Viral Holiday Marketing – How Do They Do It and What Can We Learn
The holiday season is upon us. It's a time to rest and rejuvenate, and it’s also shopping time for both families and brands. People look forward to relaxing and having a good time during this period, and brands are aware of this. The best brands exploit the seasonality with marketing campaigns that resonate with the consumers.
For businesses, the holiday period presents an opportunity to connect with the community positively and light-heartedly that embodies their brand and company culture. Whereas the ultimate goal may always be to increase return on investment (ROI), the holiday season brings forth a uniqueness in how businesses market themselves. Typically, holiday marketing campaigns employed by companies go a little extra in the way they reach the target audience.
Read on to find out the viral marketing strategies employed by some of our favorite big brands and what you can learn from their campaigns so that you can create viral holiday videos of your own. But first, a quick overview of what viral marketing is.
Viral Marketing: What Is It?
Viral marketing refers to an approach used in marketing a product or a service where users help spread the advertiser's message to other websites or create a situation that can result in multi-fold growth. Viral marketing aims to make a product or a service appealing and approachable enough to inspire the masses to engage with it.
Whereas viral marketing techniques have roots in word-of-mouth marketing, they echo the power of peer-to-peer recommendation by using social media and other channels. Typically, viral marketing can create actual results in a short period.
Importance of Viral Marketing
Below are some of the valuable benefits you can accrue from viral marketing:
Lower advertising cost: While it may not happen immediately, viral marketing cuts down advertising costs, given that you already have enough exposure and buzz.
It builds credibility: As more people in the entire network recommend and talk about your brand, your credibility increases among the audience. The buzz generated by viral marketing will surely help boost your product or service recognition.
Remarkable growth: Viral marketing is among the few tactics that can result in explosive growth quickly.
Better visibility: This marketing technique helps enhance the visibility of the business. If you craft an excellent content marketing campaign that ignites the interest of your target audience, increased visibility will only result in increased growth of your brand.
Increased conversion rate: Viral marketing is among the most vital strategies for attracting customers and raising brand awareness. The transformation of a prospective customer into a potential customer may not happen immediately, but it will in the long run.
Examples of How Big Brands Use Viral Marketing
Here is an outline of some of our favorite viral marketing campaign ideas from past seasons:
1. The Santa Tracker by Google
Since its inception in 2004, Google's Santa tracker has been going strong. This marketing campaign enables users to follow Santa Claus every Christmas on his global gift-giving journey.
This campaign was initially started as a simple way of visualizing Santa's journey via Google Earth. Since then, the Santa tracker campaign has evolved in numerous ways. For example, the site has expanded to offer live updates directly from the sleigh, showing information about Santa's cities and much more.
With this campaign, Google manages to market its map service in an interactive and fun way. The key takeaway from the Santa tracker marketing campaign is that it resonates with multiple audiences—it appeals to both adults and young children.
2. Christmas Trucks by Coca-Cola
Conventionally, red and green are the colors associated with Christmas. But that wasn't always the case. This only came to be after Coca-Cola launched its Christmas truck campaign. In 1931, Coca-Cola sought the services of Haddon Sundblom to improve its marketing efforts. Sundblom helped make Santa as popular as he is today: cheerful, bulky, and donning a bright red robe.
This campaign succeeds in engrossing the audience into the magical Christmas world. The brightly-lit trucks are comparable to the festive lighting on Christmas trees and buildings. The trucks themselves add to the appeal of this campaign by magically springing to life.
The Coca-Cola trucks campaign portrays the effective use of nostalgia under tried-and-true concepts. It's no wonder that this campaign creates a sense of tradition around the Coca-Cola brand. Suppose you could create a similar campaign for your brand, albeit on a slightly lower scale; it could help enhance the authority of your business and capture the imagination of your audience.
3. John Lewis Christmas Marketing Advert
Since 2011, John Lewis adverts have made us cry, laugh, and occasionally scratch our heads with the yearly offerings. So what is the magic formula used in creating these festive adverts?
According to Vicki Holgate, the first step is to understand your audience's dreams, hopes, and goals in life. People are driven by their goals and ambitions, and once you understand those, you can come up with a product that can credibly help them achieve those goals.
4. "Red Cups" by Starbucks
Since the launch of the iconic red cups in 1997, Starbucks has created fresh, festive designs each year. Today, Starbucks has solidified its place in our culture and tightly knit communities through its efforts, such as the Red Cups holiday initiative. People eagerly wait for the New Year's design to be revealed, sometimes causing controversies over the holiday cup.
The lesson we learn from the Red Cups campaign is that a cohesive and elegant brand identity may be a potent tool. This marketing campaign also demonstrates that it is possible to build unique traditions tied to your brand and encourage your audience to look forward to them every year.
5. "Holiday Gift Guides" by Etsy
Most holiday campaigns avoid being directly commercial. Instead, most businesses opt to use the holiday season to manage and increase awareness of their brands without being overly pushy.
Nonetheless, Etsy manages to go commercial while also providing its users with helpful content. Instead of going for a big marketing push, Etsy produces annual gift guides to help holiday shoppers to find the best presents to purchase based on different categories and styles.
This is an inventive way of driving additional sales while maintaining the holiday theme. Etsy's Gift Guide campaign also helps funnel customers towards the products they prefer.
The lesson here is that, regardless of whether you can create a dedicated guide or not, it is vital to ensure that your website makes it easy for users to find whatever gift they need to buy quickly. After all, buying gifts for the holiday period can be stressful.
6. "#OptOutside" by REI
Black Friday is widely considered the start of the holiday shopping season. When outdoor retailer REI did not participate in the Black Friday rush of 2015, eyebrows were raised, given that this is one of the biggest retail days worldwide.
This bold move started the #OptOutside campaign, which has become a recurring event ever since. The goal of this campaign was to get customers and employees to spend Black Friday enjoying the outdoors rather than shopping.
REI has since expanded the event to include a search engine that enables users worldwide to share their outdoor experiences. This campaign is an excellent example of a company making a statement about the holiday campaign while remaining true to its brand identity.
After all, REI deals in outdoor equipment, so it makes sense that it encourages people to participate in outdoor activities during the holiday. The #OptOutside campaign demonstrates that you can initiate relevant conversations while also channeling attention to what your business does best.
Tips on How to Create Viral Holiday Videos
From the above campaigns, it is clear that crafting a viral holiday video can be a big deal for your brand. The more views your video gets, the more leads you generate, and ultimately, the more significant sales you make.
Crafting holiday videos with the intention of going viral can also increase your brand awareness. So, how do you create a viral video?
Here is a breakdown of the strategies used in the above holiday campaigns:
Get to the point: The customers' attention span is shrinking, and your video will be competing with basically everything else on the internet. As such, you need to provide as much value as possible within a limited time. In case certain aspects of your video are not apparent, cut them.
The video should resonate with your audience: The best stories evoke emotion, preferably positive ones. Your holiday video should evoke feelings like amusement, interest, happiness, delight, and surprise. The bottom line here is that if your video evokes positive emotions from the audience, it will likely receive more engagement.
Keep it relevant: Your holiday video content should align with the current trends and events. While your audience may not necessarily need your input on every single news piece that trends on social media channels, you shouldn't shy away from incorporating a popular meme or hashtag in your holiday video.
Make your content unique: One thing that the viral campaigns above share in common are that they are all unique. When crafting a holiday video, ensure that it is unique and not duplicate another video.
The holiday period isn't just about spending time with family, traveling, and giving gifts. It is also an ideal time to market your business, increase your end-of-year sales, and strengthen your brand identity. While creating a viral holiday video can help boost your holiday sales, you first need to ensure that the video reaches as many people as possible.