Holiday paid social advertising is always a balancing act—timing, creative, budgets, and platform tools all move quickly while consumer behavior never stops shifting. Each holiday season is a little different, but 2025 presents some particularly unique challenges and opportunities.
On one hand, the steady advance of AI-powered marketing technology is opening some interesting new avenues—while on the other, tariff-fueled concerns about pricing and inventory may be causing consumer confidence to falter.
Combining lessons from the past few holiday seasons with our insights about the here and now, we’ve assembled five key tips to guide your 2025 holiday paid social strategy.
1. Start Early to Build Momentum, Then Ramp Up
Holiday planning should never wait until the holidays themselves are right around the corner. Begin in late summer (now) to give yourself enough time to hammer out budgets, goals, creative development, and testing.
Ad deployment should start in early October with lighter prospecting and mid-funnel campaigns. For our larger apparel clients, we typically begin warming audiences earlier in the season to make remarketing more efficient in November and December.
The goal isn’t to spend heavily right out of the box—it’s to balance early and late spend. Investing early builds awareness and remarketing pools. Then ramping up for Cyber Monday and final shipping deadlines ensures coverage during the highest-intent periods. Starting too late means chasing higher CPMs, so consistent pacing proved essential.
During peak weeks, performance should be monitored daily, with spend shifted to top campaigns so that dollars work hardest. Flexibility is the guiding principle.
2. Account for Changing Consumer Behavior and Economic Pressures
For some time now, the trend has been that consumers begin their holiday shopping earlier—and thus expect deals and discounts to appear well before Thanksgiving. Buy-now-pay-later is also continuing to gain traction, which is a boon for conversion rates and average order value.
Whether that’s enough to offset market factors? Unknown. There’s brewing economic uncertainty once again, which will make shoppers more value-driven. In those situations, your propositions can make all the difference: free shipping, easy returns, and clear discount messaging give you the best chances at success.
Digital ad spending increases every year, meaning costs always rise—and media costs peak during sales events like the holiday season. Combined with potential buyer hesitancy, being efficient in how you scale your budgets will be all-important.
3. Apply Lessons From Previous Holiday Seasons
As much as we all like to champion brand strength and clever creative, the holiday season is about conversions at scale. One of our biggest observations from the 2024 holiday season was that simple and direct sale messaging seriously outperformed lifestyle-heavy creative. Even for our large, established clients, motion-based creative and urgency messaging cut through better than brand storytelling in 2024.
We anticipate a stronger push toward clarity and authenticity in creative. Consumers are gravitating toward fast, snackable content like TikTok and Instagram Reels or motion-first assets on Meta. Bold, direct sale messaging is especially vital in these formats: make the offer obvious within the first seconds, because users are liable scroll away very quickly.
Authentic creator-style content will continue to dominate on TikTok, while Meta users tend to respond to carousels, dynamic product ads, and short-form video with urgency overlays. More broadly, value-driven content that emphasizes free shipping, buy now pay later, and last chance messaging will resonate with budget-conscious buyers who are looking for both convenience and clarity.
4. Leverage New AI Tools for Creative and Campaigns
Generative AI has been everywhere in 2025, and it’s guaranteed to play a big role in holiday marketing this year. On Meta, new AI-driven creative tools can help refresh assets quickly, which is especially useful to fight ad fatigue during Q4. TikTok’s Symphony Creative Studio allows us to scale trend-driven videos faster, keeping pace with how quickly content cycles move. This means strong evergreen creative can be adapted with holiday overlays and spun into new variations, cutting out the need for additional graphic design work or production-heavy product shoots.
Beyond creative, Meta’s updated Advantage Plus campaigns now give advertisers more levers to control while still benefiting from AI optimization. Almost every platform now has AI-powered campaigns, so we expect to see budgets flow toward these products as advertisers test their incremental value during the holidays.
5. Balance Evergreen and Seasonal Campaigns
Don’t turn off your evergreen campaigns: The best approach is usually a hybrid. Evergreen campaigns should remain active with refreshed messaging and creative to keep their optimization history intact. At the same time, it is valuable to launch holiday-specific campaigns for flash sales or testing promotional angles.
Layering holiday creative onto always-on campaigns preserved performance and avoided losing optimization learnings. For 2025, we think it’s wise to keep investing steadily in prospecting efforts while layering urgency messaging in at the right times. Running both together gives stability while also capturing incremental wins from seasonal urgency.
Carry Your Learnings Forward
This year, a key priority is to better understand the incremental impact of holiday campaigns. We know spend increases significantly in Q4, but measuring what is truly incremental versus what would have converted anyway is critical for long-term planning. Another priority is creative testing—understanding how different styles and messages influence buyer behavior during the most competitive period of the year.
Holiday success comes down to starting early, keeping creative fresh, and staying flexible. Consumers respond best to clarity, so bold discounts, urgency messaging, and easy value propositions will win. Brands that mix evergreen and seasonal campaigns, refresh creative often, and document what works will set themselves up for stronger results not just this holiday season, but year-round.
