As far as business marketing is concerned, the holiday season calls for some serious planning and marketing ideas! Come this holiday season and all brands and companies start work on promotional campaigns and other activities that would lead to maximum sales. Planning ahead could mean starting the process of ideation even a year in advance! Below are a few marketing ideas that could help you kick-start the promotion of your business this holiday season.
Social Media Strategies: Holiday Cheer on Facebook
Don’t let your Facebook page look dull during this festive season. You could start off by creating a banner that says ‘Happy Holidays’. You could do a lot of customized marketing on Facebook depending on the product or service offered by your company. For instance, restaurants and other eateries could put up special menus for the entire month or offer free desserts with every entree.
Define, create and plan what your key messages will be and send these to your target audience through your website content, blog, email and social media networks. Be sure to make your blog posts relevant to the holidays and schedule regular updates on X, Facebook, etc.
You could also think about emailing a special newsletter to all your customers. It could include a free gift, discount offer or voucher. However, remember to be consistent and retain the holiday theme in all your marketing activities. It is extremely important for businesses to ensure integration of their traditional and digital media campaigns while planning.
Discounts and Gift Cards
Buying trends change during this time of year, so try to connect on a more emotional level to your loyal customers by offering discounts on their most wanted list. It is perhaps the oldest promotional strategy, but nevertheless customers are always attracted to purchase discounted and/or time limited offers. Another brilliant way to attract customers into holiday shopping is via gift cards.
Themes for Christmas: ‘12 Days of Christmas’
One of the most interesting ideas for holiday marketing is to plan theme-based promotions. For instance, you could announce ‘12 Days of Saving’ campaign and offer discounts on a different product on each of the twelve days. It could be a 12-day countdown to the festival! Such a campaign would give you the opportunity to increase your brand awareness, showcase a wide range of your products and also encourage loyal customers to purchase new products.
VIP Holiday Shopping Event
You could organize a special holiday event for your customers. Keep an invite-only entry to make them feel special. They could enjoy great discounts on exclusive products, which are not available otherwise to the general crowd. For example, you could host a night-shopping event, where you offer 25 percent off to your customers and also serve them some champagne and exclusive bakery delights to make them enjoy the shopping experience and also feel valued.
Marketing Ideas: Lessons Learned
The best way to plan your current year’s holiday season campaign is to look back at the previous year and figure out the things that worked and those which had no impact on sales. It includes talking a deep dive into your top KPI’s and where applicable your online analytics. For both brick-and-mortar and online businesses, you need to track the successes of your marketing efforts in some meaningful and actionable way. Similarly, spend some time analyzing your promotional offers and those that were initiated by your competitors as well.
McAllister Marketing is a full service firm that specializes in aligning consumers and market strategy to increase business growth. We are more than your average marketing company that limits itself to campaign suggestions. We work with you to identify your customers, uncover your competitive advantage and fine-tune your marketing strategy. Contact us, or call 250-380-2299 to learn more about how we can help you grow your business over the holidays and provide you with marketing ideas that work!