If you’re not using Instagram for marketing during the holidays, you’re missing out big. Within Instagram, reels are the type of content that drives the highest rates of engagement. Knowing that, if you want to create effective holiday promotions on Instagram, you’ll need to focus on reels.
Short-form content like reels isn’t just great for engagement. It’s also good for you from a production standpoint and it can be very fun to make. You can easily set up a large library of holiday reels for Halloween, Black Friday, and even Christmas, all in hours. Schedule that in advance and you have the recipe for a winning holiday season.
During the holidays, people are more likely to spend time on Instagram and other social media platforms. That means your reels are likely to get a lot more attention.
In this article, we’ll go over several tips on how to use Instagram reels effectively, both for holiday promotions and in general. Plus, we’ll show you how to use Spotlight for cross-platform holiday promotions. Let’s get to it!
Set your goals before you start
What do you want to get from Instagram reels? Some brands focus on reels to grow awareness, drive sales, collect potential leads, or encourage users to start conversations.
Setting a goal is important because it makes your marketing efforts measurable. Instagram provides you with access to several metrics for reels which you can track to measure your success, including:
- Plays, views, and accounts reached
- Likes, comments, shares, and saves
- Engagement rate
- Follows
- Interactions
- Watch time and average watch time
You can set goalposts using these metrics, such as publishing a Black Friday reel that gets at least 10,000 views and 100 new followers. Or perhaps a Christmas reel for a promotion that gets at least 1,000 shares by encouraging users to do it.
Using Spotlight, you can get access to those key metrics and analytics right from the WordPress dashboard. That’ll save you time you can use to make more reels (go back to the grind!)
Know your audience and what they love
When working on a reel, ask yourself, “Would my audience like this?”. While it’s OK to experiment with different types of reels from time to time, you’ll mostly want to focus on the content and topics that you know your audience loves, particularly during the holidays.
If you’ve been working on reels for a while, you should have an idea of the kind of content your audience likes and what gets the most views. If your audience responds to humor, consider making funny Christmas reels. Perhaps even sharing some of what goes on backstage at your business, The Office-style.
Kick things off with an interesting hook
Every reel needs a hook. That hook is why a viewer should stick with the reel beyond the first seconds instead of scrolling down for another dopamine hit.
The hook can be anything from a fast introduction to using trending sounds to close-ups of food, unexpected phrases at the start of the reel, and more. Here’s a great hook in action in a reel collaboration between Mariah Carey and Barbie. As soon as you see who’s in it, you have to watch it:
If you’re struggling to think of a hook for a reel, consider brainstorming using a tool such as ChatGPT or even Ahref’s hook generator to come up with some initial ideas you can play with. If you can tie that reel’s hook around the holidays, even better.
Keep it short and sweet
Like this section, reels should be short and sweet. Everyone wants to be entertained and move on to the next reel, so keep your content around 15-30 seconds long. Here’s a cute promotional video of a dog rocking sponsored products for Christmas to drive that point home.
That’s all the time you need to make an impactful reel, so make every second and word in the script count.
Make it visually appealing
Ideally, viewers should know they’re seeing a holiday reel almost instantly. If it’s a Christmas reel, use the famous colors and show some cute reindeer. Let the visuals do some of the work for you, like in this holiday reel:
Don’t let the interface limit you
Reels can be somewhat limiting in terms of the Instagram interface. With reels, you want to keep parts of the content clean, so it doesn’t overlap with Instagram’s User Interface (UI):
Instagram partially covers some of the reel’s real estate at the bottom and right sides of the screen. Don’t put any important elements, such as links to your Black Friday or Cyber Monday offers anywhere near those borders unless you want to miss out on some sales!
Team up for more eyeballs
Teaming up with other businesses in a similar niche can be a brilliant holiday business move. After all the only people busier than Santa’s elves during the holidays are social media marketing teams.
Take this example of the Food Network collaborating with influencer chef Sheri Wilson to promote a spooky Halloween snack:
Instagram gives you the tools you need to collaborate with other creators in your company’s vertical in fun ways. Do some gift-wrapping guides, spooky treats tutorials, show how shoppers use your products, and things like that. After all, it’s the holidays!
If you do reel collaborations for the holidays, make sure to use a new hashtag. That way, you’ll be able to display them on your site using Spotlight hashtag feeds.
Direct visitors to take action
In marketing, there’s a term called Call to Action (CTA). It means literally telling users and consumers what you want them to do, and it works.
Keep reading.
You can add CTAs directly to the reel as interactable elements, such as links, or simple forms to collect leads, as in that example. Other brands choose to add their CTAs in the description, so as to keep the reel looking uncluttered. Here Bath and Body Works uses the description for their Christmas-themed CTA:
When it comes to CTAs, be explicit in what you want users to do, such as shopping from your feed. Some types of CTAs will also perform better with your audience, so it pays to experiment before the holidays are upon you.
Sprinkle in some holiday cheer
People want to have fun when they watch reels. If you’re a business using reels for holiday promotions, you’ll need to embrace the spirit of fun.
Show how your office prepares for the holidays. How the marketing department has fun coming up with Christmas reels. Or even show off reels that your followers make, like Cheeto.
When it comes to spreading the holiday cheer, be like Cheetos and just roll with it.
While you’re doing that, you can also try your hand at joining festive challenges and trends. There’s always a trend going around and if you can tap into it, it can make some of your holiday reels blow up.
Make your Instagram reels interactive
Reels don’t have to be just video. You can add elements like quizzes and polls to pull your audience into the reel and interact with them.
You can set up polls for users to decide what products will go for sale on Cyber Monday and which on Black Friday. You can set up hashtags for Green Monday (yes, that’s a thing) and have your audience share what products they buy under it. Then you can highlight all of that content on your site using Spotlight.
Display your Instagram feed on your website
Instagram doesn’t make it as easy as it should be for you to share posts or reels on other sites. Embedding content works, but it’s not really intuitive and it doesn’t always look great.
If you’re going to put all that work into holiday reels, it makes sense to show them off properly, and Spotlight makes it easy to do so. With Spotlight, you can showcase reels anyplace on your website and you can do it using any of several stylish templates:
Aside from sharing reels, you can use Spotlight to share your Instagram feed on WordPress. The plugin even enables you to filter what posts to display using hashtags. If you set up specific hashtags for the holiday, you highlight that content on your website using Spotlight feeds.
Remember how we talked about encouraging users to share their reels earlier to spread the holiday cheer? You can also use Spotlight to showcase those reels in WordPress by creating tagged post feeds.
Analyze and adjust
Reels are marketing campaigns. To run successful campaigns, you need to monitor their performance. This will let you answer questions such as:
- Why did this type of reel work for Black Friday but not for Cyber Monday?
- Is it too early for me to start uploading holiday content?
- What hooks work best for Christmas reels?
Instagram gives you a lot of data, but it’s your job to make sense of it. If you’re not sure what it means, run experiments, and see what works best and what doesn’t. Fail and try again.
Over time, you’ll become familiar with the kind of reels your audience loves and what types of content might not get as many views. Back those assumptions up with data and you’ll be on the path to reel stardom (or at least notoriety).
Conclusion
If you want to be prepared for the holidays, start making reels now. Try things out and see what works and, above all, have fun with it (but also keep track of reel performance, please).
Reel watchers love authenticity. They want funny Halloween videos, behind-the-scenes Christmas pranks, that kind of thing. If you can make fun promotional reels around the holidays, it can be a boon to your business. You can track how all your reels perform and use that information to refine next year’s strategy.
Spotlight can help you showcase your best holiday reels in WordPress. You can display individual reels, entire feeds, and even filter content based on hashtags and tags. Try out Spotlight today!
