Holiday season is just around the corner, and for most businesses, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM) are crucial for revenue. However, it doesn’t have to stop there – “fifth quarter” or Q5, beginning after Christmas and stretching into January, holds just as much potential.
To make the most of these peak periods, you need a well-crafted strategy. Here are five powerful tactics to ensure your seasonal growth marketing plan succeeds during both BFCM and Q5.
Why are seasonal campaigns so important?
A structured seasonal marketing campaign is key for brands aiming to boost revenue during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Q5.
Seasonal campaigns tap into heightened consumer spending behaviors, capitalizing on a sense of urgency and relevance that naturally comes with holidays and major events. By aligning your offers, messaging, and timing with these moments, you create a perfect storm for increased conversions, customer engagement, and brand visibility.
1. Define your Seasonal Offer
You may already know this, but the first step to prepare for any seasonal event is defining your offer.
Whether it’s Buy One Get One (BOGO), 30% off, or a limited-time product bundle, the offer should appeal directly to your target audience. The key is making your deal both compelling and relevant to the season.
For Halloween, you might offer “spooky” limited editions, while Thanksgiving sales could focus on gifting bundles. During BFCM, aggressive discounts and flash sales often drive the most conversions, but it’s essential to tailor your promotion to your brand’s strengths and customer expectations.
But how do you know if your offer is the right one? Start by looking at past performance. You can also conduct A/B testing to see which offers generate the highest engagement and conversions before the full launch. It’s also important to analyze your customer behavior, preferences, and feedback. This will give you the insights needed to refine your offer and ensure it’s positioned to meet your goals.
However, even if you don’t have a special seasonal offer, you could position your evergreen offers or bundles as a Holiday Sale.
2. Understand your Audience
Holiday season is the time to convert customers, so it’s essential to understand what your audience is seeking during the season.
Start by defining your audience’s level of awareness and sophistication regarding your product or service. Are they already familiar with your brand, or are they new customers? This information is vital for structuring your messaging, offers, and selecting the right creative framework for your growth marketing campaign.
Remember that in Q4 and Q5 the goal is to drive as many sales and revenue as possible. To maximize your budget, focus on audiences who already have a degree of awareness about your product or brand. Most Aware, Product Aware and Solution Aware audiences are the ones you should spot on. And for Q5, you may also want to target Problem Aware audiences, since they are constantly looking to solve a problem and your product may be a solution for them.
Understanding your audience will allow you to tailor your campaign to meet your customers where they are in the buying journey, increasing the chances of conversions.
If you don’t know where to start, check out our Video Ads Frameworks, in which you’ll find a framework for each level of awareness and sophistication.
| Unsophisticated | Moderately Sophisticated | Highly Sophisticated | Innovators & Early Adopters | |
| Unaware | Educate them about the problem | New trends, subtly introduce solutions | Position yourself as the leader | Push disruptive innovation |
| Problem Aware | Define the problem, offer solutions | Show how your solution is different | Provide proof of results | Tie your solution to industry trends |
| Solution Aware | Focus on your unique value | Differentiate from competitors | Prove your product is the best | Position as the most advanced option |
| Product Aware | Simple, direct CTA | Compare your benefits to competitors | Build trust with testimonials | Highlight your product’s innovation |
| Most Aware | Create urgency | Reinforce your brand dominance | Offer exclusive incentives | Appeal to their desire for the newest and best |
3. Prepare High-Impact Creatives
The next step is preparing your creatives.
You have the offer, you know your audience. Now you have to put it all together and create high-impact creatives that will drive conversions.
Remember that there is a lot of competition this time of the year, so your ad creatives need to stand out of the crowd.
Here are some good practices to keep in mind while crafting high-converting creatives:
- Start with a strong hook: the first 3 seconds are crucial for any video because that’s when you capture attention. A strong hook not only grabs attention but sets the tone for the rest of your messages. Looking for fresh, effective hooks? Here are 101 proven hooks that will boost your conversions.
- Match your creatives to the season: align your visuals and messaging with the seasonal event aesthetic. Use relevant colors, imagery, and themes to connect with the holiday. Remember to keep it native to fit in with the rest of the viewer’s timeline. Pro tip: use seasonal emojis for extra attention (🎄🎃🔥)
- Use UGC: incorporating UGC into your campaign adds authenticity and relatability, helping build trust with your audience. When potential customers see real people engaging with your product, it creates social proof and makes your brand more approachable.
- Create a sense of urgency: create a reason to act immediately. Offer a limited-time offer or limited availability of your product, you can also use countdowns to increase the sense of urgency. Try frameworks like FOMO, SUE, SUUB and more, these frameworks emphasize the need to act now.
- Incorporate strong CTAs: regardless of the social platform where you’re running your ad, a CTA should feel organic to the user and native to the social platform and most importantly, it has to drive action to the consumer. Check out these 25 examples of CTAs Primer has developed that are proven to convert.
- Test more, win more: At Primer, we launch new tests every two weeks. This testing cadence gives you enough time to find wins and pause mediocre ads before launching something new. Try out this methodology to improve your creative testing.
Pro tip: Iterate your winners by making different variations. Test different video formats and copy combinations before BFCM to optimize for performance.
🔥Hot tip: Running DPA ads on Meta? Adding masks is one of the easiest ways to find BIG holiday wins. Keep them simple and scannable, preferably paired with a consistent image layout so you know you won’t be blocking any key product elements.
4. Optimize your Landing Page
Now you have a great offer, you’re targeting the right audiences and your creatives are on point but… what if they don’t convert?
Before a big event like BFCM, it’s critical to ensure that your landing page is fully optimized. Even the best offer and creatives won’t deliver results if your landing page doesn’t provide a seamless experience. It’s not just about optimizing technical aspects like loading speed and a frictionless checkout process; your landing page also needs to address your visitors’ questions and emphasize the product’s benefits effectively.
Did you know a landing page has 8 seconds to convert? From the moment your page loads, every element must be crafted to drive conversions quickly and effectively.
Here are some critical elements to consider when building a high-performing landing page.
- Clear & specific headlines written to address core BDQs (buyer decision questions): BDQs are the most essential questions that have to be answered before a purchase can be made and reflect your customers’ wants, needs, motivations, intentions, and decision-making processes.
- Clear CTAs that are above the fold and in each section: guide users toward the desired action, whether that’s making a purchase, signing up, or requesting more information.
- Mobile and desktop optimization: ensure your landing page is designed for both mobile and desktop experiences. Many users will access your site from various devices.
- Easily scannable page with paragraphs with limited text: use concise paragraphs with a maximum of three lines to enhance readability and allow visitors to quickly grasp key points.
- Consistent design elements: maintain uniformity in fonts, colors, sizes, and spacing throughout the page to reinforce brand identity.
- Highlighted Value Propositions: clearly showcase what sets your product apart from alternatives and competitors, whether it’s personalization (e.g., “customized for your lawn”), convenience (e.g., “skip a trip to the doctor”), or innovation (e.g., “AI-generated skincare”).
- Social or press proof: include testimonials, user reviews, or press mentions to build credibility and trust with potential customers.
For seasonal events, remember to be consistent between your landing page and your ads. Do not only follow the same aesthetic, but also deliver on the promises you make in your ads.
5. Don’t Forget About Q5
One of the biggest missed opportunities for brands is overlooking the potential of Q5. The Q5 period, spanning from the day after Christmas through January, is often underestimate but can be just as profitable as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. During Q5, consumers are eager for change. They embrace New Year’s resolutions and self-improvement goals, and looking for ways to upgrade their personal and professional lives.
For brands in niches like health & wellness, fitness, finance, telehealth, B2B, and other sectors that help consumers improve their day-to-day lives, Q5 is a golden opportunity. With ad costs often dropping after the holiday rush, it’s an ideal time to maximize your marketing budget and capture a more engaged audience at a lower CPM.
When CPM drops due to lower competition, you have a unique opportunity to increase your ad visibility without increasing your spend. This translates into more impressions, greater brand awareness, and a higher chance of engaging both potential and current customers.
To make the most of Q5, align your offers with consumers’ renewed focus on their goals. Launch campaigns for post-holiday deals, subscription services, or special bundles that match their aspirations for the new year. For industries outside of these niches, Q5 is still an opportunity. Use it to roll out fresh messaging that speaks to personal growth or professional success, helping consumers see how your product or service can bring positive change.
By incorporating Q5 into your seasonal growth marketing strategy, you can extend the gains of BFCM well into January, capitalizing on this high-conversion, lower-cost period. A strong Q5 strategy transforms what’s often considered a post-holiday slowdown into a critical revenue-driving period, setting your brand up for success into the new year.
Ready for the Holidays?
There’s plenty to do, but thankfully, there’s still plenty of time to do it. If you need any assistance in your holiday planning, that’s what we’re here for. Need some extra hands to get all of your ad creative produced on time?
Your Growth Marketing Team: Partnering with Primer means we take care of everything—strategy and planning, production, reporting, and optional media buying—to achieve your growth objectives. You can focus on your business while we deliver the results.
Creative On-Demand: Access a subscription-based marketing creative platform to request UGC, videos, images, and landing pages crafted by top marketing creative strategists and designers who understand what drives conversions.
