Holiday Marketing Strategy: Stop Competing on Noise

Holiday marketing strategy is the plan that determines how a brand allocates budget, messaging, and channel effort across the peak trading period to drive revenue, not just visibility. Done well, it connects commercial objectives to audience behaviour in a way that earns attention rather than buying it.

Most brands get this wrong. They spend more, shout louder, and call it a strategy. What they end up with is a more expensive version of what they were already doing, compressed into six weeks and dressed in red and green.

Why Most Holiday Campaigns Are Tactical, Not Strategic

I’ve sat in a lot of Q4 planning sessions over the years. The pattern is almost always the same. Someone pulls up last year’s numbers, notes that November and December drove a disproportionate share of revenue, and then asks how to replicate that with a slightly bigger budget. The conversation that follows is almost entirely tactical: which channels, what creative, what offers.

What rarely gets asked is the harder question: why did those customers buy, and were they customers we would have had anyway?

That question matters more than most marketing teams want to admit. A significant portion of holiday revenue is captured intent, not created demand. People were already going to buy a gift, already planning a trip, already looking for a deal. The brand that shows up in the right place at the right moment takes the sale, but that is not the same as building a business. Market penetration requires reaching people who were not already looking for you. Holiday campaigns, by their nature, tend to do the opposite.

This is not an argument against holiday marketing. It is an argument for being honest about what it is doing and what it is not.

The Planning Window Most Brands Waste

When I was running agency teams, we would typically see clients come to us in September or October wanting to finalise their holiday plans. By that point, a lot of the meaningful work was already too late. The audiences that were going to make the difference, the people who had not yet formed a preference, were already being shaped by brands that had started earlier.

The pre-season window, roughly July through September depending on the category, is where the real strategic work happens. This is when you build familiarity with audiences who are not yet in buying mode. It is when you earn the mental availability that pays off when intent spikes in November. Running brand activity in this window feels less urgent than running promotions in December, which is exactly why most brands skip it.

The brands that consistently outperform during peak periods tend to treat the holiday itself as the close of a longer campaign, not the campaign itself. They have already done the work of being known and trusted before the buying window opens. When competitors are spending heavily to acquire customers from scratch, these brands are converting people who already have a warm relationship with them.

This is not a new insight. BCG’s work on commercial transformation has long made the case that the brands with the most durable growth are those that invest consistently in brand-building rather than concentrating spend in moments of peak demand. The holiday period rewards prior investment. It does not create it from nothing.

How to Build a Holiday Marketing Strategy That Actually Holds Together

Strategy is a word that gets used loosely in marketing. For the purposes of planning a holiday campaign, I mean something specific: a set of deliberate choices about where to compete, who to target, and what to offer, made before any channel or creative decisions are taken.

Here is how that actually works in practice.

Start with the commercial objective, not the channel mix

The first question is not “how much should we spend on paid social?” It is “what does the business need this period to deliver?” That might be revenue growth, margin improvement, customer acquisition, or retention of lapsed buyers. Each of those objectives leads to a different strategy, and conflating them leads to campaigns that try to do everything and end up doing none of it well.

I worked with a retail client once that had a genuine margin problem masked by strong top-line revenue. Every holiday, they ran aggressive promotional campaigns that drove impressive sales numbers. But when we looked at the cohort data, the customers acquired through those promotions had significantly lower lifetime value and much higher return rates. The holiday campaign was generating revenue that the business could not actually afford. The strategy needed to change before the channel plan could.

Define your audience with more precision than “holiday shoppers”

Every brand talks about reaching “holiday shoppers” as if that is a useful segment. It is not. The person buying a last-minute gift for a colleague is a fundamentally different buyer from the person who has been researching a considered purchase for three months. They have different motivations, different decision timelines, and different price sensitivities. Treating them the same produces messaging that resonates with neither.

The most useful segmentation for holiday planning tends to separate existing customers from new prospects, and within new prospects, to distinguish between those who are actively searching and those who are not yet in market. Each group needs a different approach. Existing customers need reasons to return and to increase their basket. Active searchers need to be captured efficiently. Out-of-market audiences need to be introduced to the brand before they start looking.

This connects to something I have thought about a lot over the years. Earlier in my career, I was heavily focused on lower-funnel performance. It felt efficient, measurable, and easy to defend. What I came to understand, slowly and through some expensive lessons, is that a lot of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The customer who was already searching for your product, already familiar with your brand, was going to find you. The harder and more valuable work is reaching the people who were not looking yet.

Make a positioning decision before you make a promotional one

The holiday period is the most competitive advertising environment of the year. Every brand is fighting for the same attention, often with similar messages and similar offers. The default response is to increase spend. The smarter response is to decide what you want to be known for, and to make sure your campaign reflects that clearly.

Positioning in this context does not mean brand strategy in the abstract. It means a concrete answer to the question: why should someone choose us over the alternatives during this specific period? That answer might be product quality, convenience, price, values, or experience. What it cannot be is “all of the above.” Trying to win on every dimension produces campaigns that are forgettable because they stand for nothing in particular.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and the campaigns that stood out were almost always the ones with a clear point of view. Not necessarily the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated production. The ones that knew exactly what they were saying and to whom. That clarity is a planning decision, made weeks before the campaign goes live, not a creative decision made in the edit suite.

Build a channel plan that matches the customer experience, not the media plan

Once the commercial objective, audience segmentation, and positioning are clear, the channel plan follows more naturally. The question becomes: where are each of these audience segments at each stage of their decision process, and what do they need from us at that moment?

Out-of-market audiences need reach and memorability. That points toward channels with broad reach and strong creative formats: video, connected TV, audio, high-impact display. Active searchers need to find you efficiently when they are looking. That points toward paid search and shopping, with tight keyword discipline and strong landing page relevance. Existing customers need personalised communication that acknowledges the relationship. That points toward email, loyalty programmes, and direct channels.

The mistake most brands make is inverting this. They spend the majority of their budget on lower-funnel channels capturing existing intent, then wonder why their customer base is not growing. Go-to-market execution has become harder in part because so many brands are competing for the same narrow slice of in-market demand rather than doing the upstream work of building it.

The Discount Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About

Promotional pressure during the holiday period is real. Consumers expect deals. Competitors are discounting. The temptation to match them is almost irresistible, especially when the sales team is watching the numbers in real time.

But there is a structural problem with holiday discounting that rarely surfaces in the campaign debrief. When a brand consistently offers significant discounts during peak periods, it trains its customers to wait. The customer who would have paid full price in October learns to hold off until November. The brand’s revenue shifts rather than grows, and its margin erodes in the process.

This is not an argument for never discounting. It is an argument for being deliberate about it. The most effective holiday offers tend to be ones that are genuinely additive: bundle deals that increase basket size, limited editions that create urgency without devaluing the core range, loyalty rewards that feel like recognition rather than desperation.

The brands with the strongest long-term positions are those that resist the pressure to compete purely on price during the holidays. They invest in the experience, the product, and the relationship instead. BCG’s research on brand and go-to-market strategy consistently shows that brands with genuine differentiation are less exposed to competitive pricing pressure, including during peak seasons.

I have seen this play out directly. One of the businesses I worked with had built a strong brand over several years and was genuinely well-regarded by its customers. When a new competitor entered the market and started discounting aggressively during the holiday period, the instinct from the commercial team was to match them. We did not. We doubled down on the things that had built the brand’s reputation: service, quality, and a clear point of view. The short-term revenue comparison looked uncomfortable for about two quarters. After that, the competitor had acquired a large base of price-sensitive customers with no loyalty, and we had retained a smaller but far more valuable one.

Measurement: What the Numbers Are Actually Telling You

Holiday campaign measurement deserves its own conversation because the standard metrics can be deeply misleading. Return on ad spend looks impressive during peak periods almost regardless of strategy, because you are fishing in a pond that is already full. The question is not whether your campaign generated revenue. The question is how much of that revenue was incremental.

Incrementality testing during the holiday period is harder than at other times of year, but it is not impossible. Holdout groups, geo-based experiments, and media mix modelling can all provide a more honest read on what the campaign actually contributed versus what would have happened anyway. Most brands do not do this work because the results are uncomfortable. They prefer the cleaner story that attribution tools tell.

I have always been sceptical of last-click attribution, but during the holidays it is particularly misleading. Customers are exposed to multiple brand touchpoints over weeks or months before they convert. The channel that gets the last click is often the one that happened to be visible at the moment of purchase, not the one that built the relationship that made the purchase possible.

A more useful set of questions for post-campaign analysis: Did we acquire customers who are likely to return? Did our average order value hold, or did we trade margin for volume? Did our brand consideration metrics move among people who were not already customers? These questions point toward the health of the business, not just the health of the campaign.

Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models has long emphasised the importance of distinguishing between revenue that grows the business and revenue that merely sustains it. Holiday campaigns, if measured honestly, often reveal that distinction clearly.

The Post-Holiday Period Most Brands Ignore

January is the most undervalued month in the marketing calendar for most consumer brands. The holiday campaign has ended, the budget has been spent, and the team is exhausted. But January is when a significant cohort of new customers, people who received gifts or bought for themselves during the holidays, are most open to forming a longer-term relationship with a brand.

The brands that plan for this deliberately see materially better retention from their holiday cohorts. A well-timed onboarding sequence, a relevant follow-up offer, or simply a communication that acknowledges the new relationship can significantly change the lifetime value of a customer acquired in December.

This is not complicated. It is just not glamorous, which is why it gets skipped. The holiday campaign gets the budget and the attention. The retention work that determines whether that investment paid off gets treated as an afterthought.

If you are serious about building a holiday marketing strategy rather than running a holiday campaign, the post-season plan is not optional. It is where the return on the whole investment is either earned or lost.

If this kind of commercially grounded thinking is useful, there is more of it in the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub, which covers how brands build the structures and decisions that drive durable growth, not just seasonal spikes.

What a Strong Holiday Strategy Actually Looks Like

To make this concrete, here is what a well-constructed holiday marketing strategy contains, in the order it should be built.

First, a clear commercial objective with a specific number attached. Not “grow revenue” but “acquire 15,000 new customers at a cost per acquisition below £28, while maintaining margin above 38%.” The specificity forces trade-offs that vague objectives allow you to avoid.

Second, a segmented audience plan that distinguishes between existing customers, active searchers, and out-of-market prospects, with a different approach for each. The messaging, channels, and offers should reflect those differences, not paper over them.

Third, a positioning decision that answers the question of why someone should choose you, stated clearly enough that a creative team can build from it without needing to interpret it.

Fourth, a channel plan that is sequenced across the full planning window, not just the peak weeks. This includes pre-season brand activity, mid-season conversion focus, and post-season retention.

Fifth, a measurement framework that includes at least one honest test of incrementality, so the post-campaign analysis reflects what actually happened rather than what the attribution model wants you to believe.

Sixth, a post-holiday plan that treats January as a continuation of the campaign rather than a recovery period.

None of this is exotic. Most of it is just discipline applied consistently. The reason most holiday campaigns underperform relative to their potential is not a lack of creativity or budget. It is that the strategic work gets compressed or skipped in favour of getting to the execution faster.

The growth strategy thinking that underpins all of this, the distinction between capturing demand and creating it, the importance of commercial clarity before channel decisions, the honest measurement of what campaigns actually contribute, applies year-round. The holiday period just makes the consequences of getting it wrong more visible and more expensive.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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