The Christmas period has officially begun so, are you ready to go with your Christmas marketing strategy?
If it gets to mid December and you’re only just typing up your first ‘gift guide’ you need to rethink your content strategy. The Christmas period is the most lucrative time of year for sales and many businesses gain a huge percentage of their yearly sales at this time of year.
In today’s market where there’s so much noise about different products and why one is better than the other, it’s important that you’re heard. To form a cohesive strategy, brands are working on influencer marketing, blogs, social campaigns, giveaways, email marketing – the list goes on. This isn’t said to overwhelm you. There’s still time to plan and form a strategy. We’ve broken down how to plan a strategy below including printables to help you.
You might have seen on our website that we do work with clients to form their strategies, we’d like nothing more than to talk to you about your Christmas 2018 marketing strategy! Just give us a call or drop us an email, we’d love to hear from you.
Social Media
Whilst you have some time before the big rush, you need to get your social media scheduled. Scheduling platforms are great for this because you can really get ahead of the curve and make sure you’re ready and posts are going out even if you’re super busy.
If you’re building your social media strategy, make sure to read our blog on which channels would work for you but ultimately, whatever you’re posting on, make sure you’ve got a bank of festive content. Gift ideas work great this time of year – there’s so many people scrolling social media looking for gift ideas so it’s well worth creating content around this. Video would work great for this to show your product or service in action.
Consider using some budget here to promote posts on social media. On Facebook and Instagram, you can easily sponsor and boost posts to be shown to a wider range of people. The insights given on both these platforms mean that they can drill down into your audience. If your product is a quirky makeup brand that’s targeted at teens for example, you can audience directly to this audience. You can narrow down your audience by gender, age, interests and so on. It’s a valuable tool and one that you can get a large return on when the cost of boosting posts to a large audience is usually fairly low.
Consider how we shop
It’s worth reflecting on how you personally shop, especially for Christmas. Many people have lots of gifts to buy, and therefore look to get the best deal or gift set that they can. Being aware of the way people shop can lead you to make changes in how you craft your strategy, making it more intuitive and how you yourself would like to shop. There’s a lot to be said for sitting down and accessing your website with a fresh pair of eyes and navigating through it as if you were a user trying to purchase a user. Assess your user journey and it’s usability for others.
Blogger Outreach
Blogger outreach or influencer marketing are priceless this time of year. Sending products out to bloggers for their gift guides, blogs and social posts can get your products seen by new and varied audiences and will receive an honest review. The power of the influencer is forever growing, check out our blog post on influencer marketing to read more on the topic. For example, you could do a competition collaboration with a brand that sits in line with yours which gives audiences the chance to win an item if they follow both accounts. At this time of year, when a consumer has to choose between two products that are similar, they will choose the one that has positive reviews and a large online digital presence. The influencers are trusted amongst the online community and hold huge sway in terms of sales.
Email marketing
Email marketing is an important tool because it’s a direct route to the consumer. There’s lots you can do in terms of your email marketing, who you send it to and what you include is important. It’s a great way to get information to customers that have engaged with you before because they’re already interested in the brand. It’s a non invasive form of marketing too – they can pick up their email whenever they get a moment. This is without you missing them – algorithms on social media now mean that not all posts are seen and it really depends on the time they check it and if they’ve liked your posts before. Without this, they might either not see it or just scroll right past. Email campaigns can be fully branded and, on our email platform, LaunchPad, you can have bespoke email campaigns. Learn more about LaunchPad here.
How to plan using our content planner
When we are first creating our campaigns and planning ahead, it’s always easier to start with the basics. We’ve already marked key dates on the calendar for the upcoming dates to help. Work backwards from the dates to begin thinking of when you should begin campaigns and ensure you’re not missing any events. Don’t feel a pressure to mark every date with a huge campaign. There’s one or two we would reccomend you do push your product; Black Friday and Cyber Monday are huge sales days. But, apart from that, concentrate on having a cohesive strategy that works across your on and offline presence.
You can download our November and December free printable content planners below.
If you want a more in depth analysis and planning meeting for your festive marketing campaigns, just get in touch!
