July 30, 2025
RIP Black Friday.
The era of doorbuster crowds is over.
Don’t take our word for it. Research states that for today’s smart shoppers, November is too late to get started.
Holiday marketing strategies revolve around understanding evolving shopper behavior, leveraging social commerce trends, and prioritizing an authentic content strategy for maximum conversion optimization.
And a new shopping strategy demands an equally sharp holiday marketing strategy for 2025.
Let’s see how leading brands are winning with smart holiday marketing strategies in the 2025 season, starting as early as July.
Tapping into holiday shopper behavior trends
Shoppers aren’t just browsing early, they’re buying early.
Nearly 60% begin their holiday shopping before October. They’re budgeting, comparing deals, reading reviews, and locking in must-have items to avoid stockouts, months before the traditional peak season.
Our research revealed that they start hunting for deals in August, make purchase decisions on TikTok, start locking in must-haves, and expect brands to meet them exactly where they are in their journey.
Your holiday marketing strategies must capture this massive, motivated audience when they’re actively buying. What does that mean for brands, retailers, and ecommerce players? Creating urgency.
Pro tip: Launch creator partnerships and spark conversations on social media. Smart brands are seeding products with micro-influencers in July and August, creating authentic content that captures early shoppers when they’re actively in buying mode.
The magic happens when creators share real experiences with your products months before peak season. Their audiences trust these recommendations more than traditional ads. By the time November hits, you’ve already built desire and social proof with the shoppers who matter most. Because if you miss that early window, someone else will own your sales.
Content strategy optimized for the collapsed funnel
From posting selfies to becoming a potent tool for direct sales, social media has come a long way. This is the new era of social commerce, where the gap between discovery and purchase has collapsed. When shoppers discover your product on Instagram, they can research, compare, and purchase without leaving the platform.
This seamless experience captures impulse buyers and reduces friction.
Brands optimizing product pages with authentic social proof see up to a 251% increase in revenue per e-commerce session.
Social commerce tools now turn social content into shopping experiences that directly drive sales. When shoppers discover your product on Instagram, they can research, compare, and purchase without ever leaving the platform. This seamless experience captures impulse buyers and reduces the friction that kills conversions.
So, how do you win?
Through a content strategy that combines authentic creator content with shoppable socials. Showcase real-life use cases on product pages, enable one-click purchasing from social posts, and ka-ching!
Building trust with authentic holiday marketing ideas
If social media is where discovery happens, user-generated content is what builds trust.
How can you spark social buzz and generate high-quality campaign content? Sampling campaigns.
They generate real-time, social-first user-generated content that you can view and measure in one place. Sampling campaigns are where compounding happens: early content drives mid-season trust, which boosts overall engagement and sales.
Pro tip: Launch sampling campaigns early to build a content library of authentic reviews, unboxing videos, and real-user testimonials. By the holiday season, you’ll have hundreds of pieces of genuine social proof ready to convert hesitant shoppers into confident buyers.
Campaigns like Bazaarvoice’s sampling program enable you to gather early, authentic user-generated content and reviews that convert browsers into buyers.
How to get in early and stay on top of mind:
- Launch sampling campaigns by August: Start building real-user content before peak season. Sampling helps generate reviews, unboxings, and social proof that drive conversations and conversions later.
- Partner with micro-influencers: Real people sharing real opinions over brand ads, any day. Also, our research showed that 55% of 18-34 year olds and 47% of 35-54 year olds prefer real shopper recommendations over ads.
- Refresh product pages: Make sure your content is current, complete, and enriched with user-generated visuals and testimonials. Also, ensure your product display pages are fully optimized for conversions.
Integrated, cross-channel content strategy FTW
Your best content shouldn’t live in just one place.
Think about the shopper journey: They discover your product on TikTok, research it on your website, and finally purchase it on various e-commerce platforms.
Visual syndication ensures they see consistent, authentic social proof at every touchpoint. Bazaarvoice’s Visual Syndication Network distributes your best-performing user-generated content across retail sites and ecommerce platforms, ensuring shoppers see consistent messaging at every stage.
This creates a powerful multiplier effect for your holiday marketing strategies.
Create high-quality visual content early in the season, then syndicate it across every channel where your shoppers might encounter your brand. This consistent social proof builds confidence and drives conversions throughout the extended holiday buying cycle.
Syndicate your social proof, influencer reviews, and sampling content across:
- Retail partner product pages
- Mobile apps
- Search listings
- Email promotions
The result: Greater brand visibility, higher trust, and stronger conversion optimization.
Winning the 2025 holiday season
Success means understanding that holiday campaigns are no longer about running Black Friday promotions. It is about early engagement, authentic content, and consistent amplification.
Your competition is still thinking in silos, separate teams for social, sampling, and commerce. And the winners? They are using smarter tools that make every piece of content work harder, every creator partnership drive more revenue, and every sampling campaign build lasting brand loyalty.
Ready to dominate the holidays? Watch the full on-demand webinar for a complete breakdown of how to get ahead.
Visit the Holiday HQ and get the complete Holiday Toolkit with activation timelines, buyer personas, and generational targeting strategies to start winning today.
