Best ways to plan campaigns, target audiences, and create buzz around holidays and special occasions.
Businesses always have high hopes from the holidays as they expect to get more sales and leads. It is now that businesses need to implement robust marketing strategies to ensure a comprehensive market coverage and engage with the target audience for their benefit.
You need special holiday marketing campaigns that can relate with your ideal customer’s requirements, needs, and preferences during the holidays.
It needs to be formulated with a specific theme or goal. It needs to be added with attention-grabbing offers and rewards that your customers cannot resist followed by effective tracking and monitoring to steer the campaign in your favour.
However, it’s not that linear. There is a way to implement this system and run the marketing machinery easily.
Steps to execute a Holiday Marketing Campaign
More than the amount of discount you offer, the way you offer the same matters. In other words, your holiday marketing campaign strategy and implementation is pivotal to see good sales during the holiday season.
Make sure to follow the next few steps carefully to execute a holiday marketing campaign:
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Campaign theme and goals
You need to set your theme straight before even posting a single image or sending out an email. It’s crucial to understand why you are running a marketing campaign during the holidays and what is going to be your core promotional strategy here.
The second thing is the goal. Not every business needs to see more money flowing into the accounting. Some want to generate more leads, while others want to get more email addresses, sign-ups, get donations, and so on.
Your theme and goals will decide the strategy and implementation of the next steps.
2. Know your audience
You cannot pitch your product to every person in the world. So, identify and understand who your ideal customers are. Profile them, including their age, gender, preferences, pain points, and future expectations. In other words, build buyer personas.
This will help you target your marketing campaigns for the right audience, which increases the chances of getting the desired outcome.
Let’s take an example of millennials. A study proves that 68% of millennials are attracted by GIFs, emojis and stickers in their emails.
So, you can include them if your target audience is millennials.
3. Build offers your customers cannot resist
81% of the people shopping during and before the holidays are expecting to get discounts and rewards. So not having any means, you are already losing a big chunk of the market share.
You can only create the right offer if you follow the steps above. Yes, your offer is going to be the centerpiece of your entire holiday marketing campaign, but it must be inspired by the right method.
From giving gift cards to discounts, coupons, cashback, loyalty points, and everything in between, there are a lot of options to choose from. Align your promotional offers with your customer’s expectations.
As different businesses have different marketing goals, the offers may also change accordingly. The simplest offer to increase sales is to give a discount.
4. Get the marketing tools and systems
The next thing you need here is to decide which marketing automation software you want to use, and how you will share the content with your target audience. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are the most common platforms, businesses also run PPC ads,, and send bulk emails related to offers to their subscribers during the holiday season.
Besides this, you can also collaborate with influencers, get brand ambassadors, hire celebrities to advertise your product, and share the promotional news with the audience as well.
5. Lead nurturing
The first step of a marketing campaign is all about attracting leads, but you must also nurture the leads coming your way and form a sales funnel.
This can be done by sending emails, messages, and retargeting them with a better discount to make a sale.
6. Monitor, measure, and report
You need to monitor the live campaigns and measure their performance. This must be done with the appropriate figures in your accounts corresponding to your goals.
For instance, the sales volume will be a better indicator of success if your goal is to increase sales revenue.
But knowing the number of visitors and email open rate is a better indicator if your goal is to get more leads.
Holiday Marketing Ideas and Strategies You Shouldn’t Miss
1. Start early
Holiday planning at your customer’s homes is starting early, so why should you stay behind with marketing. Some people will start planning for the holiday season a year in advance.
That’s true!
Well, you don’t have to start that early but make sure that when most of the people are searching online for presents and stuff to give in the holidays, your advertisements and emails are reaching them.
So, set your marketing clocks to match with your target audience’s preferences. Make an effort to read the market pulse and advertise in the best way possible to attract more leads.
2. Set up loyalty programs
Referral and loyalty programs are like the cherry on top for customers. It’s one of the best brand strategy for boosting engagement of people with your brand and buying your products.
When customers are loyal, they are likely to talk about your products or share them on social media.
You can make a customer stick to your brand by offering recurring benefits through loyalty programs – based on their purchases.
So there you go…
It’s essential to build and execute a robust holiday marketing plan to help you make more sales and increase your revenue.
We have shared some insights on building and executing a marketing plan, along with a couple of additional ideas to make them even better.
So, go out there and make the most of the upcoming holiday season; you deserve it!
Happy Holidays 🙂
