Your Holiday Marketing Strategy

Have you ever wondered how in the world people plan for their holiday marketing strategies and campaigns? Well, you’re in the right place: We’re all pretty much being slapped in the face with advertisements and sales. The holiday season is upon us and that’s what we’re talking about today!

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So, how do we plan out our holiday marketing strategy? Meaning- how do you know what to do (or pick what to do from your never-ending list of ideas) and then get it done?

There are 3 phases I’ll talk you through:

Phase 1 is the planning phase, Phase 2 is Ideation (with goals in mind), and Phase 3 is Execution.

And to be clear:

I’m not going over some huge list of campaign ideas, nor am I focusing on a complete strategy today – although I am going to talk about both.

Rather the point of this episode is to help you with the planning part, and give you the simple process I use.

However, and this is the big caveat: If it doesn’t align, it’s not the time.

Repeat that to yourself: If it doesn’t align, it’s not the time. You’ll know more about what that means here in a minute, so let’s dive in.

PHASE ONE: PLAN

There are 3 steps to this phase.

Step 1: Look at your calendars (biz & personal) and plan around those personal events, family events, appointments, meetings and all of the things that you know need to be done no matter what.

You can’t plan a work meeting when you’re supposed to be at the dentist. And no one wants to be working when they’re on vacation or attending your kids’ school event.

Mark your calendars with the important/must-do things first, so you can see what margin you have left. I know this may seem like a no-brainer, but I have to remind myself of this all the time so that I don’t get distracted.

Step 2: Look ahead at events and holidays coming up, and decide which you want to participate in as part of your marketing strategy, and which you don’t. This includes the obvious like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s, but then there’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, and whether you want to do anything outside the box or “early”, like many businesses are doing… You don’t have to do everything. but you do need to make a decision on what you will do – and what you won’t.

Step 3: Check your schedule against your overall marketing goals, and your goals specifically for Quarter 4. This is the real test.

If anything you’re wanting to do for the upcoming holidays and events doesn’t align with your business goals, then you don’t do it. It doesn’t pass. And that’s okay.

For example, if your goals don’t include growth on instagram, then you probably shouldn’t be planning an instagram challenge. And if you’re not trying to gain email subscribers, then you shouldn’t be joining a collaboration focused on growing your list. You see where I’m going here?

Although instagram growth and email list growth are great things to try to achieve, you shouldn’t be throwing any energy into that, for right now, if it doesn’t align with your current goals. Maybe you’ll do those things in the future, but now is not the time.

Just remember this and say it to yourself often (because I’m going to as well): “If it doesn’t align, it’s not the time.”

NOW that we have that out of the way, we can move on to Phase 2: Ideation (with your goals in mind)

PHASE 2: IDEATE (WITH GOALS IN MIND)

There are 4 potential goals you might have for this quarter that we’ll talk through.

Ever have an easy time thinking of goals, but a terrible time thinking of ways to make them happen? You’re not the only one. Which is why I came up with 4 potential goals you might have, and a few ways you might be able to make them happen.

Like I mentioned earlier, I’m not presenting an exhaustive list, but the things I’m going to share are all things I have done before, with the exception of the last one – which we’ll talk about when we get there – I just wanted to let you know that these are mostly all tips I have tried for myself, so I do know they work.

Here are 4 potential goals you might have along with ways to meet them.

Potential Goal #1: Increase Email Subscribers

A Classic tip that you’ll hear everywhere is to create a lead magnet. And you’re like “OK great but what kind of lead magnet? Isn’t everyone doing that?”

And I get it, lead magnets are everywhere, and your potential customers are probably used to them – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one – it just means you have to get creative about it.

I mean, you could just offer a pdf download like everyone else but I would recommend being a bit more inventive than that.

Here are three different types of lead magnet you could create that should drive your email list growth:

  1. An exclusive audio: This could be a private podcast that you only get access to by subscribing, or it could be an audio file. For example, I currently have an exclusive audio and workbook talking about how to make your budget for getting the brand package you’ve always dreamed of.
  2. An exclusive video: In this video you could give your best tips for something, or it could be a tutorial showing how to do something. Depending on the topic, this could be a slideshow with a voiceover, or a video of you, or even a recording of your screen. For example, I have a lead magnet tutorial on how to build your own brand style guide for free. It’s a recording of my screen with a voiceover of me talking, and I’m teaching you how to build a simple brand style guide yourself.
  3. A simple template: This could be a document, an excel sheet, anything where people can get the bones or framework for something and edit themselves. For example, I have a brand personality template that’s a google doc, that you get when you subscribe. You can then copy and edit the template to make your own and it will help you figure out your brand personality.

One thing I’ll say for all of these ideas is that you don’t want to make anything for free that takes you a ton of time or effort. You want the lead magnet to be worth the email sign-up, but you don’t want to give away something that people should ideally pay money for – like a robust template or even a tutorial that you would put inside of a course.

You want to make your lead magnets pretty entry-level and a quick-win for your subscriber.

It should be valuable and worth the subscribe, but not anything too in-depth.

The first reason for this is because you don’t want to give away the farm so to speak, you want to keep your best for your paid products.

The second reason being that if someone is subscribing to your list, especially via a lead magnet, they likely don’t know anything about you, or they are new and just getting to know you and what you offer. In that case, you don’t want to overload them with a ton of information at once.

Think of it like introducing yourself to someone in person and then forming a friendship, you don’t just blurt out all of the things… so lead magnets are kind of like that.

And thirdly, you do want to give them a reason to come back. If you give away everything, and you do it all at once, they have no reason to subscribe or follow you any more. So, those are just some things to keep in mind!

BONUS TIP 1: In order to get organic traffic to your lead magnets, you’ll want to make some Pinterest Pins.

I could go in-depth as to WHY you should use Pinterest, but I’ll save that for another time.

For each lead magnet, you want to have at least 10, possibly 20 pins per lead magnet just to get started. You’ll schedule them out over the period of a month, and then you will repeat that process every single month. 

If you haven’t heard of this tip, the Pinterest algorithm wants new, fresh pins for each one you make. You you don’t want to keep pinning the same one over and over again. Now to do this, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel or do anything crazy, you just need to change one thing about the template: an image, the text or graphic, or the color. You could have each one say something slightly different so that Pinterest recognizes it as a new Pin. This will help you meet this rule and make Pinterest happy.

If you want some examples, just head over to my Pinterest account, Design With Clarissa, to see what I mean.

BONUS TIP 2: Use ChatGPT to help you with this.

You can ask ChatGPT to come up with 20 different Pinterest pin titles based on the first one that you come up with.

For instance, let’s say I have a Pin that I’m calling “20 Brand Questions To Help You Figure Out Your Brand Personality”. I can put that into ChatGPT and ask, “Can you come up with 20 more pins that are like this one?” And it will do that for me.

I might have to edit and tailor the responses, and I’m not always going to take exactly what it puts out, but, I’m telling you it will save you time and energy, and it really does help.

Potential Goal #2: Increase Blog Traffic

I have two ideas for you on this one…

  1. Pinterest Pins: Similar to your lead magnets you want to make at least 10 if not 20 different pins per post and schedule that out over the course of a month or so, and then repeat the process to continually drive new traffic to your blog posts.
  2. Content Mentions: If you’re creating any kind of content anywhere else besides your blog, whether that is a podcast, videos, social media, maybe you’re speaking somewhere or hosting webinar, or you’re doing a collaborating – Whatever it may be, you want to put little teasers for your blog posts in those places. You want to mention it, talk about it, and you want to link to it from the post, from your bio, in the description – all the places.

Potential Goal #3: Increase Social Media Engagement

This goal to me is probably harder than any of the other goals that I am talking about here today because… it just takes a lot of work. It can definitely be worth it, but it does take a lot of effort. Which is why, if you go look at any of my social media right now, it kind of looks like I’m not there – even though I do try to post at least a few times a month.

However, and I’ve talked about this before recently, social media is one of the things that I decided was not one of my goals right now. So while I do try to post things when I’m inspired and when it makes sense, other than that, I’m just not on there.

But that’s just me – because like I’ve been saying: If it doesn’t align, it’s not the time.

That being said, I have managed social media for other businesses since 2014, so I’d like to think I know what works and what doesn’t, and I do have a lot of experience in this area. So the tips that I’m sharing are based on my experience as well as industry standards and best practices.

So here it goes, if you want to increase social media engagement here are a few things you could do:

  1. Plain and simple, just post more. Be more consistent. Make social media and showing up on social media a HABIT.
  2. Then, #2, you want to form your post content and your post copy around the idea of engagement whether that be asking a question, or making a statement that people might comment on, or polling people for some reason – whatever the case may be, you want to do something that makes people want to react to and interact with your posts. I have talked about a framework I like to use that you can see here.
  3. Beyond that, and this is #3, there are other things you could do like hosting a giveaway or a contest, or collaborating with other people on Instagram. This will also likely gain you followers not just engagement, so you want to be careful with this goal – do you want to gain followers and engagement? Do you want it to be engagement from your current followers or from new followers? Because there is definitely a difference, depending on what tactic you use and the way the algorithm works currently. I would just recommend doing your research when it comes to this goal so you get the outcome you’re looking for.

Potential Goal #4: Grow Your Podcast Listeners

This goal for me is a work in progress, so I’m going to share ideas that I am in the process of trying out for myself.

If you want to grow your podcast listeners or downloads you could try:

  1. Publishing blog posts for your podcast episodes: This also act as your show notes, but you’d fill it out a little bit more as if it were a blog post that someone is going to read instead of listen to. It’s more than just bullet points or links, it’s actually the podcast episode scripted out into long-form content. This also gives you more options to talk about it on social media and on Pinterest, and other places where you might not otherwise. Overall, this should help your podcast gain traction and increase awareness.
  2. Encourage listeners to leave positive reviews: You need reviews in order for your podcasts to gain any sort of traction and be recommended on the Apple podcast app and other apps. When you ask you listeners to leave a review, you need to make it really easy for them. You could create a tutorial that is easy to follow because maybe they don’t know how to leave reviews on the app – things like that. You want to remove as many barriers as you can to get those reviews that you want and need. The more good reviews you get, the higher your podcast will be ranked because that tells the algorithm that your podcast is a good one to listen to.
  3. Utilize your email list and make your subscribers aware of your podcast by sending emails, especially whenever you release a new episode. Whether your podcast is new or you’ve been doing it a while, some of your subscribers may not even know you have a podcast so this is a really easy way to gain more listeners that are already in your audience because they’re already one of your email subscribers.
  4. SEO the crap out of your podcast! This includes your podcast name, episode titles, your description, your podcast trailer, and of course your show notes and all of your links. If you choose to do a blog post for your podcast episodes, you want to make sure that is optimized as well.
  5. And a little bonus tip: I’ve heard it said before that you shouldn’t try to be cute with your podcast episodes or titles or even the name, especially getting started, because you want people to find you based on what they’re searching for. For example, if your podcast episode is about meal planning over the holidays then you should likely title it something along those lines like, “meal planning for the holidays”. If I were searching for that, that’s what I would enter into the search: Meal planning tips for the holidays, or meal planning ideas, or meal planning calendars – that sort of thing. So you wouldn’t want to title it, “Make your holidays the best they can be”, because although that might be clickable or spark intrigue, it really doesn’t tell anyone anything about what the actual podcast episode is about, and it also doesn’t lead to search engine optimization. No one is going to be able to find it in search, because that’s now how someone would search for holiday meal plan ideas. Make your titles clear and concise, and tailored for SEO.

PHASE 3: EXECUTE

Now, remember the goals I’ve talked about here, you could have at any point in time, but right now we are specifically talking about quarter four which does happen to include a lot of holidays and events where you could be promoting something.

And of course there are so many different goals you might have, so the point is that you want to focus on reaching the goals you have already set, and UTILIZE the upcoming holidays and events to your advantage to meet those goals.

Don’t make something up just because it’s the holidays, and don’t do anything that doesn’t work towards your goals.

I have been so TERRIBLE at this, I get shiny object syndrome and hear a good idea about something and then I’m like, wrecking my plans and my schedule trying to make something happen – that, a week ago, I had no intention to do.

I’ve done that so much this year that I actually didn’t even realize it… And when it finally dawned on me about a month ago, I was like, okay, I need to stop. I need to just focus on what I know I need to focus on – the things that I believe are going to move the needle for me.

I cannot constantly stop and redirect just because I watched a YouTube video or listened to a podcast about something that sounds like a great idea. And if you do that too, just know you’re not alone, but also: Here’s your permission to stop.

Remember, if it doesn’t align, it’s not the time.

THANK YOU for listening to (or reading) today’s episode of The Sweet Brand Show – let’s go out and make our brands sweet!