Reinforce Your Holiday Campaigns with Cross-Platform Creative

In order to capture the highest potential sales revenue through your social holiday season campaigns, you need to cast a wide net. By this, I mean you need to be running your campaigns across various different platforms. Why? Because today’s social media users don’t just use one platform—in fact, they use an average of 6.6 different platforms on a monthly basis.

Limiting your campaigns to one, two, or even three platforms will restrict your campaign’s coverage; and, therefore, the potential sales it can generate. On the other hand, campaigns that comprise multiple different social platforms enable you to reach these scattered audiences in many of the different areas in which they spend their social media activity. This creates a compounding effect; strengthening your campaign’s messaging, and helping drive higher conversion rates.

This is especially important during the Q4 holiday season, which in 2021, hit a record $204 in online sales in the U.S. The period of the year poses a massive revenue opportunity. But to be able to capitalize, you need to be in the game fully—this calls for cross-platform campaigns.

Cross-platform campaigns need cross-platform creative

So, you decide to run your campaigns across a range of platforms: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat. This is great, however, in order for your cross-platform campaign to be as effective as possible, you are going to need to be running creative assets that are individually optimized for each of these platforms. 

Each social platform presents content to its users in different ways. Some subtle, some not so subtle. This has a flow-on effect onto how creative should look & feel when placed amongst organic content. For each platform, there are a range of best practices that should be followed in order for creative to be optimized. These can range from the obvious: such as aspect ratio, optimal duration and logo placement; to the more nuanced: tone of voice and recommended visual techniques.

This means that for your creative to be optimized, you need to produce unique assets per platform, following best practices. This can be complex from a production perspective as it means that the volume of assets you require will climb with each platform added into the mix.

This doesn’t, however, mean that you’ll be creating completely different assets for each platform. Let’s say you’re promoting a 50% off Cyber Monday sale on selected products. Your core “50% off” messaging, along with the featured products and your branding will remain consistent throughout each of the platform iterations you create. The changes will lie in areas such as how to open the ad, layout the imagery and drive home the CTA. 

These differences may seem subtle, but it is in these subtleties where engagement can be won or lost—making the cross-platform optimization well worth the effort.

It is important to remember that at the end of the day, your holiday campaigns will only be as strong as your creative allows them to be. No matter how much media budget you invest, if your creative isn’t up to scratch, engagement—and the conversions that follow—will be hard to come by. This is why it’s so crucial to make sure that your creative assets follow platform-specific best practices to give your cross-platform holiday campaigns the best chance of success. 

Need help with cross-platform creative? 

Hopefully you’re convinced of the importance of cross-platform creative optimization during the holiday season. If, however, you don’t know how to get started, or you’re worried that you don’t have the necessary creative resources at your disposal: feel free to request a demo of Shuttlerock’s CaaS (Creative as a Service) solution, or reach out to one of our team members to discuss your requirements.