The holiday season is here! If you’re like most marketers, you’re gearing up to finish the year off strong. Planning your holiday campaign is something you don’t want to do last minute.
If you haven’t already started your campaign, don’t worry. Here are some tips on how you can create your best holiday marketing campaign.
People are going to be spending a lot of their hard-earned money over the next 6-8 weeks, and we want to help you reach your customers and prospects before your competition does.
As we all probably know by now, launching a full campaign is very different from setting up a couple tweets or Instagram posts to automatically post. A lot of holiday campaigns start in October and might even run through January.
Knowing what you are going to promote, and how, is essential. Are you going to run a sale on some of your products? Do you have a new line of products or services dropping? Are there upgrades to current products or services you can offer?
What are you looking to achieve? What is the ideal outcome of your holiday campaign? Remember your SMART goals here:
Here’s a great formula you can use:
Generate [number] leads focused on [topic/product] by [date].
Example:
I want to generate 1000 leads focused on purchasing my custom holiday gift baskets by December 17th.
Now that your goals are in place, your next step is to define your target audience. The more info you can gather about the people you’re trying to reach, the better. What social media platforms do they use? Do they prefer desktop or mobile?
Take a look at your buyer personas. Is your campaign relevant to all segments of your audience? If not, you may want to weed out the people you do not want to include, this way you avoid what they may perceive as spam mail.
The offer you create will serve as the center point for all of your campaign initiatives. A lot of the time, offers are ebooks, coupons, templates, online courses, videos, and other tools.
Think about how this can tie into the products or services your campaign is centered around. There are many options to choose from, but be sure to select one that makes the most sense to your target audience.
If you happen to decide to take the ebook route, we have a free, customizable ebook template you find in this article.
Once you have decided on and created your offer, you’ll need a place for it to live. And this is where a landing page comes in.
Your landing page is the page you’ll be driving traffic to. Keep these best practices in mind:
Now that your content has been created, it’s time for you to get the word out. Here are some promotion tactics you should be implementing:
Segmenting your list is more important than ever during the holiday season. Due to the increased number of incoming promotions and the limited amount of time busy shoppers have, well-targeted emails will likely take priority over mass messages.
Once you know who your recipients are, you can start the email creation process. Keep these elements in mind while you’re crafting your email:
Subject line - focus on what the offer solves.
Body copy - Keep it short and sweet, similar to a landing page.
Sharing options - Do not forget to add buttons to your emails that allow your recipients to quickly pass your offer along to their own network.
Blogs allow you to build your reach even further than emails. Blog posts can be effective campaign elements for attracting people to your offer. A simple “promo post” has been proven to be the most effective lead generator out of all of the different blog post types.
Aside from the promo post, be sure to add a CTA for your offer to your post(s) that align with its subject.
Now that you have some tangible promotional material, you can start promoting through your social media channels. You can share your blog posts, links to your landing page(s), any infographics you’ve created… just be sure to switch up the messaging, so that you aren’t repeating the same post over and over.
Throughout this campaign, you will likely get a significant bump in leads. It’s important that you design a plan for qualifying and developing your leads once they’ve filled out your form to continue nurturing them after the holiday season.
Be sure to segment your leads and then think about what you will use to nurture your leads. Do you want to turn these leads into sales, subscribers, or are you directing them to a particular page on your website?
Everything is in place - offer, landing page, blog promotions, and workflows, it’s time to take your campaign live!
This is probably the most important part of the process. Now is the time to determine if you’ve hit your goals. And if you didn’t hit your goals, can you find out what prevented you from doing so?
Analyze where people dropped off in your workflows. Was there a blog post that flopped? Take notes and use them to help inform your next campaign.
Good luck this holiday season! We know you’ll do great!
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Anabeth McConnell
