Whether you are planning your brand activations for 2025 or looking for a fast turnaround last-minute digital activation, we’ve some insights unwrapped and ready to help.
As we arrive in the last quarter of the year, planning seasonal marketing campaigns can feel incredibly daunting, with Halloween just passed and the Christmas and winter holiday seasons upon us, this time can feel chaotic and ideas often run dry during the last quarter of the year. However, the season is an opportune time to get audiences engaged and talk about your brand with a seasonally-themed campaign and is still important to consider. In this article, there’ll be some Christmas campaign ideas with a focus on brand and prize promotions to enhance shopper experiences during the holiday season.
Even though many brands have already started rolling out their Christmas and holiday promotions and sweepstakes, it’s not too late to join in. Whilst a promotional campaign usually takes a few months to create before it’s ready to be ready for public participation, Having tight deadlines is nothing unusual and it’s still very possible for a solid and compliant promotion to be launched within a limited time frame when you work with the agency or have the right tools. Link up with paid social and PPC to get immediate participation in promo digital.
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This kind of winning moment promotion immediately relates to the elation of winning something with the brand itself. The Advent Calendar is a classic Christmas promotional format that gets shoppers returning to your brand and excited by the building anticipation with each promotion day. The more time customers spend with your brand, the more your brand becomes front-of-mind for them.
Usually, after shoppers enter a promotion, they tend not to think about the promotion after the fact, but when an incentive is given to return, the likelihood of customers remembering and trusting your brand over time increases. Last year in Christmas 2023, there were a whole host of brilliant advent calendar promotions, one that stood out in particular was O2 Priority’s Advent Calendar.
A brilliant way to engage your audiences and get in on the festivities is by creating promotional packaging that attracts audience attention by adding visual variations to a usual and regular product offering. It also creates an opportunity to stand out among competitors within the same aisle and shelf. To keep audiences continually engaged, attach a prize promotion like a sweepstakes or an instant win which can be found through the connected packaging to keep audiences continually interacting with your brand even past the purchasing stage.
In 2023, Coca-Cola, a brand which has famously built up its reputation around Christmas launched a promotional campaign, ‘The World Needs More Santas’, supported by their new packaging designs featuring different illustrations. This new promotional packaging also included a QR code leading to Coca-Cola’s app where shoppers could play seasonal games and enter the Christmas prize draw and instant win promotions. The promotion was a good combination of in-store and digital journeys and integrates gamification into the journey that creates a simple, straightforward but addictive and engaging platformer game experience and is a strong example of connected packaging in prize promotions - or on-pack promotions - can be leveraged to funnel shoppers to further engage with the brand.
Seasonal events are also an opportunity to host something special - doing so allows brands to create a lasting impression and memory with audiences. Make sure these events are also seasonally relevant and appropriate.
For Christmas, this might be a small Christmas market which is a great opportunity to highlight and support craftspeople and vendors in an interesting and festive setting that still highlights your brand.
Alternatively, brands could also create a Christmas Grotto experience, much like the award-winning experiential activation by Tesco which was a massively successful event - what made it special was the timing - after a very financially unstable year in both 2022 and 2023, hosting a completely free Christmas Grotto experience for families made the season special for over 21,000 families that visited. Whilst there was no direct ROI with it being a free event, giving back to customers and the community at large promotes an opportunity to boost love and loyalty for the brand. That being said, using this promotion as a basis, there are ways to better curate the event to your brand as needed.
Bacardi’s gin brand Bombay Sapphire, achieved strong recognition, with their in-store experiential, at John Lewis Oxford Street, linked up in real-time with a national online promotional microsite for the chance to win real sapphires and much more. This helped activate sales in-store and combined the prize pool to the widest possible audience.
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Another award-winning promotion was Furby’s Christmas 2023 takeover of various European capitals with Furby Christmas trees. “The activation could be seen from prominent landmarks within each city, including London's Regent Street, Paris’s Boulevard Haussmann, and Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.” The absurdity and shock factor of the takeover helped this campaign go viral on social media, seeing a reach of over 50 million online and dozens of media coverage.
The scale of this campaign was huge and is an example of the reach and impact of manufactured virality. Taking over a part of a city is a playful and bold way to promote your brand and get audiences talking about your brand on social media.
A tried and tested method of gaining consumer trust and building a rapport with them is through first-hand sampling and testing. When consumers are allowed to see and sample a product, it boosts their confidence in making a purchasing decision. This opens the opportunity for a 2-way ‘transaction’ of sorts, so offer up a marketing opt-in alongside a free prize draw - make sure the digital is suitable for tablet and is handling PII data securely.
For brands in FMCG and CPG, it’s very valuable for consumers to have the chance to try before buying a product since the market for FMCG and CPG is very saturated and dense, making all goods in the market feel very similar and hard to differentiate.
With food being such a big factor in the holidays, food brands can show how their product can be used in cooking or in a way that makes the festivities special around Christmas. Sampling is a great way to inspire audiences and buy and use your product.
At PromoNow, we’re excited to see what activations brands have prepared for the holiday season and if you’re brand is looking to run your own Christmas 2024 promotion, get in contact at promo-now.com/contact or contact one of our experts on +44 (0) 20 380 555 38.
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