Despite fears about inflation and a potential recession on the horizon, the 2023 holiday shopping season is expected to be bigger than ever before. Deloitte projected a year-to-year increase of 3.5% to 4.6% in holiday sales, hitting $1.54 to $1.56 trillion, including a 10.3% to 12.8% gain for e-commerce sales.
Fashion and beauty products will make up a great deal of those purchases. Beauty was the only general merchandise category to rise last year, per NPD Group, and apparel sales have been up so far this year.
A robust shopping season offers the chance to connect with these shoppers. Plus, you have ample time to do it. According to Deloitte, two-thirds of Americans are waiting to begin their holiday shopping until after Thanksgiving, when the big deals for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and more unfurl. Line up one or more of these advertising opportunities to see the biggest bang for your holiday bucks.
Connecting With Holiday Shoppers Using OOH Advertising
The majority of holiday purchasing still takes place at brick-and-mortar shops. That means people traveling to malls, shopping strips and big-box stores to buy their presents, giving brands a fantastic chance to influence close to or at the point of purchase through outdoor advertising. Putting your product top of mind as someone walks into a Sephora or wanders around the mall makes it more likely they’ll get it.
Here are three of our favorite options for out of home advertising for the holiday season.
Billboards
We have to start with the classic. Billboards can get the job done for any product promotion. They are the biggest advertising format, so their messages are virtually unavoidable. Plus, they deliver information effectively. A Nielsen report found that more than 90% of people notice billboards, and four in five people have noticed a billboard within the previous week. That’s an extremely high saturation rate for advertising.
In addition to effectiveness, another advantage of billboards is geography. You can find billboard inventory almost anywhere, including close to places where people can buy your product. Securing several billboards in the area gets potential customers thinking about your product as they approach the point of sale (i.e., the store).
Another thing going for billboards? Messaging versatility. Say you have a holiday special running — a QR code with a coupon for your hottest holiday item. By advertising the special on the billboard, you may draw in people who might not have otherwise purchased your product. Or, instead of promoting a product directly, you can use the billboards for branding so that your company name stays with the customer when they arrive at the mall, where they’ll see your product and remember the billboard.
Wild Posting®
Wild Posting®, a proprietary format of papering posters across walls and barricades to dominate a space, also offers a terrific way to advertise for the holidays. With Wild Posting®, you can essentially own a city block, putting up so many advertisements for your product that passersby can’t escape it.
You can also use Wild Posting® to deliver incentives to purchase your product, much like with billboards. Possibilities include:
- Adding a coupon QR code
- Directing them to a website
- Promising an in-store discount when they mention the poster
In-Mall Ads
Malls remain a staple of holiday shopping experiences, and not just for older people. Fully half of Gen Z members say they will shop at the mall this holiday season, appreciably higher than the 40.8% average across all age levels. It’s critical to make an impression on this valuable demographic, who are still establishing their brand loyalty patterns and who have decades of shopping ahead of them. Reaching them where they shop is a smart way to do it.
You can find tons of ways to advertise at the mall. Of course, the best-known are buying a static ad on a display or poll in the mall or investing in the digital networks that deliver automated advertising throughout the mall. But really, you’re only limited by your imagination. Other ideas include:
- Sending a team of ambassadors to hand out free samples
- Setting up a creative experiential marketing campaign
- Putting stickers or stencils on the floor (with permission, of course)
- Buying sky banners that hang from the ceiling
- Wrapping your advertisement around an elevator or escalator
- Creating standalone backlit displays you can place throughout the mall
Connecting With Holiday Shoppers Using Digital Advertising
While e-commerce still represents a smaller portion of holiday sales, it has experienced blockbuster growth over the past decade and continues to grow at a faster pace than brick-and-mortar sales. Investing money where these digital shoppers hang out helps when they go to make a purchase — similar to the advantage of outdoor advertising.
Here are four of our favorite options for digital advertising for the holiday season.
Social
Well, duh. The average person spends 2.5 hours per day using social media, so there’s a good chance that if they’re online, they’re on Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest or the like — it’s a great place to target them. The social algorithms are extremely sophisticated, too, so you can connect with your ideal target audience easily.
Google Shopping Ads
This is the online equivalent of in-mall advertising: hitting your shopper when they are actively looking for something to buy. They are placed based on the product you sell, designed to show the most relevant ad based on the user’s search. Google Shopping Ads can also appear alongside text ads, boosting performance.
Display
You might compare online display ads to billboards. They appear almost everywhere, they have a fairly straightforward format (though you can get creative with delivery), and people pay attention to them as they scroll through content. Display ads require a good call to action to generate clicks, but you can also use them for brand awareness for holiday campaigns.
Video
You can buy video advertising across a range of platforms, influencing people during their leisure time as they mindlessly scroll through YouTube videos or watch outtakes from their favorite comedian. You can make video ads as simple or as sophisticated as you want them to be. Best of all, it’s effective; 84% of people say a video ad has convinced them to buy something.
Interested in pursuing any or all of these ad formats? Get in touch with us today. We can help you find the right place and best creative approach for your holiday advertising.