How to Shift Your Brand Visuals for the Holidays
The holidays are rapidly approaching! What will they look like during these unprecedented times? We’re curious to experience it, too, and imagine that there will be a deep adjustment to how customers engage this holiday season. How can you prepare your brand for the holidays? One suggestion we have is to shift your brand visuals.
Don’t Feel Pressured to Drastically Shift Your Visuals Around the Holidays
Come October, the pressure sets in to start incorporating reds, greens, blues and silvers into your holiday marketing, even if your business has no religious affiliations. But remember that your customers are already being barraged with traditional holiday colors in their daily lives during fall and winter months.
Ditch the Holiday Trees and Snowflakes
Hopping on the bandwagon won’t necessarily help you to stand out. You also want to make sure that your brand remains recognizable — and throwing in trees or snowflakes at random may muddle your visual message. Always stay true to your brand, especially as that’s why your customers value what you offer.
Focus on Joy in Your Marketing
Instead, if you want to grab your customer’s attention a bit more without affiliating yourself with a religious holiday, try placing more emphasis on the brighter or more energetic color(s) within your brand palette. You don’t have to abandon your existing brand identity to pull in more customer focus.
Maintain the feelings evoked from effective storytelling that uses holiday visuals. What your brand adds to the story about a given holiday guides how you visually engage with your customers.
Stick with Golds and Silvers that Don’t Tie too Closely to a Specific Holiday
If you do want to tie in a subtle holiday-esque look without departing too much from your own brand, metallics are a great place to start. Because metallics like gold and silver are often less saturated and more neutral in color, they can complement your existing color palette instead of throwing it off completely.
Take Advantage of Metallics’ Elevated Vibe
Metallic colors are often used to lend a sense of luxury to a brand or to communicate that their service or product is high end. While this may not be right for your brand all of the time, you may be able to channel these connotations into something useful for your holiday offers. The association that your customers have with metallics can lend itself well to them viewing your branding as special and important during the holidays.
Want to simplify the process and plan ahead? VVITCH Digital can create social templates for you to use during the holiday season. These are great to use during peak holiday sales months of October through December—potentially year round if you see the brand fit.
Maintain the familiarity customers may have with these colors and how importance is emphasized by using them. Your brand doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel in order to be included in the experience your customers have this holiday season.
Feel Free to Lean into Moody Winter Vibes and Utilize Deeper, Cooler, and Darker Colors
Before deploying this strategy, you’ll want to get a read of your audience to know how and if this appeals to them — there are plenty of folx out there who identify more with the grounding feeling of darker evenings and cooler temperatures than they do with the glitter and cheer of the holidays.
If that’s your audience, then feel free to lean into the darker more dramatic colors in your palette, and create visuals that reflect this season transition more so than the religious events surrounding it.
Create a Moody Vibe with Email
Design your emails with a story in mind that is relatable to what the holidays mean to your customers. With the moody winter vibes in your visuals, you can intrigue them by using this alternative approach to evoking “Happy Holidays!” with font selections, color highlighting, and customized email template elements using deeper and cooler colors. Better yet, with an email series for the holiday season you can expand on your brand’s moody vibe each week or month leading up to a given holiday.
Tell Your Moody Holiday Story with Social
Each social media platform has a variety of features that allow your brand to tell elaborate and colorful stories during the holidays. For example, take IG Stories, by using moody winter vibe colors your brand can stand out amongst Stories that will undoubtedly stick to traditional visual branding to promote their holiday sales or to engage with their audiences during the season. Stopping a thumb scroll is always important on social — getting a customer to dive into whatever has caught their attention is even better!
Unsure how to incorporate deeper, cooler, and darker colors into your email or social branding? We have made specific packages for use on social media and also included an email marketing package to ensure you’re able to visually brand across marketing channels. The packages include templates that are holiday-esque — embracing the metallics and moody winter vibes we’ve suggested.
Maintain originality where it aligns with your core customers. The story you tell during the holidays can be a nod to old traditions with the primary focus of ushering in new traditions too.
Not Sure How to Create Holiday Visuals for Your Business? We’re Here to Help.
With our holiday promotion templates and packages, your brand will be far better prepared to step into the holiday season. Your customers are experiencing something they never have before and it’s your chance to embrace them with stories they can relate to, even through your visual branding.
Need more help deciding how to approach your holiday branding? Want to experiment with the suggestions above, but don’t know where to start? VVITCH Digital can help!
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Meet the Authors
Brittinee Phillips, Copywriter
Brittinee has worked in marketing for a little over ten years. She has a passion and talent for storytelling. Brittinee's philosophy is that storytelling is the most integral part of the consumer and product experience, which is why she makes it a focal point in her approach to product and brand messaging.
Carly Teigler, Brand, Graphic, and Web Designer
After spending several years studying both architectural design and dance, Carly took her critical design eye, passion for choreographing experiences, and ability to learn quickly on her feet, and dove headfirst into the world of marketing strategy for small businesses. Having now taken a step back to focus solely on the visual side of marketing, Carly loves using her skills to create brand presences that are as passion-driven and unique as the people behind them.
