Winter holiday spending is crucial for retailers, bringing in more than $600 billion in sales revenue in the 2013 season. In order to meet these numbers, retailers pull out all the stops when it comes to holiday marketing. Each brand pools their resources to create the most innovative, creative, and eye-catching campaigns designed to grab their share of the gift-giving market.
Here’s a look at five holiday campaigns that topped the “nice” list for us this year due to their creativity, as well as their imaginative integration of digital and social.
Kate Spade Gets Creative with Video
The fashion retailer appeals to its target audience of stylish and quirky women with a candid video starring actress Anna Kendrick locked out of her New York apartment. The two and a half minute video entitled “The Waiting Game” appears in both pre-roll and shoppable formats, as well as in 5-second clips to accommodate the short attention span of mobile viewers.
This has been the company’s highest performing piece of content over the past 30 days, garnering over 150K views on YouTube. Using Sprinklr’s Social Business Index, our team looked at the impact of this (and other) inspired holiday content on brand’s engagement and found that cumulatively it has helped increase the number of people participating in the discussion around the brand by 30% over the past month.
Best Buy Continues to Experiment with Vine
Following up on last year’s #vineinline Black Friday campaign, the electronics giant is at it again on social, encouraging customers to post how they “hint” for presents with the hashtag #hintingseason. In addition, the retailer is running a “Holiday Hacks” campaign on Vine to advertise new and innovative ways to use their products.
By experimenting with emerging networks such as Vine and reposting user-generated content, Best Buy is able to connect with their target millennial audiences and improved their earned impressions by 111% over the month, according to our Social Business Index data.
Bloomingdales Makes Instagram Shoppable
The department store is working to solve one of retailers’ biggest qualms about Instagram by making their posts “linkable” and “shoppable” within the app. The #zoomingdales campaign features one jam packed post that is “zoomable” by clicking on the different tags and individual profiles within, all while linking back to the website. Through this innovative campaign, Bloomingdales showcases it’s breadth of products and provides creative party use cases for their clothing including “Potluck House Party” and “Dressy Holi-Date”.
According to Sprinklr’s Social Business Index data, the campaign is delighting fans, boosting positive market sentiment by 150% for the month and discussion strength by 32%.
StubHub Gets Crazy With Hashtag Giveaways
Ticket e-commerce marketplace StubHub (disclosure: StubHub is a Sprinklr client) is encouraging friends and family to stop with the bad gifts and give people what they really want – amazing experiences at concerts, sports games, and theater shows. By sharing their ideal ticket gift and using the hashtag #tixwish, participants are entered to win a variety of gift cards and prizes, all leading up to a grand prize giveaway of $10,000 on New Year’s Eve.
According to StubHub, the hashtag has inspired a range of creative posts from eager fans, gathering over 500K mentions on Twitter so far and providing 1.3 billion impressions for the brand.
J.Crew Revamps the Website Gift Guide
The fashion retailer took the traditional website gift guide up a notch this year with individual pages for men, women, boys, girls, and babies, each including a rainbow of products and dynamic pre-roll videos. To advertise their holiday customer service offerings such as personal stylists and same-day delivery, the retailer created four video clips on their YouTube channel starring an adorable Claymation elephant. As if this weren’t enough, J.Crew created an addition three “Links We Love” web pages that feature click through links to their favorite holiday activities and retailers including New York Ballet and Hammonds Candies.
The messaging of “gift better” is resonating with fans, producing a 100% increase in earned impression for the retailer over the month, according to Sprinklr’s Social Business Index.
Originally posted on Inc.