Transform Holiday Marketing Challenges into Opportunities
Raise your hand if you’re ready to stop dwelling on the economic headlines. We hear you.
While Holiday 2025 will arrive in a climate of shifting consumer sentiment and market conditions, brands have more power than they realize. This season isn’t about waiting for perfect conditions, it’s about being nimble with marketing strategies, and stocking your toolkit with solutions that allow you to move ahead with speed and confidence.
Quick-to-Market (QTM) solutions are emerging as a competitive option to supercharge your promotions, turning uncertainly into opportunity. QTMs allow brands to act on fresh insights, seize emerging trends, and meet customers where they are right now. Whether you are responding to a viral moment, aligning with a cultural event, or pivoting your Black Friday deals in real time, a QTM approach can give you the opportunity to vault ahead of a slower moving competitor. With the holidays fast approaching, every day counts, and a QTM could be the best gift your brand gives itself.
What Shoppers Are Actually Telling Us
Much has been written about consumers stocking up early on essentials and even holiday gifts to avoid higher prices later. Salsify’s 2025 Holiday Pulse Report predicts 15% of shoppers will be among the early birds, but the report also shows much of the action will take place this fall.
- 58% plan to shop in peak holiday season, September through December
- 73% are enthusiastic about Black Friday Deals (up 11% over 2024)
A QTM can help brands achieve a trifecta for their holiday promotions strategy: A long-term plan that has been in the works for months, a QTM that gives them the ability to be nimble as economic conditions change, which leads to the strongest possible approach to Holiday 2025.
What Is a Quick-to-Market (QTM) Promotion
A QTM solution allows brands to get a promotional campaign out into the marketplace in a matter of days rather than months. By using a templated, out-of-the-box solution, the time it takes to design and engineer a promotional offering is shortened considerably. No website to build, and minimal configuration.
Because the hard part is already done, the cost is significantly reduced from a fully customized offering, giving brands flexibility in their budget. A good QTM will still allow for some bespoke touches, including branding, customized URLs, modern options for redemption and payment as well as clear insights without a complex set-up. There should be no compromise on compliance or fraud protection. Your promotions partner should be able to walk you through all your options so you understand how a QTM will work best with your campaign.
What Kinds of Promotions are QTMs Best Suited For?
The size of the campaign shouldn’t matter with a quality QTM, but some holiday promotion types lend themselves better to a templated solution than others. Rebates and sweepstakes are often ideal candidates.
If you are designing a premium promotion that requires a more intricate site layout, more data requirements, integrations with other sites or databases, you will likely need a more customized solution. But as Black Friday approaches, and you see an opportunity to jump on a trend or discover some additional budget to spend, a QTM offer can be ideal.
Finding Opportunity in Uncertainty
A QTM solution frees you from the need to lock into a holiday promotion months in advance–giving you flexibility to adjust for tariffs, shifting budgets and late-breaking trends. Agility is key in a year where conditions are changing rapidly.
One thing that never changes–the desire of consumers to find value in a season that tends to bring them the best shopping opportunities of the year. Consumers opened their wallets wide for Holiday 2024, up 4% over 2023 to a record $994.1 billion as reported by the National Retail Federation. We’re optimistic for a successful season in 2025 and are committed to equipping our clients with the best tools to capture it.
That starts with flexible holiday marketing strategies like QTMs—giving brands the power to pivot when necessary and make every dollar and every moment count.
