Do you feel overwhelmed with all the holiday planning? You not only need to plan for the “new normal” holiday celebrations with family, but you also need to plan holiday campaigns to boost your sales this year.
Holiday Marketing Planning to Boost Sales
Don’t worry SANTA is here to save you. Nope, not the “real” Santa with a belly full of jelly. It’s the acronym I made up, so you can easily remember how to plan a successful holiday campaign. 🙂 And not unlike the jolly SANTA, this strategy will also bring you presents: more customers and sales!
- Start planning for the rest of the year.
- Align content with your business goals.
- Narrow down and plan the specifics.
- Try to experiment with a new type of content.
- Audit this year’s content.
Start Planning for the Rest of the Year
It’s never too early to start planning. You might think that Christmas is still a few weeks away, but it can creep up on you. One day you’re drinking pumpkin spice latte and the next thing you know, you’re drinking eggnog in your Christmas pajamas!
How far in advance should you plan? Ideally, you want to start planning holiday campaigns in the first week of October. List all of the holidays. Then, figure out which ones you want to prepare for. The key is to focus on which ones would bring the most success while letting go of the rest.
Holidays in the Last Quarter of 2020
- Halloween
- Thanksgiving
- Black Friday
- Cyber Monday
- Christmas
- Hanukkah
- New Year’s Eve
That’s only the main ones, and there are other special holidays, depending on where you and your customers live. It can be overwhelming to plan for all this, but you don’t have to do all of them!
Questions to guide you to figure out which to focus on:
- Which holidays are important for my customers?
- How much time and effort will it take me to prepare for each holiday?
- How much extra time do I have to dedicate to planning and executing the holiday marketing campaigns?
- If I can only focus on two holidays, which one will bring the most results?
This brings us to our next point: alignment.
Align Content with Your Business Goals
Just like your holiday shopping list, things can get crazy when it comes to planning marketing campaigns around the holiday. You might go overboard and plan a series of discounts and presents for your customers. But before writing any email campaign or designing a new banner for your website, you have to understand what is your ultimate goal for your business in this quarter?
- Do you want to gain new customers?
- Do you want to convert leads into customers?
- Do you want to increase your revenue by upselling to existing customers?
Essentially, you can divide your campaigns into two:
Customer Acquisition
This holiday campaign is focused on getting new customers. A good example for this holiday campaign is providing huge discounts to a warm audience who hasn’t bought from you yet. For example, people have signed up for your newsletter or have subscribed to your YouTube channel, but they haven’t bought a paid course yet.
Most people wait for Black Friday because they know big discounts are usually available. This could be the one last thing that finally pushes a warm audience to become a paying customer.
Customer Retention
Your existing customers are the lifeblood of your business. Why not reward them with big discounts for your other products? Do you have a more expensive course or service that they would be interested in at a huge discount? This could be the special deal for them.
If you know what is the main goal for your business and which audience you want to focus on, you will feel less overwhelmed. You either do acquisition or retention if you’re pressed for time. But if you know you can do both and get great results, you can go for it!
Narrow Down and Plan the Specifics
At this point, you already have a clear idea of which holidays you want to celebrate with your customers and the end goal for your business. It’s time to have fun and plan the party!
Your to-do list will be different depending on your goals, industry, and how fancy your campaign is. Here is a general guideline on what you need to prepare for:
Prepare the discount codes
Make sure to do the math and find the best number for discounts. Discounts for Black Friday, for instance, need to be bigger than usual! If you’re already providing 20% for other campaigns this year, Black Friday needs to be at least 30%. If you can go bigger than 50%, without eating your profit margins, then that’s even better!
Design the assets
What assets do you need? Do you just need graphics or do you need to produce videos as well? Later in the post, we’ll talk about an easy way to produce videos for the holidays.
Start promoting
Where are you promoting your holiday campaign?
Is it only to your email list? Or is it going to be on all social media channels?
Make sure that your promotion makes sense. If you’re offering an exclusive discount for your email subscribers, you don’t want to promote this publicly on your social media channels. It will ruin the exclusiveness of the promotion. But you can ask your social media followers to subscribe to your newsletter, so they can get the exclusive discount.
Collaborate with other business owners.
Your holiday campaign will have a better chance of success if you collaborate with other businesses that complement your product or service. Packaging it into a big discounted bundle is more lucrative! This might take more planning though because you need to synchronize the efforts for the collaboration to work.
Make sure your analytics is all set.
This is super important! You don’t want to launch a campaign and at the end of it, you don’t have an idea if it was successful. What are the numbers that you need to track? How many sales do you need to make to reach your goal?
While it’s important to check the total number of sales, make sure to monitor under indicators of success as well. How many people did you reach for the campaign? How many of them clicked? This can give you an idea of the conversion rate and it can help improve your campaigns for next year.
Try to Experiment with a New Type of Content
Earlier, we talked about preparing your assets. It’s fairly straightforward to design images with the promotion. But here’s the thing: everyone else has the same plan! Your offer might get lost in a sea of red tags and special deals!
Yes, you want to make videos, but let’s face it: It will probably take you extra five hours to shoot, edit, and publish all the videos. Or if you outsource it, it might cost more than you will make in sales.
It’s time to experiment with other types of content. Have you tried going live for a holiday marketing campaign? If not, this is the best time to plan it. It doesn’t have to be a complicated livestream.
For example, I had a last-minute Halloween show on our BeLive Facebook Page. It took me 30 minutes to plan it and 20 minutes to do the actual livestream. To be honest, I think I spent more time preparing my Halloween costume. 🙂
The special Halloween show was a great way to celebrate with our existing users. Plus, we provided them a special treat. Using tools like BeLive helps in easily producing holiday-themed livestreams because there are already existing designs, such as overlays and backgrounds. But you can still make it your own because you can easily upload your logos and use your brand colors. You can learn more about how to use BeLive here.
Audit This Year’s Content
No time to go live? No worries! Just like it’s important to recycle to save the environment, you can repurpose old content to save your sanity. 😂
You’re not only planning for the holiday marketing campaigns anymore. You need to plan and schedule all content as much as possible until the end of the year. If you can schedule all of them as soon as possible, then you can focus more on perfecting your turkey-basting skills.
What are the best pieces of content that you published this year? Make a list. Figure out what made them successful. Then, schedule them!
If you already have a ton of broadcasts using BeLive for the past few weeks, then you’re in luck because you will have an easy way to edit your streams and turn them into dozens of short videos. For example, if you had a livestream where you discussed a few tips to help your customers achieve something, you can easily trim these videos.
Let’s say you had this one-hour livestream called 7 Tips to Get More Leads on LinkedIn. You can turn this into seven separate videos with one tip each. The BeLive Video Editor helps you exactly where to trim. Trust me, it’s super easy! It will take you less than 30 minutes to trim all those videos, and you can upload and schedule them for the rest of 2020. You can learn more about how to use the BeLive Video Editor here.
Want access to our Black Friday Toolkit complete with overlays, backgrounds, and even suggestions on how to structure your show? Enter your email address on this form, so we can notify you once it’s available.
Ready to start streaming and boost your sales this holiday season? Sign up for a BeLive account and get a 14-day trial.
