How to prepare a holiday marketing campaign on social media?

In this article you'll learn:

• What goes into a successful holiday marketing campaign?
• How do you make holiday content with influencers?
• Is a gift guide a good idea for your brand?
• Why a holiday marketing campaign can't do without emotion.

Holiday campaign – reach the people who are actually interested

How do you keep your marketing effort from going to waste? Go through the channels you already run, check your newsletter subscriber lists, write out a profile of your main target audience, and pick your communication paths accordingly. Are your people mostly gathered around Facebook and the groups on it? Or are they hunting for holiday inspiration on Pinterest? Keep the messages visually consistent, design how they look, decide on the campaign's central theme. Plan the work with dates attached to it. The earlier you do that, the more time you'll have to polish it.

Remember to react to current events, though – build the campaign in September, leave it untouched until launch, and you'll miss the newest trends on your social channels, and with them the attention your audience would otherwise have given you.

Holiday marketing campaigns with influencers – when to start?

Making holiday content with influencers is a great way to put your brand's offer in front of new audiences, nudge them toward buying, and build trust in the brand. Don't count on the best creators eagerly agreeing to work with you at the end of November, though. They'll all be tied up in contracts already! If you want your holiday campaign built on the influencers who fit your brand best, it pays to start negotiating a few months ahead. And if you haven't done it yet, this is your last call!

At the same time, make sure the collaboration has a clearly defined plan – without specific goals there's a good chance the marketing effort goes to waste, and the budget with it. Think it through: why does this particular influencer fit my offer? What exactly are they meant to promote in a holiday context? Ask them for their own ideas and work out a format together that stands apart from the competition – that will help you get maximum conversion out of the work and land the campaign as a success.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday – the foundations of a holiday campaign

These days, an inseparable part of any holiday campaign is… Black Friday. Combined with Cyber Monday right behind it, it has settled permanently into the heads of Polish consumers. Plenty of people turn up at the mall or on online store pages on those particular days just to find out what a brand is discounting. Why do Black Friday and Cyber Monday matter so much to a holiday campaign? According to a Deloitte report, in 2020 Poles planned to leave 16% of their holiday budget in stores on Black Friday:

https://www2.deloitte.com/pl/pl/pages/consumer-business/articles/zakupy-swiateczne-2020.html

• Marketing during this window can catch a customer's attention, lift sales, and pull in new audiences tempted by the deals on offer. So put together offers that are genuinely attractive: ones customers will use straight away, and ones that turn their attention to your range. Right before the holidays it's worth running promotions again, to show that special occasions = special offers in the store.
• For some shoppers, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the perfect chance to get every gift bought at once. December holiday shopping has a reputation for being a “mad rush”, whereas the option to “wrap the whole thing up” back in November and then get ready for the holidays calmly is, for a lot of people, the ideal answer. So make sure a shopper can find something perfect for themselves and the people close to them right then – they'll certainly remember where they managed to buy their holiday gifts.

The gift guide – invaluable help during a holiday campaign

A holiday campaign has to be built around helping customers. Their visits to the store often have no particular plan behind them, and the gift list is either very vague or nonexistent. Make your social media and your website act as an advisor – show ideas that can become the perfect gift on the spot.

• “We've put together a special guide…” – those words immediately lift engagement among people hunting for creative gift ideas.
• Show your best-selling products. Bestsellers read as the “safe bet” gift – the majority can't be wrong, after all. Point out what has been bought most often lately and present the product's strengths in the context of a holiday gift.
• If you plan to have a new product in the lineup for the holidays, remember to introduce it to customers well in advance. An unproven choice is a hard one to make – even if the new item is genuinely innovative, its sales may not meet your expectations. A few weeks earlier, show the new arrival on social media and describe it properly, so the product becomes a familiar part of the range.
• Don't forget to highlight every holiday promotion. Use social media to communicate discounts, seasonal bundles and promo codes, special holiday packaging, a gift-wrapping service and so on, so the lift in sales is as big as it can be.
• Holiday shopping is one long sprint – free delivery is a good practice here, because it saves the customer time. Say so clearly on your social channels and on your site.
• It's worth spelling out the last date an order can be placed and still arrive before the holidays. A parcel can always fail to turn up because of a chain of events, but if we aren't sure it will make it in time, we shouldn't mislead the customer. Sometimes no purchase at all right now is a better outcome than the disappointment of a missing gift – the second one puts people off coming back to us far more effectively.

Emotion in your holiday campaign

Emotion is the foundation of marketing, and in the run-up to the holidays it matters even more. The seasonal mood encourages bigger purchases, buying with the joy of loved ones in mind. In your social media communication, aim for positive associations with the brand. Use what you know about your audience to build messages in which your products are the answer to their problems and a source of joy.

Be available to customers – answer the questions they'll certainly have, and there will be plenty of them (especially on social media). Take care of them, so they trust your brand. Helping someone choose a gift or clearing up a doubt will build a strong bond between consumer and brand.

While you're building the positive emotions, though, be careful not to trigger the negative ones. In the frantic pre-holiday weeks that comes down mostly to how easy shopping is. Before the campaign starts, make sure everything on your website works flawlessly; that product pages display correctly; that the online store has a clear layout of the range; and that in brick-and-mortar stores the staff know every promotion you're pushing on social media. Last-minute shopping comes loaded with stress – if a customer remembers your store as the one where buying was hard work, and all the more so if they abandoned the cart, rebuilding that trust can be very difficult.

Holiday campaign – do it now!

To sum up – if you haven't started work on your holiday campaign yet, there really is nothing left to wait for! December is the intense stretch where prepared ideas get executed, and November is the perfect time to build the pre-holiday mood that keeps sales at the level you planned for.

Out of ideas for your holiday campaign concept? Get in touch and see what our creativity looks like – we guarantee a plan that makes the most of the time left and is cut to fit your brand!

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