August is too early to be talking about the holidays if…

…You’re a customer (we all have that one friend or family member that starts listening to Christmas music three months too early).

But, if you’re a business owner, it’s most definitely not too early. Now is the time to be planning your holiday digital strategies, sales and campaigns.

Overwhelmed on where to start? You’re in the right place.

This post will introduce you to five things you can start doing this week to prepare for the holiday season.

1 – Choose Your Sales, Offers & Timeline

One of the first things you can do is pick out the sales that you want to participate in.

The main sale days you can choose from over the Holiday season are:

November 26th: Thanksgiving
November 27th: Black Friday
November 30th: Cyber Monday
December 1st: Giving Tuesday
December: Christmas / Holiday Month
December 26th: Boxing Day
December 31st: New Years Eve
January 1st: New Years Day

Once you’ve selected the sales you want to run, you can then start to think about your offer.

For example:

Black Friday // 15% Off Everything
Cyber Monday // 10% Off
Giving Tuesday // 10% Of All Proceeds Go To Women’s Refuge
Holiday Month // 10% Off All Gift Bundles

Once you’ve selected your sales and your offers, you can then create your promotional timeline.

For example:

Mini Campaign/Offer	Date Starts	Date Ends
Black Friday – 15% off	Tuesday, November 24, 2020	Friday, November 27, 2020
Cyber Monday – 10% off	Sunday, November 29, 2020	Monday, November 30, 2020
Giving Tuesday – 10% of all proceeds to to X	Tuesday, December 1, 2020	Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Holiday Sale – 10% off	Thursday, December 18, 2020	Thursday, December 24, 220

Your start and end dates will help you map out your promotional material for the sales, eg. list building, paid advertising timelines and social media schedules.

2- Start Planning Your Creative Concepts

Once you’ve decided on what holiday promotions you’re going to participate in, the offers of the campaigns and the timeframes you want to run them in, it’s time to start thinking about the creative concepts you’re going to use.

What will be your main themes and messaging? What types of product images or videos do you want to use? What will be the intended aesthetic of your campaign? How will you make your holiday sale different to the thousands of others out there?

We recommend creating Pinterest boards and bringing together image, text and design inspiration, as well as creating documents to explore your campaign themes, messaging and direction for each holiday sale.

3- Map Out Your Holiday Marketing Budget

It’s time to talk about moolah. How much money do you have to allocate to your holiday marketing campaigns?

Remember, you have to spend money to make money…

Once you’ve decided on the lump marketing budget, you can then plan out how you will allocate it. Seperate your budget out into the various holiday sales you’ll run and think about the costs each campaign may incur. These costs could include, product photography, design, social media boosting, paid advertising etc.

4- Plan Your Content Strategy

Now that you’ve got an idea of the creative direction that you’re wanting to take your campaigns and the budget available, you can move on to how you will leverage digital content to communicate your promotions.

At a minimum, your strategy for each holiday promo should include:

A social media calendar with planned promotional posts and stories
An email marketing calendar with planned broadcasts for your main list
A blog post or podcast calendar with planned posts related to holiday promotion
A messenger bot strategy

Need a hand with this? Get in touch with us today.

5- Plan Your Paid Traffic Strategy

How will you use paid advertising to get your campaigns in front of your customer base? Mapping out your paid traffic strategy is a big task, but it’s absolutely necessarily in order for you to tap into your customer base and drive holiday sales.

At a minimum, your strategy for each holiday promo should include:

A list building strategy. For example, you may like to set up a landing page where customers can opt-in to be the first to know when your holiday sale starts. You can then use this list to target warm promotional content via various digital channels.
A Facebook/Instagram ads plan – taking into consideration how you would target cold, warm and hot audiences.
You may also like to consider other paid advertising platforms such as Google, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more. This will depend on your brand, product, budget and offer.

Need help? Paid traffic is our jam. Our team specialises in advanced social media advertising, email marketing, paid traffic strategy and more. Get in touch today.

We apologize in advance for quadrupling the size of your do-to-list, but trust us, you’ll thank us for it later. The more work you put in now, the more successful your holiday campaigns will be.

Don’t forget that we’re here to take the weight off if you need us.

In the meantime, be sure to follow us on Instagram and Facebook for regular digital marketing tips, tricks & updates.

Happy Holidays!