By Latisha S. | latisha@pancakedigitalsolutions.com
It’s no secret that the holidays are almost upon us. So you may be asking yourself how and when to start planning for your holiday marketing campaigns.
Well, the answer is NOW!
In fact, the best time to start planning your holiday marketing campaigns is around August-September.
But don’t fret! If you haven’t started planning for your holiday marketing, we have five tips that will help you get started.
1. Start mapping out when your holiday campaigns will start and end.
More than likely you will be running campaigns from early November to the end of December (or even till the New Year). You can create a simple excel sheet to use as a content calendar so you can start planning your social media content.
This planning will also include what social media platforms you will be using. Will your campaigns run on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc?
Depending on how new your business is, you may even be running campaigns on more than one platform.
During your planning process you will also plan out how many posts that you will create, what types of posts (written, lives, etc) and how many of those posts will be organic and how many will be paid advertising.
2. Research your competition
You will want to start researching others in your industry. What campaigns are they running? What types of holiday content and campaigns did they run last year?
This process will help you see what worked for them and what didn’t. Then you can start crafting your strategy around that.
3. Nail down your “Big Idea”
This is your big concept…your key message. Why does your audience need what you’re offering? What steps will you take to get them there?
This is where you will come up with a campaign concept, a common theme for all of your messaging to revolve around.
Of course, you don’t want to be trying to sale in every post. But you can still have key themes to draw from and create content around.
Ways you can do this are by:
- Giving your campaign a specific name
- Writing a tagline for your campaign
- Creating a branded hashtag specific to this holiday campaign
4. Choose your services or featured products for the campaign
Here is where you will choose which services or products that you will be promoting throughout your campaign. This will also be a huge factor in your content creation and what types of content that you put out.
5. Plan and schedule your content
Once you have all the pieces in order, you will plan which posts will be scheduled on which day. Then you can use a scheduling system to schedule all of your posts out. If you are scheduling for Facebook and/or Instagram then you can use their native scheduler, Creative Studio.
On the Table…
The holidays can be the most festive and even stressful time for businesses. But, with the right planning and strategy, you can be sure that you will have a successful holiday campaign for your business.
For more marketing tips, please join our free Facebook group, Marketing 4 Makers.