You might not have Santa’s elves to help you prepare for the holiday season, but you do have social media. Today, social media is also an important part of how people discover products, compare options, find gift ideas, and interact with brands during the holiday season.
According to a holiday shopping survey by Sprout Social, 46% of consumers said they use social media and physical stores equally to discover holiday gifts. For Gen Z shoppers, social media is even more important, with 54% saying it is their top channel for discovering products.
So, a holiday social media campaign is not just about posting festive content. It is an opportunity to build relationships, showcase your products, drive sales, and create a memorable experience around your brand.
We are a WordPress product company, and one of our main products is the Dokan multi-vendor marketplace builder solution. As a result, we've seen that many small businesses are trying to promote their products on social media.
A well-planned holiday marketing strategy can make this process much easier and help them reach more customers. In this post, we'll guide you with strategies to launch a holiday social media marketing campaign for the best results.
The Clock is Ticking! Start Planning for Your Holiday Campaign
Holiday shoppers are starting their research earlier, and social media is becoming part of that early discovery process. Pinterest, for example, says its audience starts planning holiday purchases well before the final shopping weeks.
So, instead of waiting until December to start posting holiday content, begin planning your campaign early and gradually build interest.
To help you get started, we are going to share some practical holiday campaign tips. Let's start:
- Start with Last Year's Campaign
- Set Clear, SMART Goals
- Know Your Audience
- Fix Your Goal & KPI
- Choose the Most Effective Social Media Channels
- Set a Timeline
- Create Attractive Holiday Creatives
- Choose a Memorable Campaign Hashtag
Let's see the details-
1. Review Last Year's Campaign
Before you get started to work on your holiday marketing campaign, you need to visit the memory lane, walk through your previous campaign, and your competitors' too!
Did you launch any campaign on social media during any previous holiday season? What did your competitors do at that time? What was the social reach and engagement from those?
Don't just look at the number of likes. Try to understand which content actually helped your business.
Here’s what to check:
- Campaign Reach and Engagement: Review the engagement metrics, including likes, shares, and comments.
- Conversion Rates: Were last year’s campaigns effective in turning followers into buyers?
- Audience Feedback: Look at the comments and reviews to see what resonated with your audience.
Find out the data and learn your lesson from that. It can greatly help you in reducing the cart abandonment rate.
2. Set Clear Goals and KPIs
Based on your previous campaigns, set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) for this year. These goals could focus on increasing engagement, reaching new audiences, or generating leads. Your goals could focus on:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Increasing social engagement
- Driving website traffic
- Generating leads
- Increasing product sales
- Growing your social media community
- Increasing repeat purchases
Choose KPIs that match your actual goal. For example, if your goal is sales, track social clicks, conversion rate, revenue, and purchases rather than focusing only on follower growth.
A simple goal could be: “Generate 20% more website purchases from social media during the holiday campaign than during last year's campaign.” The exact target will depend on your previous performance, budget, audience, and business size.
3. Know Your Audience
To optimize your social media marketing, you need to understand your target audience and the social networks they spend most of their time on. Create a buyer persona to properly understand your target audeinces for effective marketing campaigns.
Different platforms attract different audiences and support different types of content. Instead of choosing a platform simply because it is popular, choose the platforms where your potential customers are actually active.
Here are some examples:
- Instagram and TikTok: Useful for visual products, fashion, food, beauty, lifestyle, short-form videos, and creator content.
- YouTube: Useful for product demonstrations, gift guides, reviews, tutorials, and longer-form video.
- Facebook: Useful for community building, broader audiences, product promotions, and customer communication.
- Pinterest: Useful for gift ideas, holiday inspiration, recipes, decorations, DIY projects, and products that people like to save for later.
- LinkedIn: Useful for B2B holiday campaigns, professional audiences, company updates, and business-focused offers.
You don't need to be active on every platform. A focused strategy on two or three relevant platforms can be more manageable than trying to maintain an active presence everywhere.
4. Choose the Most Effective Social Media Channels
Once you understand your audience, select the platforms that fit both your customers and your content format. Build an effective social media workflow. For example, a fashion store may focus heavily on Instagram and TikTok because its products are highly visual.
A software company may find LinkedIn and YouTube more useful for educational content. A gift or home decor business may benefit from Pinterest alongside Instagram. The important thing is to match the platform with the type of customer journey you want to support: discovery, consideration, engagement, or purchase.
Social media is no longer only an awareness channel. It can also be part of the shopping journey. Research from 2025 found that 43% of surveyed consumers had purchased a holiday gift after seeing an influencer endorsement, with the figure higher among Gen Z and Millennials.
5. Build a Holiday Content Calendar
You should set a clear timeline for your holiday marketing campaign, including a start and end date. Also, you should prepare the schedule for sending the social media post/message. But don't create a calendar that only says what you will post each day. Build it around different stages of the customer journey.
For example:
- Early Season – Introduce your holiday theme, share inspiration, and build awareness.
- Mid-Season – Show products, gift ideas, offers, tutorials, customer stories, and creator content.
- Peak Shopping Period – Highlight your strongest offers, bundles, limited-time promotions, and important shipping information.
- Final Days – Create reminder content around genuine deadlines, such as the last day for an offer or the final date for guaranteed delivery.
This approach helps you avoid repeating the same “Buy Now” message throughout the entire campaign. Check some best Christmas marketing ideas to boost your sales.
6. Create Attractive and Useful Holiday Creatives
You can easily enhance brand awareness and get closer to your audience with a visually attractive creative. Well, you might need a little bit of innovation and holiday flavor to do so!
Think about using seasonal colors, like red, green, gold, and silver, and adding holiday-themed elements like snowflakes or gift icons. Ensure your creatives stand out with catchy captions and a clear call to action.
However, holiday content does not always have to be promotional. Mix promotional posts with content that helps, entertains, or inspires your audience.
For example, you can create:
- Holiday gift guides
- Product comparison posts
- “Gift under $50” or similar budget-based recommendations
- Short product demonstration videos
- Behind-the-scenes content
- Customer stories
- Holiday tips and tutorials
- Polls and questions
- User-generated content
- Limited-time offer announcements
Short-form video should also have a place in your campaign. Product demos, unboxing videos, before-and-after content, tutorials, and quick gift ideas can all work well as short videos when they match the platform and audience.
7. Use Creators and User-Generated Content
Holiday campaigns can become more relatable when customers and creators are part of the content. Instead of relying entirely on polished brand advertisements, work with relevant creators who can demonstrate how your product fits into real holiday situations.
You don't necessarily need a celebrity or a creator with millions of followers. Smaller creators with a relevant and engaged audience may be a better fit for some products and budgets. You can also encourage customers to share their own content.
For example, ask customers to:
- Share how they use your product during the holidays
- Post their holiday setup or unboxing
- Share a photo or short video
- Tag your brand
- Use your campaign hashtag
With permission, you can then reshare the best customer content on your own social channels. This gives your campaign a more authentic feel while also showing potential customers how real people use your products.
8. Create a Memorable Campaign Theme or Hashtag
Even if you don't like hashtags, the truth is they can still be useful for organizing campaign content and helping people find related posts. You need to create a hashtag that will represent your brand, content, and, of course, the campaign.
However, hashtags should not be the entire strategy. On many platforms, content discovery also depends on recommendations, search, engagement, keywords, watch time, and other signals.
Instead of creating a complicated hashtag, keep it short, easy to spell, and relevant to your campaign. You can also create a campaign theme or phrase that is repeated across your posts, videos, landing pages, and emails.
9. Track, Test, and Improve Your Campaign
Your holiday campaign should not be a ‘publish and forget' activity. Track your results while the campaign is running. Check which posts are generating:
- Website clicks
- Product views
- Shares and saves
- Comments and conversations
- Leads
- Purchases
- Revenue
- Creator or UGC engagement
If one type of content performs better than another, consider creating more content around that format. You can also test different hooks, visuals, CTAs, offers, and audiences. At the end of the campaign, record the results so you have a useful benchmark for the next holiday season.
Social Media Tips to Kickstart Your Holiday Campaign
So you collected the data from last year and took the preliminary steps before starting to plan the main campaign idea? Great. Now we are ready to move forward.
To be honest, creating a holiday marketing campaign for social media is not that hard. The real challenge is creating a campaign that gives people a reason to stop scrolling, engage with your brand, and eventually take action.
But we are here to help you inject creativity and launch a unique holiday marketing plan for your social media followers. Something that will ensure your brand gets noticed around the social platforms and supports your actual marketing goals.
Check out the social media holiday plans that we have come up with, and feel free to mix up the ideas and create your own unique one.
a) Create Exclusive Social Media Content
Don't you want to make your social media audience feel special during this holiday? This is your chance, mate! Apart from social media, you definitely have other marketing plans for this holiday. No, you don't always need to align everything, not all the time. You can walk the same path, but sometimes you need to explore sideways too!
It could be exclusive rewards, discounts, or giveaways only for your social media followers. To pull it off uniquely, resonate the holiday flavour in it, and create the announcement post mentioning that you care about and value your social media audience!
b) Show Behind-the-Scenes Holiday Prep
If your holiday campaign goal is generating engagement and getting connected to the followers, then it's especially for you! You can just share a few snaps of how the company is preparing for Christmas or Thanksgiving and ask them to share their stories.
If you can use ‘behind-the-scenes' content the right way, then it can genuinely create brand affinity.
For creating behind-the-scenes content during this holiday season, you might need to choose the social platform wisely. For example, Instagram or Snapchat is great for showcasing your fun side, but don't share a funny image on LinkedIn.
c) Host a Social Media Holiday Contest
A social media contest is one of the popular ways to generate community engagement. To include a giveaway with it, you can get the most out of your holiday campaign.
You can make the giveaway innovative using a few tricks! You can ask them to share their holiday inspiration, snap, selfie, or quotes with you, and by uploading the content on your page, they will be eligible to get the giveaway.
You can provide a giveaway with every purchase they make during the holiday season. You can even create a custom initiative, which will be spiced up with that holiday theme, and make people interested in participating in the content. Again, please keep in mind that a visually attractive post will always get more engagement than a blunt one!
d) Show Customer Appreciation with Special Rewards
You can show customers your thankfulness during these holidays by arranging a customer appreciation campaign. If you run an e-commerce website or any other customer service business, then you should take this chance to present gratitude through a holiday campaign. You can do that in the following ways:
- Start A loyalty program during this holiday
- Offer them to visit & spend with your brand
- Spotlight customers on this special season
- Send a gift to the most engaged customer
- Offer them to visit & spend with your brand
- Throw a party & invite your loyal customers on social media
e) Track and Use Data for Next Year
For social media, the holiday is a season for frenzy. To cut through the social media noise and actually engage with your targeted audience, a holiday hashtag campaign could be the easiest and most effective idea. You can easily track the engagement and generate brand awareness, too.
Wrapping up the Holiday Social Media Marketing Campaign
Try out these holiday marketing ideas for your social media channel. Get the best out of your marketing effort by trying to be creative about it, adding elements that resonate with your brand, or helping your audience connect with you!
Let us know what your favorite holiday Social Media campaigns are and what the outcome was from them. Happy Holiday!