Slideshow: 6 best practices to prepare your holiday marketing campaigns

With the holidays just around the corner, consumers are already preparing for the biggest shopping spree of the year. Is your marketing ready?

The article was originally published on Digiday Content Channel. 

With the holidays just around the corner, consumers are already preparing for the biggest shopping spree of the year. Is your marketing ready?

It should come as no surprise that, this year, even more people will shop online: 16.6 percent more than in 2013, according to eMarketer. There will be more consumers getting comfortable with purchasing the gifts on their mobile devices and more overall income for retailers. (eMarketer predicts a 5 percent lift for the latter.)

Consumers are using their mobile devices and relying on advertising and social media to guide their holiday shopping to an unprecedented degree. It’s not just digital-only shoppers. According to Google, 75 percent of consumers plan to use their mobile devices while shopping in-store this season.

Whether they buy their gifts online or offline, the key to activating your potential customers is engaging them throughout their entire buying journey — and across every channel, on smartphones, tablets and desktops.

To see the greatest returns, marketers must stand out from the crowd. How? For starters, by focusing on the message. Marketers must produce advertising that’s creative and immersive at the same time. For example, the buying process can be influenced (and accelerated) by showcasing products in galleries and videos within the themselves. Additionally, users should be engaged through social media. Finally, marketers should consider incorporating simple gaming elements into the cross-device experience.

Of course, some ad features work best only in certain scenarios. For instance, though an increasingly large number of consumers use their smartphones to research products, many still prefer to use a desktop device or visit brick-and-mortar stores to make the final purchase. Knowing this, add a location-based feature to your smartphone ad?

To learn more about getting your display ads in shape for the holiday season, view the guide below. It includes several best practice campaign examples.