It’s October and the holiday season is fast approaching, is your brand ready?
Having a comprehensive plan, an abundance of themed content, and seasonal-specific offers can boost your sales, encourage customer retention in the New Year, and inform future marketing efforts. We’ve been assisting clients with their marketing strategies for many years and have learned a few things about how to successfully navigate the holiday season. We’re happy to leverage our experience and knowledge to help with your marketing preparation, as well as a few promotional ideas to get you started.
Ready to Prepare?
Getting started early allows you to form a cohesive plan, and when you have a cohesive plan you can navigate unexpected changes and redirect efforts when the need arises. Here are what we consider to be the best ways to prepare for your holiday season marketing efforts:
Appraise Last Year’s Holiday Marketing
Take a look through your numbers from last year on any area you focused on for your holiday marketing. Email click-through rates, social media interactions, sales numbers, etc. Take note of what worked and what didn’t work and consider what potential marketing areas you might have missed, this will help you form a comprehensive plan for this year’s marketing.
Evaluate Your Customer Base
It’s always good to check in with your customer base and target audience and it is especially important before launching a big marketing endeavor. Particularly if your audience has made a big change in the last year, or if you’ve been introduced to a whole new market; this might affect your strategizing, particularly when it comes to which channels of marketing you want to focus on.
Set Objectives
Do you want to increase sales? Do you want to tap into a new audience? Do you want to broaden brand awareness? Deciding the goals of your marketing campaign can inform where you focus your efforts.
Create a Marketing Calendar
The holiday season spans several months and if you have big goals and grand plans you’re going to want to keep on schedule. By creating a marketing calendar you can keep track of when you need to send emails, when paid marketing goes live, and when you need to post on social media. It’s incredibly helpful to have a schedule if you have multiple team members working on your marketing. You can also work backward from your schedule to determine when you need to have outside sources finish work, e.g. designing and coding.
Important Seasonal Shopping Days:
November 29th, 2024
November 30th, 2024
Cyber Monday
December 2, 2024
Giving Tuesday
December 3, 2024
Need Some Help?
If you’re not sure where you want to focus your marketing efforts or if you need to brainstorm additional ideas, we can help! Here are some suggestions based on where we’ve found clients have the most success with their marketing campaigns:
Offer Something Special
Creating a special product or service discount is a great place to start. You can build a campaign around this, especially if you will only be offering it during the holiday season. Consider what might incentivize your audience the most and plan from there.
Develop Holiday-Specific Content
Whether it’s targeted landing pages or informative blog posts, adding holiday-specific content to your website can boost SEO and drive organic traffic to your website.
Be Active on Social Media
Social media is already an area you should be focusing on for year-round marketing, but it’s especially important during the holiday season. Current and potential customers are going to social media for gift ideas, seasonal inspiration, and shopping recommendations and meeting them in that space with solutions is a great place to focus efforts. You might also consider collaborating with influencers to expand your reach and advertise to an audience that has built-in trust with your partner.
Take Advantage of Personalization
Use customer data to personalize offers through email marketing. Sending targeted emails based on past purchase history and browsing data can boost engagement and conversion rates.
Don't Miss Out!
Taking advantage of the unique marketing opportunities afforded by consumers ready to spend money during the holiday season can help your brand meet year-end goals. Ensure you have success by planning ahead with our tips!
