Holiday Marketing Ideas and Strategies for Small Businesses

Looking For The Perfect Holiday Marketing Ideas?

With the holidays zooming right toward us, it’s time to start planning your holiday marketing campaigns.

Read this post to learn how to maximize your reach and conversions this holiday season with creative holiday marketing ideas. 

The holiday season stretching from October through the end of December is an important revenue-making time for most small businesses.

In fact, ⅓ of small businesses say that Q4 is their most profitable time of year.

This can also be a competitive time for marketers.

And this year, things are supposed to be even more interesting with all of the supply chain issues we’ve been running into over the last 18 months. 

So let’s look at some holiday marketing ideas and strategies that work well for small businesses.

This post will be dedicated to December holiday marketing.

For a dedicated Black Friday post, check out this one to get Black Friday marketing ideas. 

Let’s get into it!

Why Worry About A Campaign?

If you’re not familiar with the term, “campaign” means the coordinated marketing strategy around your product, service, brand, or message. 

Your holiday marketing campaign can help:

• bring in business,
• connect you with your customers,
• build relationships, and
• increase your revenue.

The more time you have to plan and launch a holiday marketing campaign, the better. 

Let’s look at some holiday marketing ideas, methods, tips, and tricks. 

Holiday Marketing Ideas For Organic Strategy

What you don’t want to do during the holiday season is pull back on posting (or, even worse, stop posting at all).

We know it can get busy, which is why it’s important to plan your organic content early…

…and get it scheduled out so you don’t have to remember to manually post. 

Here are some holiday marketing ideas and best practices to follow…

…to help you have a better chance of standing out and getting your customers connected to your products: 

1. Post more frequently

More competition means your posts could get lost in a sea of other posts.

If you’re not posting frequently enough, the algorithm won’t show your posts to your audience.

If you post daily, try it twice a day; if you post every other day, post daily. 

2. Run giveaways to increase reach and get customers focused on your products

When you plan giveaways, always have a goal in mind and give away a product or service that makes sense. 

3. Use video

The algorithm on nearly every platform is prioritizing video, so make sure you are creating and posting more videos.

Make them as engaging as possible. Here’s a great post on video marketing strategy that you should read next.

4. Share products & sale information

You can go a little heavier on selling during this time of year.

Show more of your products, give more details about your services, and share sale info often.

Users won’t see every post so you need to say it again and again. 

Holiday Marketing Ideas Using Paid Strategy

Ads will likely cost more during the holidays, but they’re still worth it on platforms like:

• Facebook,
• Instagram, and
• Google

…because of the payoff.

A word of warning: It’s a tough time to start advertising for the first time or as a new business.

Things are more expensive, consumer attention is stretched thin, and there are global supply issues to deal with for everyone.

If you do start advertising, you need to be patient. 

The next 3 months may not go well for you (or it might be huge), but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to establish good results in Q1 next year.

Here’s what we suggest you focus on during the holidays. 

a. Focus on Retargeting Visitors & Engagement with Dynamic Ads

If you sell products, retargeting your website and account visitors with dynamic catalog ads is the way to go.

These ads will show your products to interested people and increase the likelihood of you getting that conversion.

We have a more in-depth post on retargeting here in our remarketing vs retargeting post. 

b. A/B test your ads with Lookalike Audiences

By using your source audiences such as page followers, website visitors, email subscribers, and etc…

…you can create a Lookalike audience of people who don’t know about you yet, but are likely to be close to an ideal customer. 

We like to test Lookalike audiences against our chosen targeting to see which converts better.

If they’re performing similarly, we’ll start using that Lookalike audience for brand awareness ads.

You can read more on Lookalike audiences in this Facebook ads targeting post. 

c. Promote Your Holiday Selections with the Video Views Goal

You don’t even need to show humans in this video or say anything (which means you won’t have to write a script).

• Show your products in holiday or winter settings and add some festive music.
• Use minimal on-screen text to give pricing or ordering info. 
• Create a paid ad for video views, then add Lookalike audiences and audiences using general targeting.

This will help bring more people to your page and your products, which can translate into more sales for you. 

Holiday Marketing Ideas With Email Marketing

You’ll want to continue sending emails during the holidays as well.

But unlike organic posting, we don’t recommend increasing your send frequency too much.

Definitely not doubling it. But, you should send an extra few emails a week. 

a. Take the time to plan your campaigns

We recommend you sit down at a calendar and mark all of your:

• deadlines for shipping,
• any sales you’ve planned,
• special holidays your customers, or
• your company celebrates.

Then mark the days you’ll send emails. 

You should start promoting Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales in the first week of November at the latest.

December holiday promotions should start at least 6 weeks before the day.

b. Don’t reinvent the wheel

If you want to see great examples of real marketing emails from companies of all sizes, check out reallygoodemails.com.

You can search by topic or category, or just browse emails. When you see one you like, click it and you’ll get more info.

These are real emails, so we find them helpful to look at. 

Here are some ideas for emails you can send.

• Dedicated “holiday guide” emails

Think about the catalogs you got in the mail from Toys R Us every year, but digital, and for adults, if that’s your audience.

Experiment with how you group and present the guides. 

• Shipping deadline reminders

If you have guaranteed delivery dates or shipping deadlines that your customers need to be aware of, give them a warning. 

• Sale & coupon information

If you’re like the majority of businesses during the holidays, you’ll be offering sales, promotions, and coupons a number of times. 

• Gift card promotions

As those shipping deadlines pass and it gets closer to the big days, send out gift card emails.

Appeal to the last-minute shoppers, the folks who forgot someone, and whoever else might benefit from the gift card. 

• After-holiday emails

Headlines like “didn’t get what you wanted?” or “Use your holiday cash” work well to extend sales after the holiday is over. 

When should you send these emails? 

Ideally, you’ll use data from your email provider to choose the best days and times to send emails to your customers based on their real activity.

However, if you don’t have that information yet (like you’ve just started sending emails or you’ve been inactive for some time), don’t worry. 

Studies show that, generally, the best day to send emails is Tuesday, with the worst days being Saturday and Sunday. 

Conclusion

We hope you found this post helpful and that it gave you some holiday marketing ideas for your campaigns.

The trick is to plan them out so you don’t feel frazzled or miss opportunities to promote the right product at the right time. 

Your customers want to buy from you, they sometimes just need a little help remembering it.

Use your most dedicated customers as a source audience to build lookalikes so you can find even more customers.

If you think you will need more help from the experts to really take advantage of the holiday season (and beyond), go ahead and get in touch with us.

We offer various digital marketing services to businesses in whatever industry you may be. Contact us today!

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