Your Guide To Preparing A Great Holiday Marketing Plan

Can’t you smell it?

If you’re thinking about the smell of holidays, you’ve got it right! The season is looming around the corner. Halloween vibe might be over by the time you read this article. But the Black Friday and Cyber Monday are approaching fast. December is only a month away. Very soon people will be on the lookout for the best holiday promo offers.

But the big question is, are you ready with your holiday marketing plan? If not, my friend, you are already late and you better get started ASAP!

To help you out with that, today we will be talking about the recipe for a foolproof holiday marketing plan. Some of these points will definitely sound challenging in the first place. But we will ask you to follow them for once at least. The results will speak for themselves!

You First Need A Marketing Goal

Holiday campaigns are not just about wowing customers with attractive visuals and outdoing the competitors in terms of gifts. Don’t get us wrong- these are important but first, you need to get your goals correctly.

We are not talking about a single goal here; there can be multi-dimensional aspects of your objectives. For example, you will have to decide on the following things:

a. Are you targeting new customers or existing customers?
b. Do you have a new product which you would like to focus more on?
c. Would you like to give offers that will expire after a few days?
d. How do you want your customers to interact you with?
e. Do you want to generate a “certain amount of traffic” on your site or “sales of a product”?

The answers to these question will help you decide on your marketing goal. You might be wondering what is all these fusses with a goal- it is supposed to be a jolly event with some gifts, right? But, in reality, it’s not so simple. Let me summarize in points what might happen when you don’t have a set target for your holiday campaign.

• No increase in website traction coupled with decrease in revenue
• Negative customer response to poor communication about offers
• Loss of reputation for not standing out during the holiday season
• Waste of opportunity to boost up product visibility

Now decide, do you really want to start the race without any brain works?

Select Your Promotional Channels

So you have set your holiday marketing goals. You have a rough idea about what you want to have in your sack after wrapping up the campaign. That’s good for a start.

Now you need to think about the channels you want to use to communicate your offers to target customers. Assuming you are an online based business, the following channels would be most appropriate for you:

1. Blog – If you have a blog section on your website, must utilize it in this holiday season. Because most of your followers keep their eyes on that section. An engaging blog post can easily turn things around by generating huge traffic and sales for your company.
2. OptIn Bar – You can consider placing an OptIn bar on your landing page. A great advantage of OptIn is that you can easily capture leads with an OptIn form. Also, it strikes as the most visible element to any visitor of your website.
3. Facebook – You can find almost everyone on Facebook. So maintaining your presence in that platform is mandatory. Which types of content have worked best for you in FB so far? Try replicating the core concept for the holiday campaign as well.
4. Twitter – Twitter is another platform that sometimes beat Facebook in terms of viral effect. Since the active user segment of Twitter is different from FB, Twitter marketing can help you gain unique customers in this holiday. Just make sure you optimize the contents for Twitter’s suitability.
5. Email Newsletters – Email is a superb way to reach your customer base. With some personalization in your copy and appropriate CTA placement, you can expect to get more than 30 times return on investment. However, you need to pick an active subscriber’s list for this purpose.
6. Native Ad – Marketeers are increasingly using native ads to promote their offerings during the holiday season. Plenty of options are available. But you have to keep in mind that it might start a bidding war with your competitors; so you need a budget for that.

Personalize the Contents Based On Audience & Timing

Where does your audience spend most of their time? In which time of the day they remain most active? What do they type when they search for something?

These types of data will help you to get maximum returns out of your campaign. Let me explain with a simple example. Suppose you are an eCommerce that sells sports merchandise. Then your primary customer should be the urban youth of 16-28 age range. To get your offers in front of them, you need information about their browsing habit. Find out in the websites where they spend a significant amount of time and the keywords they use to search for their preferred products.

Using these data, you can customize your content and ad strategy. As your offers will be more relevant and visible, it will give you an edge over other players in the market. 

Remember Hashtags Are Also Important

We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to select proper hashtags and keywords. You need to learn the art of leveraging high-volume keywords and hashtags to reach a wider audience base. During this time, one such overused keyword can be “holiday deal” or “haloween17“. You should definitely consider using that in your social media and paid ad campaigns!

Level Up Your Customer Engagement Game

Remember that in any kind of promo campaign, engaging your customers is the key to success. That is why try to make sure you have more than a few tricks up your sleeve to get your customers moving. Giveaway contest is a great way to ramp up audience interaction. So, you should have a list of relevant sites that let you hold giveaway contests. Make sure you add the most interesting offers with the giveaway since it has a better possibility of getting viral.

Naturally, during this time people will have a lot of questions related to your offers. How you respond to those queries will differentiate you from your competitors. You must engage with an amicable and helpful tone to create a purchasing environment for them. And if you can nurture the relationship later, these customers might turn into your brand promoters. On the other hand, during holiday season one bad move with a customer might hamper your reputation and affect sales more severely than during other times

Track Your Efforts and Outcomes For Future

Last but not the least, you must include tracking and monitoring your activities in the plan. Many marketing ideas can be tried and tested for your holiday campaigns, but you should have a documented report on the execution and outcomes. It will help you to develop an insight on what works and what doesn’t. This part of growth hacking will allow you to optimize your resources for future and get the maximum outcome from it.

Wrapping Up

Now review your marketing plan and check if these points are reflected on it. If the answer is NO, you are not doing it right! And make sure your team members toy with creative ideas during the brainstorming session. Because unless you think of coming up with new ideas, it will become tough to stand out in the noise!

Let us end it here wishing you best of luck for your upcoming holiday campaign!