The 3 “golden rules” for Holiday marketing, that will make you want to start celebrating early.

Following the busiest eCommerce weekend of the year, there’s no time to rest. Or, better yet, do these 3 things below, and rest away! Start celebrating Christmas, early, you deserve it. If you complete these, that is.

Bonus rule: Breathe. Don’t let the hustle of the holiday season overwhelm you! Keep it cool, and play it smart.

1. Segment Holiday Campaigns In Advance

While it’s no surprise that you’ll save time and energy by scheduling your emails in advance, this tip applies to all of your marketing campaigns. This includes social media and blog articles as well! Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to promote everything at once, but rather play it in stages. Segment your month into quarters, promoting a theme for each week. This rule, of course applies to every month of the year, but you will be happy you did in December. Because, remember – you want to start celebrating early. No more last-minute-emergencies on Xmas Eve.

Try scheduling your holiday campaigns by breaking it down into these product discovery stages:

• Week 1 – Comment on a topical issue – “Winter Is Coming – Are You Ready?”
• Week 2 – Identify how your products address the topical issue – “Our Patented IceShield Technology Keeps You Warm!”
• Week 3 & 4 – Call to Action – “IceShield Clothing At 50% Off – Buy Now!

Alternatively, you can feature a product type or brand every week leading up to the New Year with a weekly feature or promotion. One week could feature a sale on Mittens, while another could feature a sale on Winter Jackets. By segmenting your marketing messages in advance, you save your advertisements from becoming stale, too.

2. Bundle Your Holiday Messages

Once you’ve got your weekly themes set up, it’s just a matter of planning everything in advance. Instead of writing a new article from scratch every day, set aside a large chunk of time to deal with all your social media or all your blog posts at once. Not only does this approach save time by helping you stay “in the groove” of writing good copy, but also gives you plenty of time to review your material in advance.

COOL TIP: If you are not writing your marketing campaigns yourself, but work with an external marketing agency, keep in mind, that this is exactly why they are asking you to submit your priorities in advance. 😉 So they can plan everything nicely for you, without rushing and compromising the quality of the campaigns. 

Fresh tip: None of your marketing campaigns work alone. Share on X

Your marketing campaigns don’t work in a vacuum. Each customer touchpoint either adds or detracts from your branding associations. Since you manage more than one marketing campaign, it’s important to identify a clear message to achieve your marketing goal.

There are two general goals for any marketing campaign: increase awareness (branding), or increase conversion (sales). You either want to spread the word about your products to create new customers, or target your existing fans to create customers out of visitors.

Here’s how your marketing campaigns fall into either category:

Reach – Build Impressions > Spread the word

• Social Media
• Blog articles / Downloadables

Conversion – Build Engagement > Increase willingness to buy

• Newsletters/Email Blasts to subscribers
• Remarketing ads to existing customers

Once you’ve identified the purpose of your marketing campaigns, you can start reviewing your statements to verify that they successfully achieve the goals of “increasing awareness” or “increasing conversion.” If you spend 80% of your time crafting the right statements, you only need to spend 20% scheduling them for the right mediums. Just like selling products in real life, you don’t want 20 convoluted sales pitches. You only need two or three points that hit hard.

3. Don’t Spread Yourself Thin

You know what would be a lot easier than making sure that “everything works perfectly” through the busiest selling season of the year? Focus your time and energy on only a couple of star performers to make sure that they really make an impact this holiday season.

We like to think that Marketing is a form of science. Some forms of marketing work better than others, and that’s a fact. The key to consistent marketing is to constantly check for redundant campaigns and opt out for better-performing ads. By keeping your marketing portfolio slim, you decrease the amount of work you need to put in for better results. Here are the types of checks you should be doing on a regular basis:

• Daily Basis – Conduct A/B tests to constantly improve the copy and creatives of your running ads. Constantly switch out poor, stale ads for fresh, high-performing superstars.
• Weekly Basis – Check the performance of your campaigns to compare performances. Is one campaign gaining more clicks at a lower cost? Is that a seasonal trend, or is one campaign legitimately stronger than the other? Why is that? Can I take the copy/creatives from one campaign and imitate its successes in the other?

Once you’ve identified your poor performers, it’s worth taking a look to see if there are simple improvements that could be made. If there’s an easy switch (e.g, the better performing campaign has newer creatives) you could try to improve the performance of your poor performer. If that doesn’t work, it’s worth pausing your campaign altogether so you can spend your resources promoting the superior campaign until its reach and/or engagement starts to drop.

You know that email you write every year that doesn’t result in any sales? Drop it. Work on the ones that do result in sales. And make them amazing.

Are you still with me?

So!

• Don’t be overwhelmed by the holiday shopping season.
• Schedule your campaigns in advance, so you’re not put under the pressure of promoting too many items at once.
• Save time by identifying your core message before working on any specific copy or creatives.
• Once your campaigns are up and running, monitor them on a regular basis to ensure that only the most effective ones are receiving the lion’s share of your marketing budget.

Did you find any “aha” moments from this blog post? If you like what you’ve read, drop us a comment on our Facebook page or visit our marketing agency in downtown Vancouver! We always have chocolate.