Four Innovative Ways Brands are Driving Revenue This Holiday Season
The holiday shopping season has arrived, and with it comes an exhausting cycle of seemingly non-stop marketing efforts for consumer brands across the globe. With economic uncertainty mounting and holiday shopping predictions looking pessimistic, brands are searching for creative new ways to drive revenue in 2022.
We’re here to break down the trends and take an in-depth look at some of the exciting new ways that retailers are connecting with their consumers to drive revenue this holiday season.
1. TikTok
TikTok has become a staple of the marketing mix for businesses large and small since its rapid rise to popularity in 2020, and the young social media platform certainly has a large part to play in this year’s holiday shopping season. Despite budget cuts and layoffs impacting businesses across seemingly all industries, social media ad spending is one area that seems to be safe from it all. TikTok has become an advertising giant, and is expected to take in over $10 billion in ad revenue alone this year — that’s more than social media rivals Snapchat and Twitter, but still less than Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
The strength of TikTok’s ad platform comes from the behavior of its users and the structure of its advertisements themselves. The average TikTok user spends an astounding 96 minutes per day on the app, providing the platform with an incredible opportunity to serve them with a wide variety of ad content. The ads themselves are unique, too, as they appear the same as a typical TikTok post — displayed full-screen and with no changes in format outside of the word “sponsored” displayed beneath the post. Expect businesses large and small to harness the extraordinary power of TikTok’s ad platform this holiday season and beyond as they look to capitalize on the app’s content-obsessed Gen Z user base.
2. Virtual Holiday Stores
The popularization of virtual reality technology in recent years has created many unique opportunities for retail brands to enter the “metaverse” and connect with their customers. Companies have experimented with virtual stores in the past, but 2022 marks the first year where these virtual stores represent a critical component of brands’ promotional strategies — we’ve already seen retailers like Crocs, Coach, and Bloomingdales launch virtual stores ahead of the holiday shopping season.
These virtual stores offer consumers a fully immersive and interactive experience that allows them to play games, take quizzes, interface with products, and visit exotic virtual locations. For brands, it is an opportunity to bring gamification to the retail space in a totally unprecedented way. What began as a private offering for small groups of retail buyers over the last two years is likely to become commonplace among major retailers this holiday season and beyond — especially as virtual reality technology continues to become more popular.
3. Intelligent Chat
Holiday shopping puts a major strain on retail brands large and small for the better part of two months. Soaring demand between Black Friday and late December means even more inbound messages and emails, more pressure to provide excellent customer service, and even less time for employees to spend focusing on the bigger picture. Many retail companies turn to hiring seasonal help in order to respond to the thousands of DMs, emails, comments, and calls they receive during this period, but the cost of hiring and training short-term help often outweighs the benefit.
Some innovative retailers are turning to intelligent chat technology to more efficiently solve this seasonal challenge. These intelligent chat platforms give brands the power to more efficiently engage with potential customers and answer their inbound questions without the need for employee intervention. GameOn Technology is a leader in the intelligent chat space and powers conversational experiences for many of the world’s most popular brands and sports teams. Retail brands are increasingly turning to this technology in an effort to save employee time and bandwidth during the peak shopping season. With the ability to handle a wide variety of inbound requests — everything from logistical questions to specific inquiries about product information — brands can confidently rely on GameOn’s chat technology to provide their customers with an authentic conversational experience across all of their touch points.
4. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing isn’t a new concept by any means — brands have been reliant upon celebrities and high-profile influencers to bring awareness to their products for decades. The evolution here comes in the way that brands are actually using their influencers for promotion. The days of paying the most famous person available to do an ad campaign or a one-off social media post are behind us, and brands are increasingly turning to “micro influencers” — personalities with under 100,000 followers on social media who generally have more of a genuine connection to their audiences. These micro influencers generally have higher than average engagement rates on social media thanks to the close-knit communities they build with their audiences.
Influencer marketing has been heavily influenced by the rise of TikTok, and we expect to see that play a major part in the influencer strategy for many popular brands this holiday season and beyond. As we alluded to above, TikTok has created an ad platform that doesn’t feel like an ad platform — creators are using that to their advantage by working with brands to create product-focused content that feels genuine and authentic. The content is so good that it can be difficult to tell what is sponsored promotion and what is genuine. Brands want it that way! It’s a trend that puts creators in the driver’s seat and empowers them to rally their audience around the brands and products they love.
As the holiday shopping season heats up in the coming weeks, it’s worth keeping an eye on these trends to see which brands are operating on the cutting edge of marketing and engagement this year.
