Holiday dinners, gifting, entertaining, travel, corporate events, and New Year’s celebrations all create new occasions for consumers to discover and purchase wine and spirits. But winning OND doesn’t start in October.
The brands best positioned to capitalize on holiday demand are planning their strategy, budgets, creative, media, retail priorities, e-commerce experience, and measurement well before consumers enter peak holiday buying mode.
And there’s another important consideration: not every OND conversion happens online.
For wine and spirits brands, digital marketing can influence at least three major paths to revenue: E-commerce. Retail. Visitation.
A consumer might discover your brand on Instagram and purchase a bottle online. Another might see a digital ad, find a nearby retailer, and purchase in-store. Someone else might discover a winery through paid social, search for tasting experiences days later, and book a reservation.
An effective OND strategy needs to account for all three.
By October, your brand should ideally be launching, testing, and optimizing campaigns, not deciding what the holiday strategy will be.
A strong OND planning timeline might look something like this:
Starting early gives your team something incredibly valuable during the most competitive months of the year: data.
Instead of entering November with an untested campaign, you’ll already know which audiences, messages, creative, and channels are generating results.
Consumers don’t purchase wine and spirits during OND for one reason.
They may be shopping for:
Each occasion creates a different opportunity for messaging.
Instead of relying on one generic “Happy Holidays” campaign, brands should develop creative and media around the moments when their products naturally fit into consumers’ lives.
A bottle positioned as the perfect Thanksgiving pairing may need completely different messaging from that same bottle positioned as a holiday gift.
Before deciding which platforms to use, determine what you actually want consumers to do.
For many wine and spirits brands, there isn’t one conversion. There are several.
OND presents a significant opportunity to increase direct-to-consumer revenue, particularly through gifting and entertaining.
Brands should consider creating:
Most importantly, make the path to purchase easy.
If an ad promotes holiday gifting, sending consumers to a generic homepage creates unnecessary friction. Send them directly to a page where they can explore the relevant products and complete the purchase.
For many wine and spirits brands, the majority of sales happen through retailers rather than their own website.
That doesn’t mean digital advertising can’t drive those purchases.
Before OND, identify your priority:
Media can then be concentrated where consumers can actually find the product.
Paid social, programmatic advertising, geofencing, and store-locator campaigns can help connect digital discovery with physical availability.
The journey might look like:
Holiday Ad → Store Locator → Retail Visit → Purchase
Brands can also explore footfall attribution where available to better understand whether consumers exposed to advertising subsequently visit targeted retail locations.
For wineries, distilleries, tasting rooms, and other hospitality-driven brands, OND isn’t only a product sales opportunity. It’s also a visitation opportunity.
During the holidays, consumers are traveling, hosting friends and family, planning weekend activities, and looking for memorable experiences.
Your digital strategy should make tasting and hospitality experiences easy to discover and book.
Paid search can capture high-intent consumers actively looking for wineries, tastings, tours, or experiences in your market.
Paid social can introduce consumers to the destination before they begin actively searching.
Retargeting can then bring interested visitors back to complete their reservation.
The journey might look like:
Social Ad → Brand Awareness → Google Search → Tasting Page → Reservation
The key is understanding that these channels don’t operate independently. Awareness created through one platform can drive intent and conversions through another.
One of the biggest mistakes brands can make during OND is focusing exclusively on the final conversion.
Consumers can’t purchase a brand they don’t know exists.
A strong wine and spirits holiday marketing strategy should therefore support consumers throughout the funnel.
Rather than asking which single channel generated the sale, consider how the channels worked together to create it.
As OND approaches, pressure to deliver immediate ROAS can push brands heavily toward bottom-of-funnel advertising.
Conversion campaigns matter, but relying exclusively on existing demand can limit growth.
Awareness campaigns help create demand, while search, retargeting, e-commerce, and retail strategies help capture it.
For example:
Paid Social + Programmatic + Content → Awareness & Consideration → Search & Retargeting → E-Commerce / Retail / Visitation
Someone exposed to a Meta ad today may not purchase immediately. They may search for the brand days later, purchase it at a retailer, or book a tasting experience weeks later.
Looking only at last-click attribution can significantly underestimate the impact of upper-funnel media.
Holiday creative should evolve as consumer priorities change throughout OND.
Think about developing creative around different seasonal moments:
Brands should also prepare multiple formats and variations for paid media, including short-form video, static assets, lifestyle imagery, product-focused creative, and creator-style content.
More creative doesn’t simply keep your feed interesting. It gives advertising platforms more opportunities to identify what resonates with different audiences.
Wine and spirits are naturally suited to gifting, but consumers shouldn’t have to figure out the offer themselves.
Consider making holiday shopping easier through:
Your website, paid media, social content, and email campaigns should all reinforce the same gifting proposition.
The simpler the decision feels, the easier it becomes to convert holiday shoppers.
Increasing media spend won’t solve a broken conversion experience.
Before OND campaigns launch, audit your digital infrastructure.
Confirm that:
The last thing you want is to discover during Black Friday that your campaigns have been generating conversions you can’t properly measure.
Your existing customers may be some of your most valuable audiences during OND.
Segment your database based on behaviors such as:
These audiences can support email and SMS campaigns as well as eligible paid-media targeting, retargeting, and audience expansion strategies.
Your OND strategy shouldn’t only focus on acquiring new customers. It should give existing customers compelling reasons to purchase again.
OND media budgets don’t necessarily need to be distributed evenly across October, November, and December.
Different brands will experience different peaks depending on their products, distribution, promotions, and objectives.
A DTC wine brand may need additional investment around gifting and shipping deadlines.
A spirits brand with strong retail distribution may prioritize Thanksgiving, holiday parties, and New Year’s Eve.
A winery may increase visitation media during periods when holiday travel and tourism demand rises.
Build flexibility into the media plan so spend can move toward the channels, audiences, markets, products, and messages producing the strongest results.
OND measurement becomes particularly challenging for wine and spirits because consumers can convert through different channels.
If you only measure online purchases, you may miss the impact advertising is having on retail.
If you only measure last-click bookings, you may miss the Meta campaign that introduced someone to your winery.
Your measurement framework should reflect your business model.
Depending on your objectives, OND KPIs might include:
No single metric tells the entire story.
Before your holiday campaigns launch, ask:
If you’re waiting until October to start checking these boxes, you’re giving your competitors a head start.
The holiday season creates enormous opportunities for wine and spirits brands, but the consumer journey is increasingly complex.
The same campaign can influence an online purchase, an in-store sale, or a tasting-room reservation.
That’s why OND shouldn’t be approached as a collection of isolated holiday campaigns. It should be treated as an integrated strategy connecting brand awareness, consumer intent, e-commerce, retail, and visitation.
At oneteam™, we help wine and spirits brands build integrated performance marketing strategies across paid social, paid search, programmatic and geofencing, content, SEO, email, and digital experiences.
Planning your OND strategy? Let’s build a media plan designed to turn holiday demand into measurable business results across e-commerce, retail, and visitation.
