Unwrap a High ROI: Holiday Creative Strategies That Drive Results

The holiday season is a major investment for advertisers, and for many businesses, it can make or break the year’s advertising and sales goals. A solid creative strategy can help marketers ensure a great return on investment (ROI), since eye-catching, unique, on-brand creative can make all the difference in marketing ROI.

“Creative is the single biggest lever we control,” says Anthony Blatner, founder and CMO of Speedwork. “Based on LinkedIn’s own data, ads built on a clear story and strong visual identity generate 6-7x the ROI of ‘safe’ creative, because they lift recall and consideration at the same time.”

Creative development and measurement for holiday ad campaigns should start early, taking into account the relatively condensed time period and the opportunity to capture new audiences. “Seasonal creative often performs better because it’s timely,” adds Blatner.

Businesses of all sizes and industries can craft their holiday creative carefully with an eye toward great returns. Check out these seven tips on how marketers can strike the right balance of maximizing ROI and thoughtfully, creatively engaging prospects during the holiday season, all based on data insights and trends from Taboola’s creative team.

7 Ways to Maximize ROI This Holiday Season With Creative Practices

1. Understand the Link Between Creative and ROI

Creative best practices — including visual imagery, copy, interactive components, and more — aren’t a siloed effort from the rigor of holiday marketing campaigns. Putting time and effort into creative advertising can have a direct impact on ad click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CVR), ultimately leading to improved ROI. Taboola’s creative team found, for example, that holiday-themed ad visuals can boost CVR by 4x compared to generic creatives.

The cost of ineffective creative, whether it’s bland, repetitive, or low-quality, shows itself in wasted spend, reduced conversions, higher customer acquisition costs, and lost opportunity cost. Marketing teams can’t do holiday season over with better creative — it’s essential to spend time on it well ahead of the season starting.

2. Be Authentic and Stay on Theme

Unfiltered, UGC-style creative can help build trust and is generally more relatable than stock photos. Candid, DIY imagery is a straightforward way to capture the holiday spirit and stand out to users and prospects in a busy market. Vibrant colors and festive themes can also help you stand out, as can emotional triggers and themes.

For B2B companies, holiday themes in creative can help stand out and connect to the season. This often extends throughout December, folding in end-of-year and New Year’s creative opportunities, and taking advantage of holiday slowdowns as periods of reflection and goal-setting. “Give before you ask,” says Blatner of businesses running holiday campaigns. “Insight reports, ROI calculators, or year‑in‑review benchmarks are often great introductory pieces that can help draw in interested prospects.”

3. Know Exactly What to Measure

Advertisers and marketers have to get as specific as they possibly can on capturing metrics that show how well creative is performing. Again, timely creative like holiday ads often perform better, according to Blatner, and he recommends examining performance at various levels. That might start with micro, “thumb-stop” metrics like scroll depth and carousel swipes to see if the creative is being consumed.

Next, mid-funnel metrics like CTR, cost per lead (CPL), and the qualified lead rate can show whether the story resonates with the right people as planned. At a macro level, Blatner recommends measuring pipeline dollars, win rate, CAC-to-LTV (customer acquisition cost to customer lifetime value), and close/won revenue that connects creative to the CFO’s scorecard.

“For LinkedIn, we stitch all of that together with conversion tracking and offline CRM uploads,” says Blatner. “For bigger accounts, we do brand lift studies to quantify sentiment shift.” These numbers, taken as a whole, give marketers a fuller picture of how creative is truly performing to then take action, such as scaling what’s working and pausing what isn’t.

4. Use Budget-Friendly Creative Strategies

Spending a year’s worth of budget on the holiday season isn’t possible for most businesses, especially smaller or new ones. Luckily, there are lots of options in modern digital marketing and advertising to make an impact in a cost-effective way. Repurposing strong creative, using stock images in a unique way, and user-generated or DIY-style ads can all help teams stay under budget. Use analytics to identify top-performing creative assets and see how you might reuse those.

Be sure to consider the assets or possibilities you already have in-house. “These days, a selfie-video ad from a CEO or founder can be your strongest marketing campaign,” said Blatner. “Grab your smartphone and hit record. People listen to people more than companies.”

Taboola’s playbook also recommends creating looping, short-form, human-driven HD motion videos to capture attention and bring products to life. And remember, seemingly simple tools available to today’s marketers are really very sophisticated. “Canva is the most affordable and full-featured creative tool you could need at the SMB level,” says Blatner.

5. Incorporate Personalization as an ROI Driver

Personalization strategies for holiday season marketing are only limited by marketers’ imaginations. Personalized messaging can boost relevance and ad performance, with attentive users browsing in a specific time period.

Ideally, marketers will have segmented their audiences already and can then explore personalization strategies for the holidays specifically. Consider including varying emotional triggers and messages based on these segments, including factors like demographics, purchase history, and known interests. Holiday personalization tactics include targeted emails with product recommendations, exclusive offers or discounts for returning customers, and, if possible, landing pages tailored to users.

For e-commerce companies, quizzes or other interactive calls to action (CTAs) can lead to personalized gift guides or other assets.

6. Conduct A/B Testing for Optimal ROI

Optimizing ROI means starting holiday efforts early and conducting useful, thorough A/B testing for creative elements for a more successful end of year. “Start earlier than you think,” advises Blatner. “Creative and copy should be live by late October, so learning phases finish before Thanksgiving.”

The results of A/B testing will offer valuable information about which creative users are responding to, helping marketers make ROI-positive decisions. Depending on available resources, advertisers can test images, videos, copy, emails, social media posts, CTAs, and more. As with any good A/B tests, gauge one element at a time.

7. Post-Holiday Creative Learnings

The holiday season starts well before December for most brands, and it continues into end-of-year and beginning-of-year timed themes. While there may be some respite once the holiday period is over, advertisers should take time to evaluate performance and have plans in place to continue the momentum. “A strong Q1 starts in Q4 and over the holidays,” says Blatner. “Maintaining strong brand awareness over the holidays is key to being considered in those Q1 opportunities, because prospects will start by exploring the brands they already know, like, and trust.”

Take the time to build a library of successful holiday creative insights, and analyze performance to inform future creative strategies and campaigns, whether for next year’s holiday season or to see what can be incorporated into ongoing campaigns.

Key Takeaways

Bland, stock-looking, or otherwise tepid creative won’t get marketers and advertisers many returns in the busy holiday season. Storytelling, A/B testing, and personalization are all important components of advertising success, but even more essential for holiday and end-of-year campaigns. Marketers have to pay careful attention to every creative element to see strong ROI and other positive results once the season has ended.