eBusiness Weekly
Leslie Mupeti
Christmas is usually a time for giving and receiving gifts, as well as spending quality time with family and friends.
During Christmas, people all over the world are often in a “generous” mood and buy a variety of presents, food, and decorations. To escape the holiday shopping frenzy, most individuals begin their shopping in October or November.
When it comes to Christmas marketing techniques, most brands stick to tried-and-true methods such as painting all product packaging red, including little Christmas trees into all of their social media images, and placing token Christmas trees in their retail locations.
There is nothing wrong with it, except that it is the bare minimum, and doing the bare minimum will not help you soar above the market noise. You must create an effective Christmas strategy. A successful Christmas marketing plan should aim to engage your audience, optimise sales, and raise brand recognition.
Depending on how successfully you advertise yourself, you may position your company as the go-to spot for all of their Christmas shopping, resulting in increased sales.
- Audit the previous holiday campaign and review your current marketing channels
You should evaluate the prior holiday campaign before launching your Christmas marketing effort. Auditing the performance of prior holiday advertising might help you understand your target audience’s behavior. You may discover more about previous patterns and how they affected the success of your firm.
Soliciting all available information can assist in defining objectives for a more effective holiday marketing campaign.
Overall, don’t forget to audit the best-performing products and product families from past years, as well as paid marketing, social media activity, collaborations with influencers, newsletter campaigns, SMS/WhatsApp campaigns, and blog material.
Customers engage with your brand in a variety of ways.
The search funnel is more chaotic than ever nowadays.
Before purchasing a product, a buyer may learn about it in an email, study it on their PC, and then show it to their spouse on their cell phone.
The more channels you have to promote and communicate on, as well as the more effective your omni-channel advertising approach, the more successful you will be this Christmas season.
Furthermore, keep in mind that various channels respond better to different segmented audiences. Associating the right channel with the right target group is a painstaking data-driven procedure, thus detailed research tools must be used.
- Know your goals
After this you need to know what your goal is for the holiday season. For example, depending on your KPIs, you may want to raise income over last year, meet quarterly sales targets, or generate more visitors to your website. Regardless of the end outcome, having your goals clearly outlined can assist you in developing a Christmas marketing campaign that properly targets those aims.
Setting defined, time-bound goals allows you to focus your attention and provide a clear barometer against which to assess your progress. For example, you might establish a target of having one-quarter of your yearly sales in November and December by the conclusion of the 2021 holiday marketing season.
Setting objectives will assist you in assessing your strengths and shortcomings, planning for the future, and noting which tactics were most beneficial.
The results can then be used to guide future campaign plans.
- Identify your target market
The first step in developing a holiday marketing plan is to identify and categorise your target demographic, as well as gather specific information about them. Before you begin planning your Christmas marketing strategy, you need guarantee that it will appeal to your target demographic. Studying your target group ahead of time enables you to determine which holiday methods should be used for that specific persona and whether your strategy needs to be modified depending on your results. Learn about their preferred channels of information consumption; do they prefer to absorb content on their PC or mobile device?
These insights aid in making smart holiday marketing selections.
- Do some research
Before taking any action, you should always verify the most essential Christmas statistics that apply to your sector. For example, how did last year’s Christmas sales fare? Did we see an increase or decrease? How has consumer behaviour evolved after COVID-19 in terms of the Christmas season? What is your country’s predicted Christmas retail revenue? By gaining this knowledge, you will be able to design a more efficient Christmas marketing strategy: you will be able to precisely predict your inventory demands, compute your advertising budget, and much more.
- Execute
Once you’ve determined your holiday marketing objectives and compiled a list of best practices and holiday marketing ideas, it’s time to create your holiday marketing concept.
Whether your concept is a color scheme, theme, holiday phrase, or a combination of all three, make sure it connects all of your marketing activities.
A smart holiday marketing idea should serve as a guide for all of your marketing activities during the holiday season.
The ideal design should be significant to your target audience, whether that means using a nice, basic colour scheme for a minimalist audience or communicating a broader message to a niche group.
