12 Days Of Christmas Marketing
12 Tips for Planning Your Christmas Marketing Campaigns
Let's be honest, after last year's festive flop, we all deserve a very merry Christmas!
Did you know, shoppers are predicted to spend around £84 million this year in retail sales alone?! With online shopping being the most preferred way to buy. Source Statista
In an ideal world, the Christmas prep starts as the Halloween fun winds down but it's not too late to make the most of the festivities.
Many Christmas marketing campaigns are already in full swing as it is a key time to generate more revenue over any other period in the year.
Planning ahead is always the best option to maximise any sales during this period, but if you have not yet planned your Christmas marketing campaigns. Then have a read for our top tips for planning your Christmas marketing, some not too late to take away this year, but great for next year's plans too!
Review Previous campaigns
The best place to begin is always to review and revisit last year’s Christmas marketing campaigns. What worked well, and what didn't?
To review last year's Christmas campaign performance, you can review when sales peaked, and why. Which social media posts, paid ads, or email marketing converted the best and what were the key messages used. Reviewing past campaigns will best inform this year’s marketing strategy.
In the ideal world, Christmas marketing campaign analysis is best done at the start of the new year after your Christmas campaigns are still fresh in your mind. It is never too late to revisit though, so get onto those reports today and start unpicking!
Set your Christmas marketing goals
We all know goal setting is always the best place to begin. It also helps for accurate success measurement! Those good old SMART goals!
There are usually some common goals across all businesses when it comes to Christmas marketing objectives. Usually, these are:
Boost sales
Generate leads
Drive online website traffic
Increase engagement
Build brand awareness
Figuring out which one(s) is hugely important before you begin planning your Christmas marketing campaign.
Review your target audience
Now that you have reviewed any previous campaigns and set your goals, it’s time to zone in on your target audience!
You can look at patterns in your audience like demographics, buying behaviours, and any new trends!
If you haven't done any customer persona/target audience work before, some of the key things to look at, are:
Which content formats appeal to them most?
Where are they in terms of distribution channels online and offline?
What motivates them to buy at Christmas? Is it a free gift, discount etc. which appeal to them the most?
A nice easy way to find out the answers to some of these questions is by creating a survey and sending it out to your email mailing list. You can also review things like your website and google my business analytics data to find out your current top-performing content and what worked well last year.
Create a Christmas marketing Plan
Fail to prepare, prepare to fail!
When it comes to planning you may have your own process already, but you can use software such as Trello or even create a good old fashioned editorial calendar in excel. Planning is key to ensuring your Christmas campaign runs as smoothly as possible.
The holiday season isn’t just about Christmas and usually begins just after Halloween, and definitely by November. There are a number of other dates you need to plan your campaign around. Creating a timeline to start with will keep it super organised.
Ideally, you’d create something like this in the six months prior but here are some key dates ahead of next year's campaign.
Black Friday
Cyber Monday
Winter Solstice
Christmas Eve
Christmas Day
Boxing Day
New Year’s Eve
While these events are important to start your planning, you can also create a Gantt chart to plot out all of your campaign deliverables. This will help you stay on track and give you the opportunity to organise your messaging and offers in advance. Don’t neglect to factor in those all-important key dates such as your last shipping date, business closing date, order cut-offs etc.
Consider your marketing channels
Review which channels you’ll be using to promote your Christmas campaign.
It’s important to ensure that your campaigns are delivered consistently across all your relevant channels, which helps with consistency and conversion and will prevent disjointed, and unaligned marketing campaigns!
You can look at optimising your website with the new information, paid media, social channels, email and so on.
Decide on any offers or incentives
Which offers will you use to tempt customers to spend more throughout your campaign?
Discounts, bundles, buy one get one free, 3 for 2, free gift, free shipping when they spend over a certain amount, gift sets, gift vouchers etc! There are so many...
Plan your key Christmas marketing messages
It’s time to plan your Christmas campaign message. To craft your message, consider the following:
How do you differ from competitors?
What are the desires of your target audience.
Your mission and vision.
Your brand values.
Content, content, content!
Once you have the key foundations of your campaign, it's time to focus on the content!
Map out every campaign touchpoint across each channel and decide what assets you need to create. Ensure that your copy and design reflect your brand and deliver your key messages consistently across all channels.
This is likely to take some time and ideally, you should aim to have your assets ready by the end of October.
Deliver a more personalised experience
93% of companies see an uplift in conversion rates from using personalisation.
So there’s a lot of value in creating personalised experiences for your customers, an amazing way to do this is using email marketing.
The key to personalised journeys is to deliver relevant messages at just the right moment based on the actions someone has just taken.
You can also set up a more personalised experience on your website, for example, ‘triggers’ so when a visitor abandons your site, they’ll receive an email reminding them of what they were looking at to try and tempt them… From browser to buyer! Clever stuff ay!
Housekeeping!
When you’re creating content, consider whether there is any supporting content on your website that needs optimising.
Think about which pages your campaign directs people to for additional information. Make sure their experience is consistent throughout their journey.
Update any external links such as your Linktree.
Tweak any automation- Before you launch your campaign, consider whether any of your automated emails need tweaking.
Small details like this enhance the overall customer experience your campaign delivers and ensure your efforts are fully optimised to drive the best results.
Failing to update supporting content could lead to a disjointed experience that could hinder your conversion.
Put a contingency plan in place
Before the launch date arrives, plan how you’re going to respond to any issues that could arise. Creating a clear process and plan of action will allow you to deal with any hiccups more smoothly and with less stress!
A test and learn approach will really help to maximise your success.
Don’t forget about after Christmas
Keep that momentum going! Don’t drop the ball once your campaign has finished – take those Christmas business promotion ideas and really get the most out of them. That blurry period between Christmas, New Year and returning to work is a time to recharge your marketing.
Top tip: If you’re planning on contacting people in January, wait until at least the second week – people generally have a lot of catching up to do on emails after the festive period, and you don’t want your communications to get lost in the abyss.
Takeaway
The build-up to Christmas can be especially stressful for business owners, already trying to do all the things! We hope that our ‘12 Christmas marketing planning tips’ help to bring some calm to your Christmas marketing campaign plans.
If you’re late to the planning process and are feeling the pressure, our advice is to keep things simple. Focus on consistently delivering clear messaging through a simple theme, across your key channels.
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