7 ways to build a full-funnel holiday marketing strategy

Holiday shopping doesn’t start when the decorations go up. For many consumers, researching, browsing, comparing, and even buying starts weeks or months before the biggest shopping days arrive.

In 2025, more than half of U.S. consumers planned to begin holiday shopping in October or earlier, while 60% still expected to finish their shopping in December. That leaves marketers with a long window to influence decisions, from the first spark of inspiration to the final purchase. (Medill Spiegel Research Center)

A strong holiday marketing strategy needs to account for that entire journey. Focusing only on shoppers who are ready to buy means missing the people still discovering brands, researching products, and deciding where they’ll eventually spend.

For growing businesses, that means thinking full-funnel: drive discovery, acquire new customers, and maximize conversions. Here are seven ways to build those goals into your holiday marketing strategy without making advertising another full-time job.

1. Start your holiday marketing strategy before peak season

There’s a reason holiday promotions seem to arrive earlier every year. Shoppers do, too.

Circana found that 44% of consumers planned to start their 2025 holiday shopping earlier than they normally would. That makes the weeks leading into peak season valuable for more than announcing your biggest discount. (Circana)

Early holiday advertising gives potential customers time to discover your business before they’re staring at a dozen competing offers. Someone might watch your video, browse your site, notice a product they like, and leave without buying. That interaction still matters because you’ve introduced your brand before their purchase decision is final.

Starting early can also give campaigns more time to learn which audiences, products, messages, and creative are getting attention. That insight becomes more valuable as shopping activity accelerates.

There’s a budget consideration, too. Advertising demand increases around major shopping moments. Rather than relying on a few highly competitive days to deliver your entire season, starting earlier gives your holiday marketing strategy more time and flexibility to work.

2. Plan for discovery, acquisition, and conversion

Not everyone seeing your holiday ads is ready for the same conversation.

Someone discovering your business for the first time may need a reason to explore. A shopper who has visited your site several times may need a reason to finally purchase. An existing customer might be interested in coming back for another product.

That’s why a full-funnel holiday marketing strategy should account for three distinct goals:

• Drive discovery: Reach prospects and introduce more potential customers to your business.
• Acquire new customers: Turn interested shoppers into first-time buyers and grow your customer base.
• Maximize conversions: Encourage shoppers and existing customers to purchase and generate more value from those relationships.

Criteo GO lets marketers create campaigns around each of these goals. Today, they are separate campaigns, so businesses looking to address the full funnel can activate all three as part of a broader holiday strategy.

That approach gives each campaign a clear job while helping your marketing address shoppers at different stages of their journey. You’re not asking every impression to do everything at once.

3. Use the holidays to find new customers and grow existing ones

The holiday season puts a lot of potential new customers into the market. Naturally, acquisition becomes a priority.

It shouldn’t become the only priority.

Harvard Business School research describes acquisition and retention as complementary rather than competing strategies. Research from Bain has also demonstrated how customer value can grow with repeat purchases. In apparel, for example, Bain found that a customer’s fifth purchase was 40% larger than their first, while their tenth was nearly 80% larger. (Harvard Business School)

For a growing business, that makes balance important. You want to bring new people into your customer base during a high-intent shopping season, but you also want to make more of the relationships you already have.

Your holiday campaigns can re-engage previous visitors, reconnect with existing customers, and surface products relevant to what someone has already shown interest in.

And think beyond December. A customer acquired during the holidays can become a repeat customer in January, spring, or next holiday season. The sale matters, but so does the relationship you’re starting.

4. Make search and social part of a cross-channel holiday strategy

Search is useful during the holidays for an obvious reason: people are searching.

They’re researching gifts, comparing products, looking for deals, checking reviews, and trying to solve very specific shopping problems. A strong search presence can help your business show up when that intent is explicit.

Social has a different strength. It can help create demand before someone knows exactly what they want. Images and video can introduce a product, demonstrate how it works, show it in context, or give shoppers an idea they weren’t searching for five minutes earlier.

Both belong in a modern holiday marketing strategy. Neither should be the end of it.

People don’t spend their entire shopping journey inside one search engine or social platform. They move between feeds, websites, apps, publisher content, videos, search results, product pages, and online stores.

That’s where cross-channel marketing becomes important. Instead of treating each environment like a separate universe, a cross-channel strategy helps your brand stay present as people move between them.

Criteo GO can extend that reach across the open web and supported social environments, with access to more than 35,000 domains and apps. (Criteo)

For growing businesses, this creates an opportunity to compete for attention across many of the same digital environments as much larger brands without needing a giant marketing department to manage every channel independently.

5. Give shoppers a chance to remember you

Holiday marketers understandably spend a lot of time thinking about conversions. But not every valuable impression ends with a purchase.

Brand recognition has a role, especially earlier in the season.

Imagine a shopper sees a video featuring one of your products in October. Later, they come across the product again while browsing online. A week or two after that, they see another ad while actively researching gift ideas.

By the time they’re ready to buy, your business isn’t completely unfamiliar.

A full-funnel holiday marketing strategy gives those earlier interactions room to contribute instead of judging every ad solely by whether someone purchased immediately after seeing it.

That can be particularly important for small and emerging brands. Familiarity takes time to build, and established retailers already have plenty of it. Starting earlier and appearing consistently across channels gives your brand more opportunities to earn a place in the shopper’s consideration set before the buying decision gets serious.

6. Use AI to optimize your holiday campaigns as shoppers change

Holiday shopping moves quickly. What people want, what they respond to, and how close they are to buying can change throughout the season.

Trying to manually keep up with every audience, bid, placement, product, and creative decision is a lot for any marketer. For an entrepreneur or lean marketing team, it can become unrealistic.

AI can take more of that work off the marketer’s plate.

Criteo GO is powered by Criteo AI, which draws on more than 20 years of commerce intelligence and real-time shopping signals. It can automatically optimize targeting, bidding, creative, and product recommendations around the marketer’s chosen goal.

That matters because good holiday advertising requires more than finding a large audience. It requires finding people with relevant intent and deciding when, where, and how to reach them as that intent changes.

AI can process those signals continuously, reducing the amount of manual optimization required from the person running the business.

You shouldn’t need a college degree in digital advertising to launch a sophisticated campaign. A good advertising platform should help make the complicated decisions manageable, giving smaller teams access to capabilities that once demanded significantly more time and specialized expertise.

7. Let AI help with holiday ad creation, too

Holiday advertising creates another problem for lean teams: you need creative. Usually, a lot of it.

Social needs assets. Display needs assets. Video needs assets. Different placements require different formats, and holiday messages can become stale quickly when shoppers see the same thing repeatedly.

That doesn’t mean every small business needs to suddenly develop an in-house creative department.

AI-assisted creative tools can make producing and adapting ads faster. Criteo GO can help generate images and copy, while its AI video capabilities can create video assets using information from a business’s website. Ads can then be adapted across display, native, social, and video formats.

That lowers the creative barrier to cross-channel advertising. A smaller business can experiment with video or expand into additional formats without treating every new placement like a completely new production project.

More importantly, it gives time back to the people running the business. The holiday season already comes with inventory, fulfillment, promotions, customer service, staffing, and everything else that mysteriously becomes urgent at the same time.

Advertising technology should reduce that workload, not add another pile to it.

Build a holiday marketing strategy for the whole shopper journey

The holiday season isn’t one shopping moment. It’s months of discovery, consideration, comparison, purchasing, and repeat purchasing happening across different channels at different speeds.

Your holiday marketing strategy should be built for that reality.

Start early enough to build recognition before peak competition arrives. Reach prospects who haven’t discovered you yet. Turn more of those prospects into first-time customers. Keep engaging the customers you’ve already earned. Use search and social, but expand your reach beyond individual platforms with a cross-channel approach that keeps your business visible as shoppers move around the internet.

And let AI carry more of the operational weight. Automated optimization and AI-assisted creative can make sophisticated holiday advertising much more manageable for a lean team.

Criteo GO helps businesses approach the season around three core goals: drive discovery, acquire new customers, and maximize conversions. By combining Criteo AI, commerce intelligence, cross-channel reach, and easier creative tools, Criteo GO gives growing businesses a simpler way to compete for holiday shoppers without spending the whole holiday season managing ads.