaigns 

Your online customers and in-store shoppers aren’t distinct categories, so don’t treat them as such. 

Digital engagement with short-form video can be an effective way to drive traffic to your online and brick-and-mortar shops. If bringing people in-store is the goal, use video to conjure nostalgia. Showcasing beautiful retail displays, people using shopping as a bonding experience, and the festive ambiance of downtown areas are all great ways to get people off the couch and into your store. 

Additionally, you can use your holiday digital creative in-store on screens for clean, modern holiday decor that you won’t need to pack away come January. Repurposing short-form video in this way is cost-effective and environmentally conscious.