3 Strategies For Engaging Audiences Around The Holidays

Consumers are getting ready for the holiday season by turning to YouTube for decoration tips, holiday recipes, and gift-giving inspiration. By digging into these trends across the YouTube holiday space, marketers can uncover insights on their audience’s viewing behavior, and better develop video and marketing strategies to make an impact on consumers this season.

Here are some effective strategies our analysts found while uncovering the holiday space on YouTube:

It’s Not Just About The Content — Marketers Should Focus on Consumers

As more and more consumers turn to YouTube for everything entertaining and informational, holiday content on the video domain is seeing a larger viewership each year. This year, Pixability projects holiday content will reach 37.3B total views on YouTube — a massive audience that marketers can’t ignore. Overall, Pixability’s analysts found that holiday content attracts more than 130B total views.

While the growth of content being consumed indicates that marketers can reach a large audience through contextual targeting, marketers must also balance their strategy through behavioral targeting. Pixability’s campaign experts have found adding a behavioral targeting strategy to video campaigns tends to drive higher view and click-through rates — indicating that marketers can layer in holiday and gift-giving topics to better engage their target audiences.

Kick Off Your Holiday Campaign Early

Marketers should kick off their holiday video campaigns early — around Black Friday or Cyber Monday — to beat the competition to the punch and get ahead of more costly periods closer to December. In addition, Pixability found that holiday video viewing actually peaks in November — and this trend holds true across each major event that Pixability examined through the holiday season: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. By publishing video content early, and kicking off campaigns in November at the start of the gift-giving season, marketers can reach a massive audience at a premium.

Cyber Monday And Black Friday Are Critical For All Brands

As could be expected, shopping content drives the highest viewership across both the Cyber Monday and Black Friday sub-spaces. Tech-related videos attract a much higher viewership within the Cyber Monday sub-space, while haul-related content delivers a larger audience within the Black Friday sub-space. However, advertising around these shopping holidays is important even for brands that aren’t focused on holiday promotions — for example, QSR brands can engage consumers that are out-and-about in November, enticing them with savory advertising as they’re completing their holiday shopping.

Developing content around these holidays and targeting shopping behaviors is critical, but not only on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. In fact, Google founds that merely 18% of shoppers consolidate all of their shopping to the Black Friday-to-Cyber Monday weekend — indicating the importance of an always-on approach to advertising.

By understanding how consumers are searching for and engaging with content on YouTube, marketers can better plan and execute video strategies, reach consumers through engaging content, and develop effective targeting strategies.

Want to learn more about how you can take advantage of the massive viewership around the holidays on YouTube? Let’s get in touch — we’d love to walk you through how the Pixability platform can help you maximize the impact of your digital video strategies across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Connected TV.