Holiday campaign season is upon us, and for businesses, it’s a crucial time to shine in the crowded marketplace. Whether you’re a purpose-driven brand or a small business with a big heart, crafting a successful holiday marketing campaign requires strategic planning, creativity, and a touch of holiday magic.
Planning and managing a holiday campaign can feel overwhelming. This blog post will guide you through the nine essential steps to ensure your holiday campaign sparkles. If you would like extra support or guidance, consider booking a 1-Hour Marketing Consultation Call or take a look at our Custom Marketing Roadmap service.
Step 1: Define Holiday Campaign Goals
Before you dive into the holiday marketing frenzy, take a moment to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with your holiday campaign? These objectives will serve as the foundation for your holiday campaign strategy, helping you stay focused and effective.
Here are some common campaign goals you can consider:
- Sales Targets: Determine your desired sales figures for the holiday season. Are there specific products or services you want to sell more of, or are you aiming for overall sales growth? You may want to prioritize a certain product or service to help consolidate efforts in one direction.
- Brand Awareness: It’s possible your goals are more about general brand awareness and recognition. This might be the case if you’re launching a new brand, or preparing to release a new offering that isn’t available for purchase yet.
- Audience Engagement: If acquiring new customers isn’t a key concern for you, you might prioritize building a deeper connection with your audience. This is a great way to extend the annual or lifetime value of current customers, increase referrals, and foster brand loyalty.
- Lead Generation: Some businesses use the holiday season to generate leads for future marketing efforts. With the new year right around the corner, this is great time to start building up some early momentum for the upcoming Q1.
While you don’t want to go overboard with goal-setting, you can also consider more than one for your holiday campaign. We typically work with our clients to identify both a primary and secondary goal– for example, sales vs. brand awareness– and set clear KPIs based on each.
Step 2: Assess Resources
To create a successful holiday marketing campaign, you need to assess your resources carefully. Money and time are your most valuable assets during this busy season.
- Money: Determine how much you can afford to spend on paid advertising or outsourcing various marketing tasks. If you plan to invest in paid advertising, set a clear ad spend budget for each channel you include in your strategy. If you plan on outsourcing tasks like content creation, email marketing, graphic design, or social media management, lock down your vendors ASAP as these types of services are in high demand during the holiday season.
- Time: Consider how much time you have to plan the campaign, create content, and actively manage it once live. If you decide to dabble in a new platform or try your hand at an unfamiliar format, be sure to factor in extra time for trial and error. Consider sticking to the channels and formats you’re most comfortable with, as time (and expertise) is truly of the essence when crafting a holiday campaign and ensuring smooth execution.
Remember, you don’t need a massive budget or in-house team to run a successful holiday campaign. While having financial, strategic, and creative support is helpful, you can achieve a lot on your own with the right strategy, mindset, and work ethic.
Step 3: Decide on Organic Content vs. Paid Advertising
One of the first decisions you’ll face is whether to rely solely on organic reach or invest in paid advertising for your holiday campaign. Each approach has its pros and cons:
- Paid Advertising: While it guarantees visibility, it’s also the most expensive time of the year to advertise due to the onslaught of ads from retailers big and small. It can also be a more challenging time to create successful ad creative, as people experience “ad fatigue” and start to tune them all out. However, paid advertising can be highly effective if executed well, and careful conversion tracking can provide a clear picture of the ROI for your efforts.
- Organic Reach: While organic content should arguably play a role in any marketing strategy, you can forgo paid advertising and rely only on organic for your holiday campaign. If you already have an active and engaged audience (or truly have no ad budget), this could be a viable option for you. But, it will be a challenge. Like with paid ads, you’ll need to get creative if you want to stand out amongst the constant barrage of competing content– with much of it having paid handsomely to be there.
Step 4: Identify Your Marketing Mix – Product, Price, Place, Promotion
With so much competition during the holiday season, you really need to be strategic about where and how you prioritize your marketing efforts. We can look to the classic Marketing Mix framework– often called the 4 P’s of marketing– for help.
The 4 P’s of marketing are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Here’s how you can consider
Product: Begin by determining if there’s a specific product or service you want to highlight during the holidays. You may even consider creating or rebranding a product to align with the seasonal spirit and events. For example, you might offer a limited-time holiday themed version of your product, or bundle multiple products together into a holiday gift basket.
Price: When it comes to pricing, you need to find that sweet spot between being competitive while remaining profitable. Smaller businesses may struggle to match the deep discounts of larger brands during events like Black Friday. Instead, consider offering added value through bundles, exclusive holiday packaging, or loyalty rewards. These strategies can attract customers without sacrificing your profitability, ensuring pricing is both appealing and sustainable during this critical sales period.
Place: Selecting distribution channels for your campaign is crucial during the highly competitive holiday season. Your allocation of resources and efforts should align with your goals and audience. You can opt for a focused approach on a single channel or diversify across multiple channels based on what works best for your unique campaign needs. Don’t default to familiar channels; instead, carefully assess which ones will be the most effective for your specific holiday campaign.
Promotion: To make the most of your holiday campaign, focus on crafting strategic messaging that resonates with your target audience and aligns with your campaign objectives. This messaging should run consistently through all your campaign content. By strategically positioning your brand and conveying its unique value, you can minimize the need to compete primarily on price, giving your holiday campaign a distinct competitive edge.
Step 5: Consider Charitable Holiday Campaigns or Partnerships
The holidays are synonymous with giving, and incorporating charitable initiatives into your campaign benefits both your brand and the community. Brands that give back often garner increased customer loyalty and support, translating into higher sales and greater word-of-mouth marketing. For potential customers, your charitable efforts could sway their decision in your favor over a competitor.
Explore various ways to give back, such as donating a percentage of profits, matching customer donations, hosting donation drives, or partnering with local charities. I once encountered a store that had a tree filled with $5-100 donation cards for various charities; shoppers could easily grab one for the amount and charity of their choice and add it to their purchase. It worked on me!
Step 6: Create a Holiday Campaign Calendar
A well-structured campaign calendar is your roadmap to success. It also takes much of the day-to-day pressure off, as you’ve decided ahead of time what you’re doing and why. This helps ensure the content you churn out actually serves a purpose within the greater vision of your campaign.
We recommend a minimum of 6-8 weeks for your holiday campaign, allowing it to run across both November and December. This ensures you’re prepared for major shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, while also having a comprehensive strategy for the full season.
When crafting your calendar, be sure to include all identified channels, as well as content formats and the specific topics or pillars you’ll be focused on. You also want to be strategic in your content output, balancing promotional content with seasonal, educational, trending/cultural, brand awareness, and “just for fun” content.
Remember– this is the hardest time of year to stand out online, for both organic content and paid ads. Creativity is your friend both when planning out content and in the next phase….
Step 7: Create Content
It’s content creation time! We strongly recommend creating your content ahead of time in batches to maintain a high level of consistency and quality. You want to give yourself time (and permission!) to really put thought and care into your content. As mentioned, this is the most competitive time of year for marketing, so you need to bring your A-game and be willing to shake things up.
Get creative. Play around with different concepts or ways to approach a specific idea. Have fun with it! You never know what’s going to resonate with your audience, and often it’s those silly, random, late-night ideas that end up being a hit.
Don’t forget to batch all content formats– or at least, as much as you can manage. For example, don’t just focus on social media feed posts, but think about blog, email, stories, and short-form video content. The more you can get done in the batching period, the smoother things will go throughout your holiday campaign– and likely, more effective too.
Step 8: Schedule Content
Once your content is ready, schedule out what you can. Social media management platforms like Later or Hootsuite are great for this. Many even offer a free tier up to a certain amount of scheduled content or integrated accounts.
Keep in mind– there are still content formats that require manual positing. Some examples include Instagram stories that feature engagement stickers, Facebook lives, or even reels that you want to add audio to from within the platform (like a trending song or skit).
You also want to be ready to move on trends and opportunities as they arise. For example, creating a reel to pair with trending audio, or jumping on an overnight pop culture meme. It’s not uncommon for the silliest last-minute meme to become that month’s top performing content!
Step 9: Actively Engage and Monitor Holiday Campaign Performance
So your campaign is officially live. Sorry, you’re not off the hook yet! Be prepared to play a proactive role in both engaging with your audience and monitoring campaign performance.
Audience engagement includes things like responding to comments, story interactions, and DMs. Bonus points if you set aside some time each day to find new, relevant accounts to follow and engage on others’ content. This can help in both growing your audience and scoring higher visibility within the feeds of people you engage with.
You’re also going to want to closely monitor campaign performance– especially if you’re investing in paid advertising. Keeping an eye on metrics allows you to pivot your ad spend or strategy based on real-time results. If certain content or audience groups perform exceptionally well, you can adjust your strategy accordingly to maximize impact.
Remember that the most valuable performance tracking needs to be set up ahead of time. Before your campaign starts, identify what your conversion points will be, and install any tracking pixels or other integrations you may need. That way, you’ll know exactly which ads or organic content lead to actual sales, or whatever your goal conversion might be.
Ready to Craft Your Holiday Campaign?
I hope you found this blog post helpful in laying out the groundwork for your holiday campaign. Planning (and executing on) an effective campaign can be tricky, but if you stick to these steps, put in the work, and maintain the right mindset, I’m confident you can pull it off!
If you would like extra support or guidance, consider booking a 1-Hour Marketing Consultation Call with me or take a look at our Custom Marketing Roadmap service. Getting clear, expert guidance on your strategy can help with not only your holiday campaign, but give you compelling insights and clear direction you can take into the new year.
May your holiday campaign sparkle with purpose and bring joy to your audience and your business.