Shopping season is upon us, but before it ends, there’s Christmas. It’s a time to spend time with loved ones, reflect on the past year, and exchange gifts.
Because people put a lot of time and thought into finding the perfect gift and often wait until the last minute to purchase, this means that as an advertiser, you have all of December to promote your products. Running a successful holiday marketing campaign means that you execute a solid plan that creates results. A thorough checklist can help keep you on track, but there are other elements to consider.
Holiday Marketing Campaign Tips
These four, holiday marketing campaign tips below will help you plan ahead and prepare in advance for next year, too!
What Has Worked
First, take a look at all the campaigns and marketing tactics that you’ve used in the past. What worked well and what could you do differently? Asking questions like this can help you make better decisions by allocating resources the right way. If you don’t think about what worked in your past efforts, you could end up wasting money with a strategy that simply doesn’t do the job – or not putting enough money into a tool that could get you better results.
Know Your Customers
Look at your customer base and demographics. Who buys from you, who do you attract, and who spends the most time and money with you? When you dig for information, you learn more about the people you already serve.
A popular way to find out this type of information is to do an RFM (Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value) analysis. Facebook Audience Insights is a great tool you could use with RFM. To do this, just import your email database segment into Facebook, and you will get a report on lifestyle, job roles, and pages they follow.
Know the Competition
You can learn a lot from your competitors. See what you can find out by signing up for their newsletter, browse their site, and use Facebook’s new Info and Ads feature to analyze their ads. Don’t copy them; instead, use the insights to see how you could be marketing differently and take action on the things that make the most sense.
Have a Plan of Action
Get clear on what you want to achieve and set specific goals if you want to get your team on board. You’ll know if your marketing campaign is successful by setting reasonable goals to measure it against. You can see sales growth without doing any analysis, but you won’t know what results you could have received and you probably won’t feel very motivated to improve them.
Bottom line
Because there are only a few small shopping events between Cyber Monday and Christmas such as Super Saturday and Free Shipping Day, most brands just focus on Christmas marketing. Many retailers start as early as November, so next year, start your holiday marketing even earlier for maximum results!