13 Aug How To Plan Your Holiday Marketing
By Justice Abbott
As summer comes to an end, the holiday season is quickly approaching us! For retailers, the holiday season beings next month, so it’s definitely time for you to start planning your holiday marketing. We’re here to help! We’ve laid out a step-by-step guide to make sure your business is ready for the holidays!
Step 1: Choose A Calendar
The most important step in planning your marketing is having a place to plan! Before you begin laying out your holiday ideas, you need to select a calendar that will work best for you and your team. Some great calendars are Basecamp, Trello, Asana, or Google Calendar. Each of these sites allow you to insert graphics and verbiage into a calendar that can be edited at any time. The Germono team likes to use Basecamp2, but we have experience with all of them. Google Calendars is a good option if you’re working solo and it’s free 🙂
Having a clear space for your planning is important because it allows your ideas to be organized which eliminates the possibility of forgetting or misplacing them. It also allows you to see your campaign on a calendar so you can make adjustments as needed.
Step 2: Draft
Drafting is where the planning process really begins. Your draft is considered the “skeleton” of your campaign as you are essentially outlining the content. Your skeleton consists of placeholders for what days you want to post about each topic. This is important because once you have these placeholders lined up you can begin to work backwards, going into each day and filling in your content ideas.
We like to start by marking down major holidays and sales. Once you have these marked, fill in topics such as products, specials, or events. After filling in these important dates, you may have a couple “extra” dates available that will be open for you to add any content that may “pop up” or any updates. Here is an example of what that will look like. The titles in red are the “skeleton”.
Step 3: Visuals
Because holiday sales are so crucial for retailers, there is a lot of advertising “noise” during this busy time which makes it important to stand out from the rest! This means preparing your images and videos ahead of time and making sure you are choosing the most eye-catching, engaging visuals to make sure customers are stopping to learn about your product or service.
If you plan to market on social media, professional images are going to be a key ingredient. We suggest setting aside a portion of your marketing budget on hiring a product photographer. It is best to get these photos taken as soon as possible so you have plenty of time to sift through them and add your favorites into your campaign calendar. We also suggest taking as many photos as you can so when it’s time to choose the ones you want to post, you have more than enough options and you can afford to toss the ones you may not love!
Step 4: Prewrite and Proof Descriptions
After you’ve decided on what visuals you are going to be using, it’s time to write out your post descriptions. It’s important to use engaging verbiage that will efficiently explain your product or service and engage your audience. If advertising on social media, for apps like Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, be sure to research hashtags to match the visuals you have chosen for the topic of the day.
Once your post descriptions have been drafted and uploaded into your calendar, one of the most important steps is to PROOF READ! This might seem like a no-brainer, but it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the holiday fun a make tiny grammar or spelling mistakes that you don’t even notice. We recommend having multiple members of your team read through each post description, checking for these mistakes and correcting them before the final posts go out. This blog post has been proofed by another person on our team before we published it.
Step 5: Prepare Your Social Media
During the holiday season you can expect increased traffic to your business pages and website, so take the time now to review and prepare them. Some good questions to ask yourself when doing this are:
- Is it easy for my followers to make a purchase?
- Is all my information current and up to date?
- Are the emails and links in my platforms working? During this time, it’s important to test those email links yourself because one wrong letter can mean a lost sale!
We strongly recommend setting up auto-replies for your frequently asked questions on Facebook and Instagram. You can do this via Facebook Business Suite Inbox. Check out our social media pages to see a quick demo on how to easily do this. Having auto replies set up will alleviate the stress of replying to such a high volume of customers because it provides them with an immediate answer to the question they have, which is just brownie points for your business!
Step 6: Prepare Signage
Now that you have your social media marketing planned, we suggest supporting your campaigns with ads and flyers. These will complement the campaign and reach potential customers that may not see your organic posts. You can approach this step in many ways, it might be advantageous of you to reach out to a marketing specialist to get you started!
Remember that NOW is the time to begin planning your holiday marketing as the season is quickly approaching and can feel pretty chaotic! This step-by-step guide will ensure a smooth holiday campaign for your business. As a treat, we’ve created a festive holiday playlist just for you, check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5qldCq5sGMZSR6muGLnjtdGMto5vtTm
Shoot us an email with your favorite holiday songs and don’t hesitate to ask us any questions about your holiday planning! Justice@Germono.com
