Much like the Hallmark channel, you need to be thinking “Christmas in July” when it comes to your marketing strategy. A good holiday push takes careful consideration and time in order to make impactful creative that will convert amidst the steep competition.
We are here to help with five questions you should be asking yourself now to get ahead of the game this Holiday season.
1. Will you be running Holiday sales? What will be the exact dates and discounts you will be promoting?
From Black Friday, Cyber Monday, to Super Saturday, think about which holiday sales opportunities make the most sense for your brand. Flash sales can help drive urgency and many consumers wait until these sales occur to purchase during the holiday season. Other brands like to create their own unique sales days to stand out from the crowd. These are especially useful if you have a large, active organic followership that would take advantage of a VIP sale marketed strategically to them. Don’t forget to extend your sales offerings to your brick and mortar locations as well as digital assets.
2. What is the creative direction for each Holiday or sales opportunity.
Ask yourself what creative assets will you need to support the sales (video, still image, carousel ads etc). Do you have specific products or collections that you will want to put front and center in the holiday ads? Gift guides are also popular and get great click percentages. Consider making landing pages for these guides or any other collections that you will be promoting.
3. Will you be incorporating influencer or UGC (user generated content) into your creative strategy plan.
Utilizing influencer or brand ambassadors is a recommended strategy for e-commerce brands. Not only can you achieve brand awareness with their followers, be sure to get the rights to use their content in your paid social ads! This can help solve a creative need or test user generated content against other ad types to see how your audience reacts.
This requires a lot of time and effort picking the right influencers, understanding the right asks & payments, setting up contracts, providing a creative brief so that the content the creator makes matches your brand aesthetic, approving content, managing communications, and lastly measuring results. Krewe Media helps clients in each of these stages, as needed. Another reason to get started now thinking about how influencer marketing fits into your holiday marketing plan.
4. Will you be participating in any Holiday markets, pop-up, or special events?
Just as digital marketing can help drive website sales, it can also help drive awareness and traffic to your event. You will want to carve out ad budget and creative assets like a potential hype video to support important Holiday events. We like to run a video to gain brand awareness with key audiences that would be interested in your event and then strategically boost a Facebook event to get people signed up to attend.
5. How much will your ad budget increase during the Holiday season?
Consumer intent and competition increases during the Holiday season. Thus, we highly recommend that you increase your ad budget during this time. We find that for most of our ecommerce brands, the Holiday season makes up a huge portion of their total yearly sales. If this season is the most important sales opportunity for your brand. Invest accordingly. We recommend doubling or even tripling your budget during the Holiday season.
If you feel overwhelmed with how to successfully plan and implement your Holiday marketing plan, we can help. Krewe Media helps plan, execute, and manage digital ad campaigns for all types of brands. Reach out to us for a free consultation to get the conversation started.