How to use holiday greetings to build brand awareness
The vision industry is a highly technical one but at Vision Markets, we are convinced that you don’t win business with bits and bytes only. You also need to build a strong relationship and emotional connection between your audience and your brand.
Holiday greetings are a great way to add a human and personal touch to your marketing, even if you don’t have the budget to create those multimillion-dollar ads that big consumer brands produce every year for the holiday season. You can, of course, post a free clipart of Santa and wish your audience a merry Christmas but will that be beneficial to your brand? Here are a few tips for your holiday greetings.
1. Celebrate the right holidays
It all starts with selecting the right holidays. The Christmas and new year season immediately comes to mind to western companies but if your company operates globally, you may want to consider other holidays and select them according to your business priorities. For example, if you have a strong focus on the Chinese market, don’t miss Chinese New Year as it is the major holiday of the year in China. Or if you decided to conquer the US market, why not post a nice greeting for Independence Day?
2. Be mindful of cultural and religious sensitivities
Many holidays are rooted in local culture and religions. Depending on the cultural diversity of your audience, you may want to avoid too direct references to a religion. In a country like France, for example, religious neutrality is very important and organizations avoid to wish merry Christmas to their audience, preferring more neutral phrases like “season’s greetings”, “happy holidays” or “happy new year”. If you stick to a message like “merry Christmas”, we recommend avoiding too explicitly religious text and images. For example, use images of a Christmas tree rather than nativity.
3. Deliver your brand message
Anyone can post a nice picture of Santa. But will that be remembered by your audience? Probably not. Use the opportunity to convey a message related to your own business offering and brand values, so your audience remember you and what you do for them. Here are examples of short video clips that we have created for ourselves, in which we include a decent reminder of our four areas of consulting: Strategy, M&A, Recruiting and Marketing.
4. Stick to your brand identity
You want to be identified and remembered among all these holiday greetings, so keep your visuals in the same style as your website, your advertising campaigns, your trade show booth, etc. But try to add a touch of fun and fantasy for the extra surprise and smile. For example, in our last holiday greetings video clip, we turned the circled V of our logo into to a decoration ball.
Below is an example of a short video clip we created for our customer Fujifilm. The clip reuses footage of a promotional video for their professional binoculars. We just changed the text, the music and added a cameo of Santa.
Another good example is this video clip by Allied Vision that reinterpreted the key visual of their main advertising campaign of that year. This kind of approach builds on the familiarity of your graphical style to your audience for immediate identification.
Are you motivated to surprise your audience with inspiring holiday greetings? Contact us today to brainstorm the best idea and get it done in time!
