Smart Holiday Marketing for Better Connection, More Business

Year-end is the time to indulge in holiday mood. This is the time to get your connections warm; knock everyone you know and wish “Happy Holidays”. It is also the time when people shop till they drop! With most people on a shopping-spree, businesses often offer crazy discounts to attract more customers during this season. With competition almost sky-high, holiday marketing is all about grabbing the market fast. 

While planning for your marketing during this holiday season, keep in mind that it is not only about how much profit you make; but about the connection you create! With a smart holiday marketing plan, you can reap the benefits for the entire year and more. Remember

So, do you have an effective holiday marketing plan in place? Here’s how you can do it like a pro!

Plan Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns Well

You probably share marketing content day in and day out on social media. But, launching a campaign is a different ball game altogether. You need to plan it out minutely before getting started.

1. Set a timeframe: Holiday campaigns are time or period centric. If this particular campaign is related to the year-end holiday time, it should span from at least Thanksgiving to the New Year. Careful, often your competitors start it as early as in October and it even overflows into January, the next year. So, study the market, take cues from competitors’ activities last year, add a dash of your own flair and plan as early as possible. 

2. Know your audience: We assume that you have already set your target audience. The target can have varied segments of different age groups, people with different interests. You might need to structure the marketing messages for individual segments. 

Do extensive research to understand the behaviour of a target demography. This is a crucial action before you start your holiday marketing campaign. Does your target like to gather information by reading more on a laptop or on mobile? The results of such researches can help you narrow down your focus on what to publish. You create tailored content and position that carefully. 

Depending on your research, you can find out whether your target group will read blogs, or casually scroll down the Instagram timeline, or carefully read some LinkedIn publications, et al. 

For example, if you are targeting young adults between 18-25, social media like Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest may be the place to reach them. And colourful and fun poster like the one below (BTW, it is a DocHipo template) can be used to grab their attention.

At the same time, if the majority of your target audience consists of seasoned professionals/individuals from a traditional line of work, perhaps a subdued and classic greeting will work best. Here’s an example from DocHipo.

The key here is to understand your target audience, know what they like and what they don’t and then tailor your campaigns/activities/messages accordingly. 

3. Set a goal: Set achievable yet aspirational marketing goals for the campaign. Later on, these goals will be the benchmark to judge the success of that campaign. Calculate your marketing needs according to the set goal. With a goal in sight, it becomes easier to decide the marketing channels and deadline.

Create an Offer for Holiday Marketing that They Cannot Refuse

Now that you have planned your audience, timeframe and goal, it is time to zero in on an offer they cannot refuse.

An offer can come in various form factor. It can be as straight forward as a discount (in fact, this is the commonest of all), can be a free goodie with a purchase, can be loyalty bonus points, can be a cashback and so on. 

While most businesses offer discounts of some sort during this time, you may want to get a little creative with your offer. An unusual offer can set up, apart from the rest and up the intrigue factor!

Kick-start Your Promotion Process

So far, you have spent several hours researching on the holiday marketing campaigns. The target group, marketing channels, offers to promote are all in place. This is the time to take the plunge into full-fledged promotion. Here are the holiday marketing channels that you can use for creating buzz around your campaigns.

1. E-mail Marketing:

Email marketing is certainly very much alive! Despite the widespread notion of email marketing not being as effective any more, it is still the third most influential source of information; especially for the B2B segment. 

So, don’t shy away from creating informative, impactful and conversion-friendly email marketing campaigns this holiday session. How do you do that? Here are some tips:

• Create targeted email campaigns for different audience groups. One size does not fit it all!
• Communicate your offers clearly.
• Have strong call-to-action within the email.
• Have some graphical (do not go over the board though) element to light up the email.

2. Newsletters:

If you send regular newsletters to your audience, you already have a loyal group of followers. Leverage this audience for your holiday marketing efforts this festive season. 

While the primary purpose of your newsletter is engaging with your audience, you can definitely use the newsletter for generating buzz about the cool campaigns you are running. You may want to give your newsletter subscribers a little extra something (think an extra 5% discount or loyalty points or cash back) to make them feel even more special.

Social Media:

When it comes to holiday marketing on social media, don’t hold back. Create loads of documents with beautiful holiday messages. Customers are not interested only in shopping. They simply want to take a plunge into the holiday spirit. Let them soak in the flavour, thoroughly.

You can simply extend your warm holiday greetings (and hugs of course) to your audience or market your holiday offers on social media. Whether it is creating beautiful posts or paid campaigns, there are a few things you need to keep in mind.

• Make sure that the posts are the right size.
• Get the tonality of the posts right.
• Make sure your messages are relevant and free of errors.

Here are some stunning DocHipo templates you can use this holiday season!

Measure the Success of Your Holiday Marketing Campaign

This is probably the most important part of your Holiday marketing. It is time to analyse the success of your marketing strategy. Check whether you hit the goal set in the very beginning. If not, you need to analyse, what fell flat in the marketing process. A thorough analysis will help you come up with a stronger holiday marketing strategy next season.

Last Words

Holiday marketing strategy should reflect the happy cheery atmosphere. Jazz-up even the most serious mail to attract new customers and rekindle the love affair with your loyal ones. End the year with a heart-to-heart connection with your audience!  At DocHipo, we’ve got you covered with tons of cheery templates with holiday spirit! Sign up today for creating gorgeous documents that’ll take your holiday marketing to the next level!