How to create a holiday marketing campaign

Steps to creating a holiday marketing campaign:

1. Decide on a campaign theme

Holiday campaigns like all campaigns run for a certain period of time. Depending on your needs you can start this as early as November and spill over into january.

Also remember, holiday campaigns don't have to be offers for a sale it could even be giving back to your community.

Lululemon, for example, uses their annual seasonal campaign to focus on their mission to bring people together.

Previous campaigns included a message of “giving presence” (rather than gifts), a #feelgoodgiving drive, and a reflection on the range of feelings caused by COVID-19 during an unconventional holiday period.

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2. Choose your campaign goals

Now that you've set a theme to your campaign, you need to determine what you want to achieve.

What is the ideal goal for your campaign?

Your goals should be should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART goals, for short)

To help you better align your marketing efforts with SMART goals, check out this free goal setting template. You can use this template to summarize your goals, calculate your greatest marketing need, and set deadlines.

3. Define your target audience

With goals in place, the next step is to define your target audience. The more information you can gather about the people you're trying to reach, the better. Where are they hanging out on social media? Do they prefer to consume information on their desktop or mobile? This will help you make smarter marketing decisions when it comes time to create content and plan promotions.

If you don't already have buyer personas or would like to create campaign-specific personas, we recommend you check out our free buyer persona templates.

4. Create an offer

Once you've set your audience, now is the time to create an offer or which will serve as a focal point for your campaign. The offer could be a discount, e-gift card, ebooks, a message, free templates, tips, videos, tools etc.

A main step is to think about where your traffic typically comes from, if it's mostly mobile users than desktop, think about how to create a mobile friendly, fast process that is accessible when they are strapped for time.

5. Create a landing page

Considering your landing page is the page that you'll be driving traffic to, it needs to be convincing. Here's a list of some of the essential elements you should include:

Compelling headline

Interesting visuals

Easy to understand

Shows benefits of your offer quickly

A form so you can collect information

6. Design a promotion plan

Now that your content is ready, it's almost time to figure out how to reach your audience. Yes, we are talking about channels.

Email marketing:

If you already have a list of people you know will be interested in your offer, that's great. If you want to slice and dice your database to go after a more specific group, you should take care of that segmentation first. Then focus on elements to keep in mind while drafting your email. Subject lines, body copy and sharing options should focus on personalisation, benefits of offer and buttons to share your offer.

Check out HubSpot's Template Marketplace to find an email template that fits your needs.

Blogging:

Once you've sent an email to get your offer on the radar of your intended audience, it's time to build out your reach even further. Blog posts serve as an effective campaign element for attracting people to your offer, and can be approached in a couple of different ways.

Social Media:

Now that you have some tangible promotional material in place, you can start promoting it through your social media channels. Whether you share the related blog post or a link to the landing page, be sure that you're switching up the messaging so you're not repeating the same tweet or Facebook post over, and over, and over...

PPC:

Paid advertising can be a great tool to boost some of your inbound efforts -- especially around the busy holiday season.

If your budget allows and you know there's search demand for your offer, you may want to experiment with putting a little money behind some of your campaign assets to promote them on social media.

7. Create lead nurturing paths

What will happen to your leads once you've generated them? And once the holidays have come and gone, what will they mean to your business?

Before you launch your campaign, it's best to design a plan for qualifying and developing your leads once they've filled out your form. This is where email segmentation and email nurturing becomes important.

We found Hubspot's email marketing course helpful when launching our campaign, you can check the course here.

8. Take the campaign live

Now that you're all set, it is time to take your campaign live.

It is best to do a soft launch before you initiate any promotion, as this will make sure you see if everything is working as you expected it to be. Check for any typos, glitches or missed marks. Once you are happy with everything you can kick start your promotion and drive traffic to your landing page.

9. Measure and Report

This is the most important step of all. After some time of your campaign being live check how it's performing and what learnings you've gained from it.

Did you hit your goals? If not, what went wrong?

Analyse where people clicked and when did they drop off, areas of you offer that didn't work. Take note and use them in your next campaign strategy.

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Creating a holiday marketing campaign isn't all that different from creating a marketing campaign during the rest of the year. The main difference lies in the themes and offers you create.

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To learn more in details and find more resources, click the button below. If you need help setting up a campaign feel free to contact us.