Running a seasonal campaign with video

Seasonal campaigns fail at the end far more often than at the start. The launch gets attention; the teardown gets forgotten, and in March the home page is still showing the January sale.

Build it to be removable

The structural decision that makes everything else easy: give the campaign its own playlist. Not campaign videos added to your main playlist — its own.

That way the campaign is one object. It goes live by placing one playlist and it goes away by removing one placement. Campaign videos scattered through your permanent playlists have to be found and pulled out individually, which is how the March problem happens.

The shape of a campaign

Before

One or two videos, placed where existing customers will see them, saying something is coming. Short. The job is a diary note, not persuasion.

During

The full playlist, on the home page and the relevant collection. This is where most of the content lives and where most of the sales happen.

Keep the tagging tight. A campaign video tagged to your whole catalogue converts worse than one tagged to the three products it shows, because the shopper cannot tell what the offer actually is.

After

Remove the placement on the day the campaign ends, not the week after. Set a reminder when you launch it — the end date is the thing nobody diarises.

Keep the videos. They are not waste; they are next year’s before-phase content, and reusing them is most of what makes the second year cheaper than the first.

Watch the placement budget

If your plan limits how many places videos can appear, a campaign competes with your permanent merchandising for the same slots. Decide deliberately which permanent placement pauses for the campaign rather than discovering the limit at launch.

The mistake worth naming

Replacing all your evergreen video with campaign video. Your best-performing product videos keep working during a campaign — a shopper who came for the sale still buys the thing they were going to buy anyway. A campaign should be additive at the top of the site, not a wholesale swap.

What to record afterwards

Which videos drove attributed orders, which placement did the work, and how long the run actually needed to be. Most campaigns are a week too long: the last third earns little and the content fatigues. You only find that out by looking, and you only look if you wrote down that you would.