When the holiday season approaches, brands gear up to make the most of their promotional marketing strategies and advertising spend. To effectively engage consumers and drive sales, it’s crucial to understand the three key phases of holiday marketing and how digital promotions can play a key part in all three phases.

  • Phase 1: Acquisition (this blog)
  • Phase 2: Conversion
  • Phase 3: Driving Sales

Phase 1: Acquisition 

The Acquisition period may typically span from the summer to early October but may vary based on a brand’s seasonality. This is when brands focus on running promotions to acquire valuable consumer data and build a robust consumer list. Let’s explore how brands can optimize their acquisition strategies and set a strong foundation for a sustained marketing success during holiday season.

Captivating Contests and Sweepstakes

Running turnkey contests and sweepstakes is an excellent strategy for brands to engage consumers while collecting valuable data. By presenting enticing prizes and incentives, brands can effectively motivate potential customers to willingly share their contact information, all while generating excitement. Sweepstakes can activate new audiences and produce net-new capture of consumer data, driving future marketing endeavors. This also maximizes your marketing investment as your brand looks to re-market and convert these net-new consumers.

Interactive Quizzes and Surveys

Interactive quizzes and surveys are not only engaging but also effective tools for gathering consumer data. By creating interactive experiences that align with their brand or seasonal themes, brands can encourage users to participate and share their preferences, interests, and contact information. The insights gained from these quizzes and surveys can inform personalized marketing campaigns and help tailor promotions to specific consumer segments. This also leverages another tactic of using promotions to engage consumers in fun “marketing holidays”, read more about this digital promotion marketing tactic on our blog Leverage National Holidays.

Activate Social Media Audiences

The Acquisition Phase of holiday marketing is not just about acquiring more consumer data. To ensure the success of the latter two Holiday Phases (Conversion and Driving Sales) brands must prioritize accumulation of social media following as well. Leveraging the power of social media, brands can run Sweepstakes, Contests, and Giveaways to increase their reach. By hosting shareable and interactive promotions on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X (Twitter), brands can engage their audience, encourage participation, and amplify their brand’s visibility. However, brands that also want to focus on data acquisition rather than just garnering more social followers, can direct users to a promotion microsite where they are required to provide their contact information to submit an entry, expanding the brand’s consumer database.

Here is an example of a brand launching a social promotion in the late summer to foster social following growth prior to the Holiday Season.

By employing these acquisition strategies, brands can collect crucial consumer data during the early stages of holiday marketing. This data will serve as the foundation for data that can drive personalized and targeted campaigns in your evergreen marketing efforts.

In the next part of this series, we will explore Phase 2: ‘Conversion’, where we discuss how brands can stay top of mind during the holiday season and maximize conversion strategies during the noisiest part of the marketing year for consumers.