How to Stand Out in the Feed This Holiday Season [Holiday Sales Graphics Series Part 2]

marketing + sales

Welcome to our three-part Holiday Sales Graphics Series, where we’re sharing our best tips for visually showcasing your amazing products during the holiday season.

Whether you sell physical products or digital ones, online courses, or web-based services, these tips are going to help you create magazine-worthy, on-brand graphics that will get your offers in front of more holiday shoppers this year!

To help you take action even faster, we’re also sharing an entire collection of FREE gift guide Canva templates. Use the form below to get immediate access, so you can take what you’re learning and start creating on-brand graphics for your holiday content right away.

In today’s post, we’re going to talk about designing attention-grabbing, perfectly-on-brand graphics for your Instagram feed: both traditional square graphics and fun animated GIFs!

Prefer to watch and listen than read? We’ve got you covered — just hit play below!

Why creating stand-out social media graphics is important this holiday season

If you’ve been selling your products or services online for a while, I’m sure I don’t have to convince you that promoting them on Instagram is crucial if you want to get in front of your ideal buyers.

But what about during the holiday season? Does it make sense to show up on the platform even more?

The statistics say YES! 22% of surveyed people reported they’d be turning to Instagram to find ideas on what to buy ahead of Black Friday 2021, while Instagram itself reported that half of its users have visited a website to make a purchase after seeing a product or service on the app.

Psst — this applies to those of us selling to online business owners, too! Hootsuite found that 36.2% of B2B decision-makers are using Instagram to research new products or services on a regular basis.

Long story short? Your target audience is using Instagram to influence their buying decisions, and even more so during the holiday season!

(Is it really a surprise, though? I think we’re ALL guilty of mindlessly scrolling through our feeds and doing some online ‘window’ shopping while holiday movies play on repeat in the background!)

Types of holiday sales graphics to create for Instagram

This begs the question — what types of holiday sales graphics should we be sharing on Instagram and our other social media channels to break through all of those adorable matching-family-PJ selfies and glamorous Christmas tree shots?

One of the very best ways to provide value for your Instagram followers (not to mention to get plenty of shares and saves on your post) is to create a gift guide for them.

You can use a gift guide post to feature all of your own best-selling products, to share affiliate links from some of your favorite business owners and/or retail shops, or a combination of both!

Here are some ideas to get you started — all of which you can design in no time flat with our free gift guide Canva templates.

“Sneak peek” image of your gift guide

Already have a gift guide blog post on your website? Give your Instagram followers a small taste of what they can expect from it by sharing a “sneak peek” gift guide graphic: something that visually features a handful of your recommended products, but without giving them any more context. -

This is a great way to drive traffic to that link in your bio, as followers might just be intrigued enough to get the full context on your blog.

Full gift guide graphics

You can also easily share your entire gift guide with your followers in a single square image.

Don’t forget to include the name and price of the products and a link to a website where they can either find the full gift guide OR the products themselves.

You can use your caption to explain why these products make the perfect gift. And don’t forget to include a big, bold headline on your graphic that makes it clear who this gift guide is for!

Single product images

Have a favorite product that you want to shine the spotlight on? Create a graphic that highlights one gift recommendation and nothing else!

The best part about this type of gift guide graphic is that you have plenty of visual space to play with. Be sure to include a large, high-resolution image of your product, along with its name and price.

Depending on what design you use, you can even include a short product description and a call-to-action on the image itself.

Carousel graphics

If you really want to make an impact and keep your followers engaged with your gift guide content, blend together a mix of the above types of graphics in a single carousel post!

You can start with a “sneak peek” cover image that grabs attention, followed by a full gift guide graphic, then up to 8 single product images. Get creative with it, friend!

Animated graphics or GIFs

Last but certainly not least, you can add a little bit of flair to your followers’ feeds and really grab their attention with an animated Instagram post (aka a GIF!).

There are some basic animations included with the free version of Canva, or you can try some of the more sophisticated animations by upgrading to a Canva pro subscription.

Don’t want the entire image to be animated? You can also add in a subtle, pre-made animated graphic using Canva’s “sticker” feature. We love a cute little falling snowflake or an artful arrow that tells your followers exactly where to look.

BONUS TIP: It’s no secret that Instagram prioritizes video content, especially these days when they're competing with TikTok — and GIFs totally count as video content! By animating your graphic (or including an animated sticker), you’ll have to upload your graphic to Instagram as a video — which the algorithm is sure to LOVE!

Where to repurpose your holiday sales graphics

Your gift guide square graphics are perfect for showcasing your products on your Instagram feed — but you’re not limited to the ‘gram!

Don’t forget to repurpose your square graphics across other channels, too:

Post them to your Facebook page and/or group(s)
Scatter them throughout your gift guide blog post
Break up the wall of text in your emails
Pin them to your Pinterest boards
Add them to your product page or shop page on your website or Etsy / Creative Market shop

How to convert followers into buyers

Of course, we don’t simply want to get our products in front of our followers; we also want to encourage people to buy our products! So, how do we go about using these holiday sales graphics to convert scrollers into customers?

Our best tip is to create a PDF version of your gift guide, using our free Canva templates, and to create a simple opt-in page to go with it. This way, you can encourage your followers to click the link in your bio and trade their email address for the full, printable/downloadable guide.

Better yet, if you created a gift guide blog post following the tips in our last post in this series, you can link to that post in your bio instead!

Both methods allow you to drive more traffic to your website (which is crucial for collecting more data on your followers and/or retargeting them with ads later) AND give you the opportunity to get your followers off the feed and onto your email list (where they’re often more likely to convert).