3 Meta Creative Strategies for Max Holiday Season Performance

The peak season calls for powerful creative to help maximize sales

For your holiday season campaigns across Meta to maximize sales, they need to be backed by impactful ad creative. 

The first step to driving holiday sales is capturing – and maintaining – the attention of scrolling shoppers. The quality and optimization of your creative determines to what extent this is achieved. It can’t be emphasized enough: creative is crucial. 

But how do you produce performance-focused Facebook and Instagram creative for ‌the peak season? 

This article showcases three key creative strategies that will help give you an edge: (1) Combine Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns with creative diversification; (2) Embrace native-style Reels; and (3) Generate hype & instill urgency.

1. Combine Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns with creative diversification

Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns (ASC) are specifically designed to help performance-focused advertisers drive online sales with greater efficiency. This makes them a perfect option for the holiday season. 

However, for Advatange+ Shopping Campaigns to perform to their potential, you need a high amount of creative diversification. The way ASC campaigns work is that they start with broad targeting, and then use AI to test different creative options against different audiences to see what is resonating best. The more creative diversification you have, the better the algorithm can optimize your holiday campaigns so that your ads are being shown to the highest-intent shoppers. 

Meta recommends running a minimum of 10 unique creative assets for each ASC campaign. However, for even better results, this number should be more in the realm of 20–30.

Three main ways to diversify your creative: 

• Visuals: Showcase your product/service in different ways by experimenting with different visual techniques and festive treatments. 

• Messaging: People shop for a variety of reasons during the holidays. Try a variety of opening hooks that speak to different buyer motivators, highlight a range of offers, and ‌mix up your CTAs.

• Format: Use a mixture of video and static images. Make full use of the Meta ecosystem by creating variations for Stories, Reels, In-Feed, Catalog, Collection, Instant Experience, and more.

2. Embrace native-style Reels

Speaking of formats, one that needs to be a top priority is Reels. 

Reels across Instagram and Facebook are a great way to engage audiences through entertainment, while at the same time driving performance. In fact, campaigns that include Reels outperform those without when it comes to key performance metrics such as add-to-cart and conversions.

To get the most out of Reels, however, you need to fully embrace the format’s lo-fi, native look and feel. This means producing videos that’re tailored to the Reels format. To do so, draw inspiration from, and emulate organic Reels content. Above all else, your Reels creative should be entertaining, digestible, and relatable. 

You can still promote your holiday offers, just do so in a more natural, authentic manner.

When you speak the language of Reels, your holiday campaigns will flourish. Meta has found that Reels ads that use organic-style video see a 51% lower cost per incremental conversion. 

3. Create hype & instill urgency

The last creative strategy to help maximize performance on Meta during the holidays is to run creative that generates hype and instills a sense of urgency. 

In the lead-up to key sales dates, whether it’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or Boxing Day, it’s important to generate excitement. By running creative that hypes-up your upcoming sale, shoppers will be more eager and receptive when the sale launches. Include messaging such as “coming soon” and “you won’t want to miss out” to spark interest among sale-hungry shoppers.

To capitalize on this hype, you then want to run creative that features urgency messaging once the sale itself is underway. Most of the holiday sales dates can be characterized by offering big sales in a short period of time. Inspire shoppers to act fast by featuring urgency messaging within your creative. Examples of this include “limited time only”, “today only”, “purchase in time for Christmas”.

Start producing high-impact holiday season creative with Shuttlerock

If you’re looking for a creative solution to help your brand thrive during the holiday season, Shuttlerock is here to help. We’ll make sure that your holiday campaigns are firing on all cylinders by supplying you with impactful video creative at speed and scale. To learn more, please feel free to request a demo, or get in touch. 

For more holiday season strategies and inspiration, please visit our 2023 Holiday Season Hub.