This is how most consumers feel about holiday ads. As a brand, you may have to change your approach to improve your connection with the target audience.
If you truly want to boost your engagement with holiday videos, you’ll need to think bigger and better—interactive videos! Providing interactive, shoppable, and personalized videos can change the engagement game for you.
In fact, interactive videos can increase your conversion rates by 70%! So there’s really no reason to not implement them for your holiday video ads.
In this blog, we’ll talk about the best holiday video ideas that you can use today. But before that, let’s understand in detail why interactive videos are important for holiday videos.
Why Interactive Videos for Holiday Marketing?
Holiday marketing requires you to instantly capture the audience’s attention to drive conversions. However, with many brands competing for the same attention, how can you stand out?
In such situations, interactive videos can help. Here’s how:
- Higher Engagement: Unlike static videos, interactive videos enable your audience to be active in the video’s progression. Whether it’s branching narratives or engaging CTAs or polls and quizzes, the audience participates. This naturally increases the watch time and engagement.
- Improved Conversions: Interactive videos allow you to create shoppable ads, which the audience can directly purchase from. Not only do you effectively inform about your product through these videos, but you create a frictionless purchase experience for the customer!
- Data-driven Analysis: Interactive video platforms (like Life Inside) can track the performance metrics of your videos to show you which content is working and which isn’t. With data for engagement rates, drop-offs, and clickthrough rates, you can improve your holiday video campaign.
- Personalized Journeys: If you want to create immersive holiday experiences, you have to personalize the holiday ad for your target audience. Interactive videos allow you to customize the video elements based on data like purchase history, browsing patterns, etc.
These few (of the many) benefits of interactive videos help you take your engagement-driven holiday content to new heights!
Types of Interactive Holiday Videos
There are plenty of interactive holiday videos that you can leverage to boost your engagement. Let’s take a look at them below:
Shoppable Holiday Videos
Shoppable holiday videos bring your audience into the festive mood by providing them with an easy way to shop for their next holiday destination. Since the users don’t even have to leave the video to add the items to their cart, it creates a seamless buyer journey.
A great example would be if you were to create a shoppable holiday video for a beach destination, with relevant products that they can add to their cart instantly.
Personalized Holiday Greetings
Personalization is key if you want to gain brand credibility and customer loyalty. With data like past purchases or recent searches, you can curate ads that meet their requirements or preferences.
For example, you can create a video for new customers that addresses them by their names and suggests products based on their product search history.
Festive Gamification and Contests
A gamified approach to ads is excellent for boosting engagement, as audiences willingly participate in the videos to win. You can put up interactive games like quizzes that audiences can play to win prizes.
As an example, you can create an interactive, gamified video that audiences play to win a holiday destination or related products!
Virtual Holiday Events and Experiences
Whenever you’re thinking of video marketing for holidays, you also have to take into account those customers who aren’t able to celebrate the holidays for one reason or another.
So, creating immersive holiday experiences through interactive videos like meet-and-greets or virtual tours of popular hotspots can be an excellent way to connect with them.
This is an excellent way to establish relatability with your audience!
User Generated Content and Social Engagement
Interactive videos work best on social media platforms, as these videos can easily be shared to target the virality factor. Plus, if you can get positive customer reviews on these videos, you’ll be able to build brand trust and community engagement.
For example, if you’re a brand selling quirky and aesthetic travel suitcases, you can ask your customers to upload videos of styling their travel outfits to match their suitcases!
Best Practices for Creating Interactive Holiday Videos
Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re creating your interactive holiday videos:
- Keep It Short: Nobody likes to watch long ads. Keep your videos short, and bring the value proposition instantly. Don’t make the video longer than 90 seconds!
- Relate with the Holiday: No matter the holiday you’re celebrating, ensure that you use music or imagery that suits the holiday in question. This will ensure that the audience immediately understands what you’re talking about.
- Make it High-quality: Nobody likes to watch blurry videos with little lighting. Invest in good equipment, editing software, and a space to shoot high-quality videos. This establishes brand credibility.
- Rewards and Incentives: People like to try their luck during the holidays. So, regardless of the product or service you’re marketing, include incentives or rewards. You can include discounts or extra goodies with each purchase!
- Optimize for Mobile: Did you know that 79% of U.S. consumers prefer watching videos on their smartphones? The best way to leverage this habit is to create interactive videos that are highly optimized for mobile devices. They should maintain their quality on smaller screens and load quickly too!
- Utilize Urgency: Holidays don’t last long, do they? Your offers or incentives with purchases shouldn’t either! You must create a sense of urgency with your CTAs and offers to ensure that users are compelled to register or purchase the product.
- Shoppable Content: Create interactive holiday promotions through shoppable video ads that the viewer can interact with to directly purchase your product or service. This seamless experience results in less friction and better conversions.
Tips for Creating the Perfect Holiday Video
-
Here are some extra tips to create an immersive holiday video:
-
Always keep a strong hook to instantly capture the attention of your audience. If you don’t establish a connection within the first 3 seconds (Facebook says so), you’ve already lost the audience.
-
Implement personalization through the data you’ve gathered about the consumer’s product search history and recent purchases. Always show relevant and preferred products to increase the chances of conversions.
-
Push the video on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Shorter-length videos perform exceptionally well on these platforms, and the interactive factor can increase the chances of the video going viral.
-
Conclusion
-
You don’t need to spend hundreds of hours making the perfect holiday video. You just need people to engage with the videos, and that’s easily achievable through interactive videos.
That’s where we come in. Life Inside ensures that your video marketing process isn’t stalled—just enhanced!
In fact, our dedicated content team at Life Inside collects your existing and new videos, activates them, and automates the video funnel for distribution on all your channels. The platform also seamlessly integrates with your current stack to ensure that your workflow isn’t disrupted.
No need to worry about the tech; let us handle that while you focus on creating engaging holiday videos to drive conversions!
Sign up on Life Inside and experience the (not-just-holiday) magic of interactive video today!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How can shoppable videos improve holiday sales?
Shoppable videos provide a frictionless way for consumers to shop while watching the video. They can add the products to their cart without ever leaving the video, thereby removing the restrictions on impulse buying!
2. How do interactive videos boost audience engagement?
Interactive videos allow viewers to participate through gamified elements, polls, surveys, and branching narratives. These organically increase the engagement rates and watch times of the videos.
3. How can businesses create gamified holiday video content?
Businesses can create interactive videos with games like quizzes or Bingo, with holiday-based incentives or rewards for winners.
4. What are some budget-friendly interactive holiday video ideas?
Some budget-friendly interactive holiday video ideas include polls and quizzes on videos shared on social media platforms, user-generated campaigns with your products, and a DIY shoppable gift guides.
5. How can user generated content be integrated into interactive holiday videos?
You can create contests where users upload holiday-themed videos using your products, and the most creative ideas win exciting discounts and rewards. This is one of the many ways to increase consumer engagement with UGC!