How to pick the best colors for Christmas content

In marketing and advertising, color can be a powerful tool.

There’s nothing new about that!

For decades marketers have been using the most appropriate hues to set the mood, evoke certain emotions, and draw in potential customers.

On a more festive note, when it comes to your holiday ad content, specific colors come to mind—red, green, and yellow or gold.

But how do these colors compare when it comes to ad performance and purchase rate?

Should your ad design match the overall look and feel of the season?

And more importantly, how can you use these colors to help boost the performance of your next Christmas ad campaign?

Let’s dive in and explore how you can use color choices to create the best-performing Christmas content.

Combination of red, green and yellow works great for Christmas ads

Most marketers know that color can be one of the fastest ways to set the mood.

Especially when color schemes are easily recognizable, they can significantly influence your target audience.

When creating ads specifically geared toward Christmas, it’s essential to use colors relevant to the holiday season.

Red, green, and yellow or gold are most associated with Christmas.

These colors can help your viewers connect with your ads on a deeper, more emotional level. Simply seeing those colors should automatically evoke holiday feelings, nostalgia, and Christmas cheer.

And according to our data, they do!

When we compared, Christmas ads with red and green color themes performed a whopping 68% better than ads without a similar Christmas palette.

Try incorporating these three colors in your ads, as they can work Christmas miracles for you.

And remember, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.

Don’t invent your own Christmas color scheme. Stick with easily recognizable red, green, and gold, and you’ll be on your way to landing that next sale.

For non-Christmas ads these colors perform average

If you’re not creating Christmas-specific content but want to incorporate holiday cheer into your ads or designs, these same three colors are still lovely but won’t have as much impact.

When we compared content that didn’t mention Christmas but still used Christmas colors, we found they performed about 9% worse.

Learn about Color choices that lift performance for e-commerce ads. In this case, the overall theme of Christmas may carry more weight than individual color choices. Using Christmas colors doesn't pack the same punch without actually mentioning Christmas.

Light, bright content performs best during Christmas

Most advertisers use black and darker-themed colors in their ad content leading up to Black Friday.

But once Cyber Monday rolls around, it's time to update any black or darkly-colored content to lighter palettes for the remainder of the holidays!

Brightness is essential when evoking a cheerful mood during this time of year so try using lighter hues instead of darker ones whenever possible.

We looked at content using dark, neutral, and light color palettes during Christmas, lighter content performed as much as 27% better than darker-colored content.

That said, dark content is one of the best performers during November leading up to Black Friday when lighter colors perform as much as 34% worse.

Still, remember to switch from darker tones to lighter ones once Black Friday and Cyber Monday have ended!

Leverage the power of Christmas colors

By carefully selecting which colors you use in your advertisements and website designs around Christmas Time, you can optimize your audience’s engagement with your content and drive better results than ever!

Be sure to use hues like red, green, yellow, or gold when creating Christmas-specific content.

And finally, remember that light and bright content is always preferred over darker color themes during this time of year.

With this data-backed advice, you can now ensure all your holiday ad content will look great and perform its very best!

Dataset

The dataset from this article is based on 500m+ impressions and 8300+ pieces of individual content on Meta (Facebook) platforms. It takes into account data from all industries in all countries, with the campaign objectives of conversions only. The period is from 01.12.2021 - 24.12.2021. Numbers are looking at correlation only, not causation. Remember to check your own data: numbers for different brands, industries, and contexts will vary. If you were intrigued about a specific insight, you can go in-depth into the various dimensions and how data can be segmented in Confect, here.