The rush for holiday gifts between Black Friday and the New Year is about to begin. Consumers are buying gifts for their loved ones, and perhaps even capitalizing on some of those deals themselves—and a lot of those products are purchased in the home and lifestyle category.

For brands with home and lifestyle products to sell, you’re likely to be interested in a couple of these top consumer categories as reported by the National Retail Federation (NRF):

  • 60% of respondents said that they want to receive gift cards and other certificates
  • 18% said that they want to receive sporting goods and leisure items

Regardless of the type of product you’re selling this holiday season, you’ll need to meet those consumers online.

According to the NRF, over half of respondents, 55%, plan to do their holiday shopping at least partially online—but it’s extremely competitive this time of year.

If your brand is going to stand out, you’re going to need data-driven insights when it comes to targeting and budgets. Most importantly, you’re going to need knockout creatives to entice consumers to click.

This holiday season, we’ve taken a deep dive into planning and executing digital marketing campaigns for the home and lifestyle industries.

The Ultimate Holiday Marketing Playbook (Broken Down by 11 Industries)

Building the best home and lifestyle ads is a matter of comfort—use animals and food in your imagery.

From video ads to sponsored content, we see colorful images and videos of people performing best no matter the category.

For video campaigns, focus on specific actions, whereas for sponsored content and social media ads, colors and the lack of photo props are what’s important for performance.

Video campaigns: keep your subjects moving.

Physical activity drives the best performance from video branding campaigns. For home and lifestyle marketers, keep your subjects in your videos moving for the most engagement.

We analyzed the top 2,000 video campaigns on the open web based on two key metrics—viewability and completion rate. We mapped actions in three categories to see where the highest opportunity for marketers is this holiday season: physical activity, vocal activity and general activity.

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Going beyond the creative, here’s how your branded videos can soar:

  • Keep your videos between 15 seconds and 1 minute long
  • Include your logo on-screen for better brand recall
  • Include subtitles if needed to optimize for sound-off
  • Include and overlay for better CTR
  • …Or an end card to drive traffic from people who have finished your video
  • Finally, Test three video creatives for the best optimization

Download the Ultimate Holiday Marketing Playbook

Sponsored content: animals and food are top performers when it comes to images.

The images that drive the highest click-through-rate (CTR) for home and lifestyle brands this holiday season include animals and food. Keep it colorful; black and white images actually decrease CTR.

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We also analyzed the top keywords to use in your sponsored content headlines and creatives. Keywords like, “bang,” “onwards,” and “mattresses” can increase CTR by up to 47%.

Download the Ultimate Holiday Marketing Playbook

Targeting: consumers want home and lifestyle content on Thursdays, and other insights.

After you’ve built the most enticing creative possible, you’ll need to focus on meeting consumers at the best time while they’re shopping online.

We took a look at several targeting parameters to pinpoint exactly when and where home and lifestyle marketers can find their consumers and audience this holiday season.

Opportunity is defined at the intersection of supply and demand. We define supply as the amount marketers are spending to promote content and products, and demand as the CTR on that content.

Here’s what we found:

You’re most likely to reach home and lifestyle consumers on Thursdays.

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The New Year should be a bigger focus than time leading up to Christmas.

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Some final tips—try testing campaigns specifically for tablet devices, as well as promoting landing pages that host photo galleries. We see high opportunity for these device and landing page types.

Finally, we’ll leave you with a little inspiration.

These brands have found success with their creative advertising campaigns on the open web—check out how Samsung, Whirlpool, and Leesa have seen recent success.

Samsung

A new insurance product in Korea, Samsung Life, was able to give over 13,000 new insurance quotes in just six months.

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Whirlpool

This popular home appliance brand drove 20 million visits in two months with more than 24 thousand clicks with Taboola.

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Leesa

This online mattress brand saw almost 6 times the return on their ad spend when they used sponsored content.

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As you test out different targeting and creative tactics for the holidays, keep in mind that you may have to get creative more than once. Keep creatives fresh and try new tactics if you start to see fatigue in your online audience.

The holiday season is a time for sharing, giving, and fun, which is exactly what you should be aiming for with your holiday campaigns—give customers and fans the chance to be a part of the action.

Download the Ultimate Holiday Marketing Playbook

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