8 Ways to Kickstart Your Holiday Marketing NOW (that are NOT discounts!)
Christmastime is here!!!
Just kidding, but all the stores are acting like it’s tomorrow even though we quite literally just had Labor Day.
So if you’re feeling like you’re behind and haven’t planned for the holidays AT ALL (like me) or maybe you have something coming out soon but you don’t know how to make it festive and promote it this season – that’s what we’re talking ALL about:
Read on (or listen to the episode) for 8 ways to kickstart your holiday marketing NOW (that ARE NOT discount related!)
#1. Holiday Freebie (like a Gift Guide or coupon book)
Tis the season for giving! So make a gift guide for your audience to help them purchase gifts for their favorite people this season – this could be from your collection of products and services, or if you don’t have enough to make an entire gift guide, branch out to include some of your favorite things, too, even if you don’t sell them.
AND it doesn’t just have to be for Christmas.
You could make a gift guide for Thanksgiving, or even Halloween.
Whatever aligns with your brand and the holidays and events you’re trying to hit this year on your marketing calendar, go ahead and create some sort of gift guide or freebie to make the festive season fun – AND make people remember you and think of you the next time they need a gift! Don’t forget to capture an email address when you give your freebie away, too!
#2. Seasonal Content
Seasonal content is a HIT this time of year – anything fall, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, comfy, cozy, tasty…
There’s no reason why you can’t jump on the bandwagon and make fun seasonal content that goes with your brand and your holiday marketing goals.
The first thing you want to do is choose what PLATFORMS you’re going to post on – for me, it’s going to be podcast episodes, blog posts, Pinterest pins and emails to my subscribers. Those are my four right now. I’m not going to spend time on anything else. For you it might be your email list and social media, or your video channel and Pinterest.
Once your platforms are chosen, then you can choose what TYPES of seasonal content you want to create. You could post about tips, DIYs, trends, or tutorials – just remember, even if it is fun content for the season, you shouldn’t create it just to create it.
It needs to relate to the holidays that are relevant to your business and Marketing goals – always point your content back to your business so that it’s working FOR you!
#3. Countdown Calendars
For example, if you have deals coming up over the next few months, you can use themed countdown calendars to promote excitement and get people thinking about what you’re about to release.
You can post these everywhere – your website, social media, talk about it on your podcast, blogs and videos, and even embed one in your emails you send to your subscribers.
You could use a plugin or template for a countdown calendar within your emails, on your website or on your instagram stories, or you could even create a cute graphic one to use as a carousel or reel on instagram.
The entire point is to use this as a fun way to get people excited about your next thing, and the holidays are a great time to do it so that people don’t forget about you amongst all of the other ads and noise!
#4. BTS Content
If you are working on something that’s going to come out in a few weeks or a few months, use this as an opportunity to bring your audience in and show them or talk about sneak peeks before it’s ready.
This will help to create hype and excitement, and you could even use one of those countdown calendars we just talked about to help. You could also make this content into exclusive freebie content for those that subscribe to your email list or private podcast or private videos series.
If you’re going to share the BTS content, you may as well make it fun and exclusive so that people want to give you their email or subscribe (or whatever you want them to do) in order to get that peek behind the curtain. They feel special being on the list, and you get potential leads to sell to when you’re ready to launch your new thing.
#5. Holiday Quiz
A quiz is another great way to capture emails, and if you make it about your ideal customer and give them some information they’d want to know about themselves, that’s what makes a great quiz.
For example, you could create a quiz to help them find their holiday party style, or one to help them find the perfect gift for those hard-to-shop-for friends and relatives, or maybe a quiz to help them figure out what their holiday copywriting or design style is.
Make it fun, but always relevant to your business and what you sell or offer. If you’re not an event planner, for example, you probably shouldn’t make a quiz on finding your party style, because it’s not going to lead to anything you offer. It would just be a quiz for fun. Sometimes those are great, but you don’t want to waste time on things that aren’t going to help your business, which is the whole point of a holiday marketing promotion!
#6. Share Holiday Stories, Traditions, BTS Content
If you have a new holiday product or service coming out during the holidays, explain why it’s special or how the idea came to you, give that behind the scenes look.
If you’re a foodie, share your favorite holiday family recipes and why they’re so good or so special.
Share your holiday traditions and things you love to do and can’t go without doing during the season. People like to hear about you and it helps them get to know you better, and relate to you.
And like we’ve talked about several times the last few podcast episodes, you could take the opportunity to share by granting exclusive access to your stories and traditions by capturing their email address and sending it out weekly to your subscribers.
I think this is a great tip to start with, especially if you have something in the works that’s not quite ready or you have NO idea where to start because like me, in your mind it was still June and where has the summer gone?!
So even if you have no plans to have a holiday campaign or if you need just a little bit more time to get things going, while your audience waits, they could at least hear from you and get to know your favorite thing to do for Halloween or how you’re dressing up this year, if that’s your thing.
This tip is really just to let your audience know, hey, you’re well aware the holidays are coming up and here’s what you’re doing to celebrate on a personal level – AND THEN point it back to your business and the new products or services or campaigns you’ll be running this season that they can look forward to.
#7. Holiday Branding & Visuals
You may want to invest in holiday graphic, photography, videography and other visuals to support your campaigns and content this holiday season. You could purchase some things from a stock site, like Shutterstock or Envato Elements, or you could plan a shoot with a local photographer you love.
I think most might think of physical product-based businesses when it comes to this, because of course you’ll want to have great imagery to show off that holiday collection. However, even if you only sell services or online digital products or courses, you could still utilize holiday imagery and visuals to help you sell during the season.
Maybe you ran a campaign in the spring that did really well, so you could take the emails and social posts and Pinterest Pins you had, and revamp it with seasonal imagery, videos and messaging.
It doesn’t have to be complicated and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel if you don’t want to – and especially if you don’t have anything new coming out (like me), you could still think back to campaigns that were a hit or think creatively about how you could present the same products or offers in an exciting way all decked in lights (so to speak) this season.
#8. Look ahead and make a plan on your calendar!
Making a holiday marketing calendar specific to your business, your audience, your goals, and what YOU want to do this season is crucial. Look ahead to what holidays and events are coming up that you absolutely do not want to miss for your holiday marketing season.
There are some things that just don’t pertain to your business or that you don’t want to do and that’s perfectly fine. You could choose one thing a month or a couple things a month or skip October and just do November and December or skip November and do October, December and January.
Now obviously the main holidays that come to mind are going to be: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas and New Year’s. But then there’s also Small Business Saturday and Giving Tuesday and the first day of Fall, National Candy Day in November, National Cookie Day in December, and who knows what else.
If you Google the term “holiday marketing calendar” or “holiday social media calendar”, you’ll get a list of some fun days that you could celebrate and create campaigns around that maybe no one else is doing this year, so it would set you apart.
Look from now through the rest of the year and see what days there are that you might want to celebrate and create a campaign around for your business and utilize those holidays this season.
Again, you don’t have to do everything – you can pick and choose a handful of things handful of holidays or events to do really well and then be OK with skipping out on everything else.
You’re NOT Too Late!
This was a fun show to put together – and it is just as much for me as it is for you, because every holiday season I feel like I either don’t have something to offer or I’ve thought about it too late and then I don’t do anything.
So here we are again, the holiday season is upon us.
I have a very small product offering right now. I’m doing Brand Design VIP days and I have a couple templates in my shop and that’s it.
So that doesn’t mean that I can’t do something, but I know that I have to be strategic about it and I have to make sure that the things that I’m promoting are pointing towards what I have ready and available in my online shop. Who knows, I might just continue my podcast and enjoy the holiday season because I also think that if people want it, they’ll buy it without a special offer attached.
I don’t think you have to do anything discounted during the holidays.
You could do something as little as update your visuals to make them festive and continue on with your regular products or services and not have any special offers.
You could do something to make them exciting again, like host an event or make some special email newsletters or some special social media posts or podcast episodes, or whatever to celebrate the season.
But I don’t believe that just because the holidays are coming up does not mean that you have to have a discount, which is why the ideas that I talked about today are not sale related. And, as mentioned already, these ideas only make sense if you tailor them to your audience and what you offer. So take them and run with them and make them your own!