The holidays are coming! That means a massive boost in sales for all businesses including med spas, jewelry stores, HVAC businesses, furniture stores, and car dealerships. With consumers starting their holiday shopping and doing much of it online, this time of the year is a great opportunity for ecommerce businesses with products that can fit the bill as the perfect gift for their target audience. The best way to maximize sales is to release a compelling holiday marketing campaign that puts you top of mind for your target audience.
With an optimized marketing plan to engage holiday shoppers, you can end the year with a bang. Get rid of old inventory, push new products, increase brand awareness, attract new customers, and make money. It’s a make-it-or-break-it moment for many retailers, especially with the challenges of the last few years.
So, how exactly do you make the most of your marketing efforts during the holiday season? Here are our top holiday marketing tips.
How To Create a Creative Holiday Marketing Campaign
Your holiday marketing strategy should be a culmination of everything you’ve learned about reaching your target audience through digital marketing year-round. What do they need to see from you to turn to your business this holiday shopping season? Don’t leave this to the last minute. Give your team enough time to analyze, evaluate, and come up with creative holiday marketing ideas. Methodically formulate your holiday marketing campaign by following these steps.
1. Review existing marketing touchpoints.
Every time you run a marketing campaign, you are collecting data about what your target audience responds well to. So take a look at your marketing campaign from the rest of the year and the marketing campaign you ran last year. Can you see any patterns or trends for the marketing material that supports conversion? How could you replicate your marketing efforts to achieve similar or even better results this year?
While going through this review, it’s a good idea to take a look at your evergreen marketing material. Take a look at your website. Is it easy for holiday shoppers to find what they’re looking for? Check the effectiveness of your landing pages. Are there opportunities to win more conversions? Review your email sequence campaigns including your welcome and sales sequence. Something as simple as a subject line amendment could make it more effective at supporting your holiday promotions. Make sure all the touchpoints in the buyer journey are optimized. Otherwise, you’ll lose out on all important sales despite putting effort into a stand-out Christmas campaign.
2. Define your omnichannel strategy.
Effective marketing strategies create the opportunity for multiple genuine interactions between the business and the customer base. This builds trust with both new customers and loyal customers. The best way to encourage multiple interactions is to make sure you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. Take an omnichannel approach by running your holiday marketing campaign on multiple marketing channels.
Pick a couple of social media platforms your target audience regularly uses. Be aware of how your customer’s behavior could change around the holiday time. For example, even though you have a professional clientele, with all the days off that people have at this time of year, they may spend less time on LinkedIn than usual. Instead, they might opt to engage with personal social media posts on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
If you’ve spent the year building up a strong email list, use email marketing to your advantage. This is a great way to remind your loyal customers of what you have to offer as holiday gifts. You may want to reward them for their loyalty all year with an email list exclusive coupon. Holiday email marketing campaigns are also a great place to share holiday gift guides and send reminders about holiday sales such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Don’t forget about SMS marketing. It has been found to get better open and response rates than email marketing. With how oversaturated your customer base’s inboxes will be with holiday emails you may get better results over text. Send short and snappy reminders of the holiday offers you have available, the gift guides they can check out, and any other campaigns you’re running to spread the holiday cheer. If you don’t know where to get started, check out the 500 text marketing templates we’ve created.
3. Create a holiday-themed special offer.
Any exclusives you can offer during the holiday season give customers an incentive to buy from you then and there so they don’t miss out. It could be a holiday-themed version of an existing product. Think of the Starbucks’ holiday menu. It’s still coffee, just with festive flavoring added. Or how about holiday gift sets? It’s the kind of product customers will pick up while browsing in-store or online to tick someone else off their to-buy list.
Alternatively, you could run a special event this holiday season. If you’re an ecommerce store, you could host a pop-up store for a day or two to give shoppers the chance to see your products in person before buying. This will help out potential customers who were on the fence about purchasing from you for the first time. If in-person isn’t your thing, you could keep things digital with an interactive webinar sharing valuable tips and tricks that are much needed during the holiday season. It’s another way to spread awareness of your business.
4. Share the holiday spirit.
Christmas is a time for giving. Not just gift-giving but spreading some holiday cheer. There’s no better time to show your generosity as an organization. You could partner with a non-profit to raise money for the good work they are doing. This could be by donating a percentage of your profits during the holiday season or by dedicating a specific product to them and donating all profits from that product to the charity.
You could also show your generosity to your customer base by running giveaways with a holiday theme such as ‘the 12 days of Christmas’. It would work well as a social media marketing campaign because you can ask your audience to do something as simple as commenting on or sharing the post to enter. Giveaways work particularly well with influencer social media marketing. Ask the influencer to show off the product being gifted and then share the terms and conditions of the giveaway with their audience to attract new customers.
5. Make it personable.
There is always an emotional element to marketing. The saying goes that we buy with emotion and justify with logic. This is even more poignant during the holiday shopping season. Christmas is about coming together as a family, reflecting on the last year as we move towards the new year, and sharing that extra bit of generosity and Christmas cheer. It’s a more emotional time than normal. Keep that in mind with your marketing.
Focus on how your customers want to feel when they buy your products, not just the practical applications. Tell stories focused on family, friends, and coming together. Make the most of personalization by segmenting your contact list according to their interests and attributes so you can get the most relevant content for every individual. Surface level scarcity is an over-used marketing tactic. Give them an incentive to buy from you that goes deeper.
6. Invest in customer experience.
With the holiday shopping season being such a busy time of year, you want to make sure your customer service team can handle the increased demand from your holiday marketing campaign. They could be inundated with questions about your holiday promotions, shipping times, or an endless list of other queries. This is your chance to win over new customers and strengthen your relationship with loyal customers so put on your best show.
Having multiple ways for customers to reach you meets consumer expectations. Make it easy for your customer representatives to manage all channels of communication with an omnichannel inbox. Another way to make the customer experience more convenient is to add a webchat function to your site that can be converted to a text message thread so customers can get on with their day while you assist them.
An informed marketing plan across multiple marketing channels that includes a special holiday offer and embraces the Christmas spirit of giving in a genuine and authentic way will meet the demands of holiday shoppers and set you up for success.
The 5 Best Holiday Marketing Campaigns
To get even more holiday marketing ideas, check out some of these successful holiday marketing strategies from a range of businesses.
1. Google: Santa Tracker
Google’s Santa Tracker has developed a life of its own over the years. It’s a fun interactive website where kids (or adults!) can take a peek at what’s going on over in the North Pole and play holiday-themed games. It’s something a bit silly but endearing which is what people are drawn to during the holiday season.
2. Walkers: All Mariah Carey Wants for Christmas
Mariah Carey has become synonymous with Christmas thanks to her hit song which races up the charts every year ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’. So Walkers bagged the perfect star for their Christmas commercial. It’s funny because it’s a joke everyone understands – how Mariah Carey gets a boost in listens every year. It leans into that silliness as the star gets annoyed at the elves for taking away her packet of Walkers. It’s an ad you won’t forget any time soon.
3. Coca-Cola Canada: Give Something Only You Can Give
Coco-Cola is infamous for its Christmas campaigns. When you see polar bears drinking a bottle of Coke, you know it’s the holiday season. Coco-Cola Canada did not disappoint with their Give Something Only You Can Give TV ad. We see the emotional journey of a dad determined to get his daughter’s letter to Santa only to see Santa swoop in to save the day by driving the dad back home in a Coco-Cola truck because the daughter’s Christmas wish was to have her dad home for Christmas. That’s the kind of personable marketing campaign that flies high during this time of year.
4. reMarkable: Keep Your Goals for the New Year
reMarkable shared a simple but effective email marketing campaign. They rewarded their email subscribers with a $50 discount and incentivized them to use it by linking their product to their priorities of the time of year. reMarkable sells a ‘digital notebook’ that transfers written notes into typed notes which is perfect for organizing and planning – exactly what a lot of people do in the new year.
5. Airbnb: Airbnb Hosts Ring Our Opening Bell
With the holiday season being a time when a lot of people travel to see out-of-town family members, it makes sense that Airbnb would invest in a holiday marketing campaign. Theirs isn’t overly festive. Instead, it focuses on the holiday spirit of gratitude and the celebration of community by highlighting their hosts all over the world. It gives you that fuzzy feeling inside which you will associate with Airbnb, making them a more memorable option for accommodation.
If there is any time to invest in your marketing strategy, it’s Christmas time. Customers are looking to buy. You just need to position yourself as the business to buy from. Once you’ve crafted your killer marketing plan, make sure you have the tools to execute it effectively and efficiently.
Podium’s lead conversion platform, powered by AI and ready to integrate with the tools you already use, is the perfect solution for managing your high output, high stakes, and high return marketing campaign. It has tools for all the major marketing platforms, combining phone calls, text messages, social media messages, webchat, and even online reviews in one omnichannel inbox. It can manage surveys and payments too.
