It might make you sigh in October, but come mid December we’ll all be giddy with excitement at the thought of the big guy heading down the chimney. True, it’s a very expensive month, and not great for the waistline, but it’s a fantastic time to market to your customers.
Video marketing campaigns that tap into the festive merriment are an effective way to reach your audiences.
Take the best known example – John Lewis. This is a company that have invested so much in making a festive advert, it is now a British institution. Punters excitedly awaiting each year’s instalments as if it were a movie release rather than a Christmas advert! We’re not saying whatever you do will have that level of impact, but you never know, in your industry circles you could create yourself a bit of a marketing coup by making yourself the ‘John Lewis’ of your sector!
Below are a few examples of great ways you can tap into the Christmas spirit with a festive campaign.
Increase your bookings
Lots of businesses, particularly in the leisure and hospitality sectors, make a huge portion of their annual turnover during the month of December. Corporate and company parties, Christmas day lunch and New Years Eve are all big money makers, but it’s important to get them booked in nice and early.
Traditionally this involves sending out brochures or cold calling, which are costly and time consuming ways to reach people. Producing an engaging video and sending out via social media channels or as part of newsletter are great ways to reach more people cost effectively. You can also get really targeted with your campaign by advertising on LinkedIn to the people with the job title you’re looking to engage, or target the geographical location with Facebook or Instagram adverts (all of which we can also help with!)
Below are a couple of examples of Christmas campaign videos we did for local hotels, producing the entire production in house, including writing the lovely poem for the Hartsfield Manor video. Because we had a very particular idea for the voiceover style, we sourced it from a high profile opera singer to ensure we got the output we wanted. All part of the service.
Since launch in late September to the date of this blog post, the hotel have received 5,500 views on Facebook alone, let alone YouTube, Twitter and the website. This shows how a video can reach so many more people so much more cost effectively. How much would 5.5K brochures and their postage cost?
Reigate Manor: Christmas Party Promo from Square Daisy on Vimeo.
Hartsfield Christmas from Square Daisy on Vimeo.
Spread your Brand
One of the ways to gain more traction with your brand is to create a series of videos that lead up to Christmas. These are often very short videos and used on social media to generate some brand awareness, but they can also become viral and therefore get you much more traction and a greater return on investment.
Last Christmas we created a short series that we uploaded each day to Twitter and Facebook which spanned the whole 25 days to Christmas. We took our logo and created a character called ‘Daisy’ who was subject to a fun little animation each day, finishing with a little Christmas cracker joke. It was light hearted and because each edit only lasted about 15 seconds, was something people watched and actually started to look forward to seeing each day pop up in their feeds!
It was a very successful campaign and led to some concrete enquiries and confirmed business, with actual measurable statistics below:
- 1.5% engagement on average, high of 4.3%
- Impressions were up 11,000
- Profile views up by nearly 1,000
- 66.67% increase in traffic from twitter over December
Below are a couple of examples of the animations that we created:
Send a Digital Christmas Card
We all want to send a Christmas Card to our suppliers and customers to wish them the best over the festive period, but how much information can you get in card? It seems like an opportunity missed to really communicate with your audience. Depending on how many you send out, when you take into account the printing, postage and administrative time to print or write the envelopes, it can become quite costly.
Why not give your customers an ‘end of year’ update on what’s been happening, or explain that for every view the video gets, you’ll donate 25p to your chosen charity. If you are a science or engineering firm, you could be quirky and explain in a scientific way how sleighs would fly or how Santa actually might get down the chimney. If you were in logistics you could do a production on the practicalities of moving that many parcels around the globe. The creative industries could create a ‘Santa Clause Brand Guidelines Document’. A bit of creative brainstorming can deliver a really solid theme.
Choose something funny, involving all the staff, to show your character and personality and give your clients and suppliers a chuckle! The video below isn’t one of ours, but we like it.
Get in the spirit!
Keep an eye out this year for Christmas videos and see what you like and what might work for you. If you don’t see very many, maybe that is a sign that it is a massively under-tapped opportunity and something you need to jump on next year. Make sure you get it planned and delivered early though, September is the busiest time for party bookings and logistics won’t have any capacity to do anything but move things around during November and December.
When we create campaigns like this, we always try and make the investment go further. So if we’re filming for the Christmas project, can we also get some footage for ‘normal’ use? We also try and plan how we can change it slightly so it can be used the following year. We’re also able to help you plan a strategy on how to get it in front of people, which is the whole point.
Whatever your objectives, budget or ideas, give us a call and we’d be really chuffed to talk them through with you.
An early Ho-ho-ho to you all!
