Yes, my dear, it’s time to start thinking about your Holiday Marketing Campaign. This year, it is going to be more important than ever before to revisit your social media strategy and plan early for the 2020 Holiday Season.
According to Retail Dive, holiday 2019 eCommerce sales increased by 18.8% over 2018. Not only that but sales from mobile sites saw a staggering increase of 17% in 2019 and that number is expected to grow in 2020 as well.
The Winter holidays this year are going to see a major uptick in online shopping due to COVID-19.
In May of this year, US consumers spent over $80 Billion online surpassing Holiday 2019 sales by nearly 11%.
Solidifying your plan now will help you get organized and stay on track to meet or exceed your annual sales goals. Besides, don’t you want a piece of that pie?
I have come up with a proven 8-point strategy that I use exclusively for my social media clients that helped them increase their sales last year over 2018 by an average of 32%.
These are clients with brick and mortar businesses and online businesses as well. They also have very small marketing budgets and were able to complete the tasks with little to no disruption.
So regardless of what type of business you have or how much money you have to invest in your holiday campaign, you will be able to adapt this strategy to your business and earn yourself the pie of your choice.
Let’s get started!
- Get Creative. This is the time of year to have some fun and explore your creative side. Many companies like to come up with a theme for the holidays. Coca-Cola’s holiday marketing has been centered on the Polar Bears since the 1920s. To this day, whenever I see a Polar Bear, I immediately think of cracking open an ice-cold Coca-Cola.
- Does your company have a mascot, character, or logo that you can “holidayize” and turn into something fun and memorable?
Another common theme for the holidays is to team up with a charity. All your holiday elements would evoke feelings of unity and togetherness in the spirit of giving.
You could select specific items, create gift packages, or offer discounts for your products or services and then donate all or part of your revenue to the charity of your choice. Just remember when your customers or clients when choosing a charity.
Make sure they are aligned. For example, if you sell women’s jewelry, you probably want to focus on collaborating with a charity focused on women’s issues.
Contests and games are great for creating immediate engagement during the holidays.
Depending on your level of comfort, you could run a game per week or choose one game and run it from November through Christmas.
Some of my favorites are Comment And Win contests, Follower of the Week, Like, Tag, and Share contests, Holiday Sweepstakes, and Holiday Recipe Contests. These are fun and easy to implement, especially if you’re the one doing all the work.
- Who are you targeting and what is your expected result?
Depending on which business coach or marketing guru you speak with, this question may or may not be in their Holiday Marketing Strategy.
For me, I include it for a couple of different reasons. Let’s say you only want to target your loyal shoppers or exclude your loyal shoppers from your Holiday Campaign. Or what if your campaign is only for your customers or clients who support you on social media?
Maybe you want to target customers or clients who are not already subscribers to your newsletter. See! Targeting suddenly becomes important again.
There are so many ways to segment your client or customer base, but it all depends on what your end goal or expected results are at the end of your campaign.
- Now that you have your intended theme and your goal is set. How much money are you going to spend to get there?
What’s left in your marketing budget for the year for this final push?
Ideally, I tell my clients this number should be less than 10% of your total marketing budget. The things you want to consider are:
- Paid Ads. Will you be running paid ads on your preferred social media platforms? Do you need to hire someone, or will you create them yourself?
- If you’re running contests, determine what your prizes are and how much you will spend on them, even if they come out of your own inventory.
- If you will be working with influencers, how will they be compensated?
- Photo and Video Assets. It’s easy enough to create your own stunning photos and videos for social media. However, if you hire a professional plan to spend a significant portion of your budget on this service and digital images.
- You already have quite a fanbase of supporters, clients, and customers. Make a list of who they are and their social media accounts.
Contact them and ask if they will share a post that you create in their Stories, Reels, and on their wall.
If they’d like to share their personal experience with you, that would be even better! You’ll not only gain exposure to new audiences, but you’ll also increase your Know-Love-Trust Factor with stories of how amazing your products and services are.
- Photos and Videos. This is one of my favorite parts of this strategy!
You probably have tons of photos of your products but your Holiday Campaign needs to be bright, festive, and attention-getting.
Like I said before, you can hire a professional (which you’ll want to do asap if you choose this route).
I prefer to curate photos from a few different sites. I always catch myself getting caught up in the spirit of Christmas when I do this but it’s so much fun!
- Schedule your content. There are several sites and apps out there that you can use to schedule content but I’m only going to talk about one and that’s Tailwind.
I’ve been using Tailwind to schedule my posts for two years and I trust them completely.
Previously, I’ve had accounts shut down for using 3rd party apps but not Tailwind. Tailwind’s developers work directly with Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest so I trust the partnership they have.
Tailwind’s metrics are also easy to read for any novice social media marketer and account sharing among teams makes it ideal for just about any business.
The best feature is that you can plan the look and feel of your Instagram feed with all that FABULOUS holiday content you curated. Yeah, you guessed it. This is my second favorite part of this strategy!
- Engagement and Sales. Okay, here’s where the magic happens! You’ve got your theme, your content is scheduled, and you’re ready to jingle all the way!
Not quite. Stick with me here. If you build it, they will not come. You do actually have to find leads for your business.
You want to spend some time each day engaging with your audiences on social media in order to drive sales.
- Update your lists of hashtags to include holiday hashtags. Use Instagram to research holiday hashtags and find the ones your audience is using and following.
- Reels and IGTV Stories. You want to get exposure, exposure, exposure! Create one 15 second Reel every day and record a video or Go Live at least twice per week. SHOW OFF your products, services, take your audience behind the scenes. Let us see how you make those amazing creations.
- Use strong CTAs (calls-to-action) in every post and reply to every user-generated comment. Let them know you see them and are paying attention to them.
- Make your Instagram feed shoppable! Every month, around 130 million people tap on an IG shopping ad to learn more about items they see. Yes, you can do this too through ad promotions or simply setting up a shop on Instagram with the IG checkout feature. Contact me directly for one-on-one assistance with setting up your shop or check it out on Instagram.
- Create a couple of custom scripts for using to connect with people who engage with your posts. Here’s one I like to use:
“Hi luv! Thank you so much for your support! My name is Kristi and I’m the Vice President of Sales for @crowned4success and @bossladiesmindset. We are offering an incredible holiday deal as our way of saying thank you for your support all year long. Right now you can get 75% off our most comprehensive Instagram training that normally retails at $497. This package helped me grow my following from under 1,000 to a little over 10k in 3 months. What would you say if you could get results like that?”
- Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to look at ROI and measure your results.
For my clients, I put together a holiday marketing campaign report that answers various questions and tells the story of your holiday.
- Did you accomplish your overall goal?
- How many new followers did you gain overall?
- How many new email subscribers did you gain?
- What happened to your engagement each week?
- What posts did great? Which ones tanked? What was different?
- How did sales this year compare to last year?
- What went right? What could you improve for next year?
- Did you stick to your budget? By what percentage?
- How did this campaign help you with your overall goals for the year?
As you can see, a holiday marketing strategy can be very involved but with the right plan and strategy in place, the sky’s the limit.
This is my favorite time of the year not just because of holiday magic but because it’s the time of year when I really get to show off my skills as a holiday marketer.
There are so many ways to complete a strategy like this, but the result is a success.
And if you don’t want to go it alone, feel free to contact me or any other professional business coach to lend a hand.
Don’t let any of this overwhelm you and be sure to download your FREE Holiday Marketing Campaign checklist.
Don’t stress and take the fun out of the holidays. Besides, it’s not work if you’re having fun!
Have a wonderful 2020 Holiday season!
