How To Plan Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns On Social Media

Do you smell hot chocolate, celebration, and a lot of decking up nearer and nearer? Or that's just me? Because guess what? 'Tis the time of festive cheer, twinkling lights, and the undeniable buzz of the holiday season, i.e., from late November through January, which accounts for 25% of total retail sales of the year. It means the stakes are high, with a flurry of spending expected in the coming months.

Now, this is a time most marketers wouldn't want to miss (neither should you) to promote their brand by releasing holiday campaigns, making the scene a lot more competitive. Feeling overwhelmed and lost yet while planning to start your own?

Well, thankfully, we've put our step-by-step guide equipped with all you need to know before, during, and after planning your holiday campaign this season. Jump in!

9 Steps To Strategically Plan Your Holiday Marketing Campaigns

As you think about starting to plan your holiday marketing campaign, here are 9 crucial steps you need to take if you want the campaign success you are aspiring for.

1. Audit Your Previous Holiday Marketing Campaign

Before planning ahead for your next holiday marketing campaign, take a moment to reflect on your previous holiday campaigns to analyze what worked well and what didn't. With the help of Statusbrew, you can conduct a quick audit of your previous efforts and evaluate the success and shortcomings of past campaigns. Here's how.

• Go to "Publish" and click on "Add a new plan"
• Create your plan, "New Year Holiday Marketing," and add the date range and collaborators.

With this, you will have a calendar and performance overview that will help you avoid making similar mistakes and refine your approach for the upcoming season.

2. Choose A Campaign Theme

Once you are done evaluating your previous campaign, you can now take one step ahead in selecting a captivating theme for your holiday marketing campaign that sets the tone for your promotional activities. Since holiday campaigns run for a definite period of time, the theme of the campaign needs to resonate with the holiday spirit revolving around one specific goal or message, aligning all of your marketing channels. You just then need to promote and create a buzz around the same for the holidays.

To understand what themes you can pick and decide on, we suggest you create or follow our social media holiday calendar to start planning on the season offers.

3. Decide On Campaign Goals

First things first! Before you create your offer, you need to clearly define your objectives for the holiday season. This will require you to outline some SMART goals ( specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) that you will use as a benchmark while evaluating your campaign performance.

Your goal structure can look something like this:

• Generate 2,500 leads expressing interest in our festive promotions by October 10, 2024.
• Achieve 10,000 downloads for our holiday-themed mobile app by October 15, 2024.
• Attain $75,000 in sales revenue from our exclusive holiday product line by October 18, 2024.

Now, this is just an example. The structure may vary depending on what you want to achieve and what the deadline is for the same.

4. Identify Your Target Audience

Now that you have goals in place, it's time for you to find out whom to target this holiday season.

• You need to find out which social channels they prefer.
• Where do they consume information?
• What is their particular age group?
• What are their demographics?

This information will help you tailor your approach while creating holiday campaign content and planning promotions. While you may already have your existing buyer personas in place, you need to refine your targets to relate to the holidays in particular, thus narrowing your focus during peak selling periods.

5. Create An Offer With A Promotion Plan

Now that you know who to target, you can craft your offer along with a promotional plan that aligns with your campaign theme and goals. This can be in the form of an available eBook, whitepaper, online course, helpful resource, video, product deal, discounts, exclusive bundles, or other assets that your customers will want during the holiday season.

Then you just need to combine these offers with a strategic promotion plan, utilizing various channels like

• Email Marketing: Segment your customers into a more specific group during the holiday season and craft well-target emails. Design emails with appealing visual copy and personalized offers to retain existing customers and attract new ones.

Source: Wordstream

• Blogging: Blog posts are great to attract people to your offer, either with a promo post or a compelling CTA that aligns with the subject matter.

• Social Media: Once you have your promotional materials, promote them in your social channels either by linking your blog post or landing page or through teaser videos, Instagram stories, or tweets about them.

• PPC Ads: Well, if you have the budget, then during the busy holiday season, invest in your inbound efforts to promote on those social platforms that are the most crucial for your business.

• Influencer Collaborations: Influencer marketing has proven to drive great sales if collaborate with the right influencers, especially when it comes to the holiday season. With an effective influencer marketing holiday campaign, you can tap into a vast community of consumers that you can add to top-of-funnel efforts and convert.

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A post shared by Kate Spiers (@katespiers)

A well-crafted offer, coupled with a thoughtful promotion strategy, can not only attract attention but also drive great conversions with your holiday marketing campaign.

6. Design A Landing Page And Nurture Leads

Now that your offer and promotional plan are ready, that is when designing a landing page comes into the picture. Considering that your landing page is going to drive in more leads and traffic, it must have

• Compelling headlines, visuals, and a clear call-to-action.
• Lead capture forms to gather valuable customer information.
• Benefits that you offer.
• Personalized landing page content to align with your holiday campaign.

Now, as you start getting qualified leads in the form of sin-ups or subscriptions, segment them as per

• Trial users
• Paying users
• New users
• Activated users
• Power users

Then, divide them to engage or re-engage and deliver more contextual follow-up emails instead of generic bulk ones.

7. Prepare Your Holiday Social Ads

If you have already invested in PPC ads, it won't do you any harm to invest in holiday social ads as well. As festive ads evoke a sense of holiday spirit and resonate with consumers emotionally, you can play around with the ads, giving them a holiday touch in the ad copy or the ad itself and conveying your message effectively. You just need to know which platforms to target, as each platform has its own set of advertising options, benefits, and audience-targeting capabilities.

For instance, take a look at this Amazon holiday ad called “Joy Ride,” which has mainly won the hearts of millions of YouTube users around the theme that it's never too late to embrace your inner child and make new memories with old friends.

8. Take The Campaign Live

When everything that you need to kick-start your holiday marketing campaign is pretty much ready, it's time to make your campaign live. Coordinate the release of promotions, content, and ads across all platforms and check whether everything is functioning the way it's supposed to. For extra precaution, ask your team members to run through the stages to check for any glitches.

9. Measure And Report

This is probably the most important step while planning your holiday marketing campaign. This step lets you gauge all the efforts that you have put into developing the same and analyze whether you have actually hit any of them or not. By regularly monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement, conversion rates, and sales, you can identify the drop-off points and understand what actually held your campaign back from reaching those numbers.

To make your work a little more streamlined and easier, you can resort to Statusbrew, an analytics tool that lets you identify patterns in your brand's performance and assess the impact of your strategies against predefined goals. Our social media reporting templates help you save time by presenting data across your different socials in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand format.

Besides this, you can go in for a competitor analysis and share the report as PDF & CSV with your stakeholders who are not part of Statusbrew. So, get a FREE walkthrough of our platform to understand how we can help!

4 Examples Of Best Holiday Marketing Campaigns For Your Inspiration

To lend you some inspiration to plan your best holiday marketing campaigns, here are 4 examples of holiday campaigns led by different brands, each with its own reason for success and popularity.

1. Starbucks Holiday Cup Marketing Campaign

Starbucks is literally famous for giving their cups holiday-themed makeovers every year. The motto of the campaign is always to be at the forefront of digital marketing, making their holiday design cups the hallmark of the season. The tactic is to release these cups each year, create hype around the release through socials, and encourage consumers to visit the store and order their favorite coffee as a takeaway in the fancy cup and to upload pictures in the same. The brand will then leverage the same photos as user-generated content to gain more visitors around the holiday season. Besides this, their mobile app also launches holiday games and animations and allows you to send gifts to friends.

2. Tommy Hilfiger x Miffy Capsule Edition Campaign

Source: V magazine

2023 saw Tommy Hilfiger collaborate with Miffy, a popular rabbit in fiction, come together for a unique holiday ad campaign. The brand featured Miffy on their limited edition of apparel and accessories across men’s, women’s, and kid’s sportswear designed in the classic Hilfiger hues of red, white, and blue. The collection is high-spirited and bold, and the campaign focuses on reimagining classics as timeless yet modern, especially for Gen Z and millennials.

3. “Gifted” by Gap Campaign

Source: GAP

Gap's 2023 holiday campaign, centered around self-expression, released its "Gifted" campaign, which aimed to celebrate gratitude, togetherness, and the gift of individuality. This campaign featured personalities that fit the gifted theme, including Grammy-winning musician Alanis Morissette and her family, author Jay Shetty and his wife, Radhi Devlukia, a cookbook author. It highlighted its signature apparel that ranges from cozy essentials to denim and khakis, catering to every occasion. The ad campaign spanned digital media, out-of-home, video, and socials for a long-standing positioning.

4. Spotify Wrapped Campaign

This is one of the best examples of a campaign that lets a brand connect with its audience on a personal level. By doing its ritual annual year-end campaign, Spotify has sealed its place on the list of many people who resort to the same for the personalized experience it offers. The campaign aims to wrap all the songs users have been listening to in the past year, the genre they were the most into, and their favorite artists, along with minutes streamed and other data. With this, Spotify users share their Spotify wrapped to their social media profiles, which boosts Spotify and promotes their campaigns on social media. This happens because people love this form of advertising because it is too personal and made possible with the help of technology.

Kick-Start Your Holiday Marketing Campaign Today!

Now, creating a holiday marketing campaign isn't that difficult if you really think about it. As you gear up for the season, optimize your campaign by forming what may not be the best the right plan of action, as so many brands are doing the same to compete. To execute your perfect holiday campaign, be an early bird to buy you time to plan every step.

To add to that, if you’re looking for a social media campaign management solution to get a bird ’ s-eye perspective of your entire holiday marketing campaign, let Statusbrew handle the ins and outs of managing the same from a unified dashboard and up your chance of campaign success.

Do you have a holiday marketing campaign looming ahead? Get started with a FREE trial of Statusbrew today!