Christmas and Chinese New Year is a key shopping period for many retailers and brands in Singapore, accounting for a substantial percentage of annual sales revenue, at a highly competitive time of the year. When every brand is trying to capitalise on the occasion, retaining and growing your market share can be a challenge. Here’s how you can successfully grow your brand this festive season.

1. Make a positive association with the festival

Seasonal marketing is a perfect opportunity to create positive association and prompt purchase when your customers are susceptible to promotions and special offers. You may not be able to party with customers, but you can have some fun with them and build a relationship that can take you right through to next year’s holiday season! When you incorporate a little holiday cheer into your marketing strategies, you may become more relatable and memorable to your customers and audiences. Whether it’s throwing in a gift, creating a few videos or sending a personal email sharing your story of the year, don’t miss this precious opportunity to connect authentically with customers.

2. Engage your viewers emotionally

Creativity is important, but it is not effective unless it leads to sales, and soft measures such as likes and sharing are not as good as having sales returns. A test on ads from 4 events and 2 holidays showed that the most effective ads are entertaining and trigger emotional engagement with the brand. ‘Brand engagement’ results in the brand being seen by consumers as better meeting the expectations they hold for the ‘ideal’ in the category the brand competes. If your ad gets consumers to feel that your brand better meets their expectations, the better they’ll think the brand is.

3. Cut through the clutter.

What lessons can we draw from 9.9, 10.10 or 11.11 sale events? One way of better preparing for the next occasion might be mining customers’ post-purchase behaviours from the last 11.11 mega sale period. By filtering the data to identify those customers who displayed good post-purchase habits (such as low return rates), marketers could retarget these ‘compatible’ consumers with hyper-personalised marketing messages. And marketers have a perfect tool to do just that, namely programmatic. These are the customers we would want to establish a relationship and retarget. While this obviously only works for certain types of businesses, it is about cherry picking who sees the messages and tailoring these messages according to real-time data. All of which can result in advertising being highly personalised and targeted.

Now that you’re exploring programmatic ad buying, it’s no longer just about the ad copy or the visual appeal that will make your ad stand out. The magic is in the delivery vehicle itself.

4. Time your adverts right.

There’s an equal mix of positive and negative emotions presented when asked what holiday shopping feels like. As such, when a brand advertises too early, it may stress out consumers who are not looking forward to gift shopping! Globally, 57% of consumers think that brands that advertise too early during the holiday season, puts them off shopping. This number rises to 68% in the UK, demonstrating that brands can add to the negativity surrounding the season as opposed to alleviating it. Poorly executed content with an early media plan will heighten the risks. But get it right with previous consumer behaviour experiences and the rewards will be favourable, irrespective of timings.

5. Personalised birthday offers can prompt purchase.

Big events like Christmas may be a big opportunity for brands but the crowded advertising and unpleasant shopping crowds may make it difficult to maximise ROI. Birthdays on the contrary, is a great opportunity to increase sales, though the impact is more difficult to measure. Extensive research showed that spending increases around birthdays in terms of things people buy for themselves, gifts they receive and money spent on experiences like eating out. Email marketing close to a birthday can increase effectiveness, with ‘mystery’ offers generating the greatest response.

Looking to create a new consumption occasion this coming festive season? Get in touch with us to discover new opportunities you can grow your business!