Spinning up a seasonal campaign with Contentful

Creativity isn’t a problem for most marketers. We’re great at coming up with ideas that surprise and delight our audiences. The real challenge is the next step: getting our content out, getting people to engage, and nudging them down the funnel.

We know that feeling well. Like every good marketing team, we’re always looking for better, more innovative ways to get our content in front of our customers’ eyes.

That was the spark behind the campaign we launched last December. We had a wealth of compelling Contentful resources to ring in the new year, and we wanted them to resonate and generate real engagement. 

So, running with the spirit of the holiday season, we launched 12 Ways to Feel More Contentful in 2026 — with no extra ad spend and no need to integrate any other tools or assets beyond those already available to us in Contentful itself.

Here’s how we did it.

Capturing and keeping customer attention

12 Ways to Feel More Contentful wasn’t just a fun seasonal gimmick. It was built to extend the reach of our existing content.

Contentful’s top-of-funnel game is strong. We have an array of touch points to help customers discover us and what we do: blogs, guides, video explainers, and partner publications like the inaugural Contentful and Atlantic Re:think report. And we have the expertise to keep producing them regularly. 

Publishing one blog on its own might capture someone’s attention, but it’s not guaranteed to keep it. The trick is to keep those touch points coming and help customers get more comfortable with the brand at each one. Capture their attention with an email, then retarget with a recommended blog, then a webinar on a topic they’re interested in.

What we needed was connective tissue for the journey — something that deepens the relationship and the brand understanding. That’s where the calendar idea came from.

Creating a holiday calendar 

Contentful’s marketing style has never been businessy. We connect human-to-human, with experiences people can respond to. What better way to do that at the end of the year than with a 12-day countdown calendar?

A calendar has — in fact, is — a built-in mechanism for ongoing engagement. Customers open a new “door” each day and discover something new about our brand: a blog post, an ebook, a product showcase, and so on.

Okay, it wasn’t quite the same as a real calendar. We decided we wouldn’t do 12 consecutive days — instead we’d stagger the new offerings three times a week, which let us extend the campaign across the entire month of December and into the rest of the holiday season.

Development and execution 

The goal was to show our customers what’s possible with our platform, without piling (end-of-year) work onto the web team.

Each calendar entry was built to look like the door of an advent calendar. These were all assets and visual functionality that already existed within the Contentful platform: structured content elements that we could combine and shape into any experience quickly, without any formatting complexity.  

In this case, we simply arranged them into a grid and released them, three at a time, over the course of the month. We added light-touch seasonal decoration to the hero banner (a star here, a snowflake there), and “wrapped” each day in themed gift paper.

Visitors reached the latest entry, then “opened” it by scratching off the wrapping paper with their cursor, revealing the resource beneath.

We also added a “Subscribe for updates” button so people could be notified when a new day went live. And, as an added flourish, the page triggered a celebratory confetti drop on arrival. It was party season, after all.

Making a (qualified lead) list

They say it’s about the giving, not the receiving. But with the 12 Ways campaign, it was both.

Customers got a curated list of valuable resources to help steer and shape their marketing efforts in 2026. We got to engage with them meaningfully and grow our list of qualified leads.

That’s because there was business logic built into the 12 Ways experience, a demand-gen function beneath the fun façade.

We used direct, first-party data that our customers provided by interacting with a calendar entry to add lead-scoring points to their profile. Once they’d accumulated enough points and crossed a threshold, we could consider them a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and pass them on to our accounts team.  

The results

12 Ways to Feel More Contentful ran through December 2025 and into January 2026, as follow-up emails continued to work leads. By February, we had our first data to work with.

The campaign generated significant interest, with engagement from customers translating into qualified pipeline and then major closed opportunities — a welcome late holiday gift for us.  

It also demonstrated the value of working quickly within a structured content ecosystem: reusing assets from our library to build a completely new experience, fine-tuned to cultural and seasonal interest.

What’s next?

We have an ambition to create a fresh version of the calendar for the coming year, with new Contentful resources. The experience can grow — maybe we try a different holiday, or even a physical element with a small promotional calendar containing Contentful-branded items, sent to certain customer groups. 

The point is, we stood up a proof of concept; now we can stretch our marketing muscles for very little extra effort.

If you’re planning your own winter campaign, now’s the time to start thinking about what it could look like. And if you’re working with Contentful, you can embrace possibility: Whatever you can come up with, Contentful is your launchpad for it.

Ready to start building with composable content? We’re ready to get you started: Reach out to our sales team for a Contentful platform demo.

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