Holiday Marketing: 10 Ideas to Test for Your Business

Before we dive into our great holiday marketing ideas, it’s worth defining exactly what we mean by the term “holiday marketing”.

Holiday marketing is the process of increasing marketing activity on current and new marketing channels in the lead-up to key national or internationally celebrated holidays. For example, Cyber Monday and Black Friday are common holiday marketing campaigns ahead of the festive holidays.

Although holiday marketing can seem like a lot of effort for businesses, it’s also incredibly important.

When successful holiday marketing strategies are followed, businesses can tap into the buzz surrounding upcoming holidays. These holidays can provide huge bumps in profit and often have a drastic impact on annual turnover.

In fact, in 2020, Cyber Monday saw US companies take $10.8 billion, with Black Friday bringing in $9 billion worth of sales!

Want to see more Black Friday statisics? Our report pulls out the top stats to know about this huge event in any store’s calendar.

It’s clear that investing time and effort into your digital marketing can create a positive ROI, specifically around the holidays. But what are the best ways to do this?

Holiday marketing campaigns can be a great vehicle for giving something back to your customers. How you do this will depend widely on what you sell and what your customers would see as valuable.

For example, some businesses are now choosing to give something back by donating a percentage of sales during a holiday marketing event. This is perfect for stores with ethically conscious customers or customers who aren’t as sensitive to discounts.

However, other businesses may decide to give something back to their loyal customers by offering discounts (more advice on that later) or other things such as freebies.

Holidays are often emotionally-charged. We all want to buy our loved ones (or ourselves) the very best gift and make the occasion a fun and memorable one. So, tapping into these emotions through your holiday marketing campaigns can be a smart idea.

For example, you may develop creative assets that include images of people being delighted to receive your product as a holiday gift. This can hammer home the message of how much a potential customer’s loved one is going to enjoy opening and using that product.

Obviously, you won’t be the only business looking to tap into the buzz of upcoming holidays. In fact, almost all retail businesses will run some sort of deal and marketing campaign around major holiday events, such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday.

So you need to find ways to stand out from the crowd. One great way to do this is to use a social media giveaway as part of your holiday marketing strategy.

For example, you could create and run a generous giveaway across your social channels in the month leading up to a holiday. During this process, you could also gather marketing data (such as email addresses) and push the other offers and discounts you’ll be running. Then, when you announce the winner on social media (on the holiday!), you can draw traffic in and get them engaged with what you have to offer.

Holidays are a great time to convince new customers to buy from you. However, it can also be incredibly lucrative to re-engage old customers or people who have considered buying from you in the past. This is especially true if you’re running a special offer as part of your holiday marketing campaign.

Why?

Past customers who had a good experience with your product and customer service will likely jump at the chance to buy from you again (especially at a discounted price). And customers who considered buying from you but didn’t pull the trigger may have made that decision based on price – so enticing them with a special offer could finally see them through checkout.

The best way to do this is to set a simple retargeting strategy. By including a piece of code on your website (a cookie), you can collect data on visitors and retarget them with ads on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google.

Video is a powerful marketing tool and every business should have a video marketing strategy. It’s a great way to cut through the noise of busy holiday events and get your marketing message heard.

80% of video marketers claimed that video has directly increased sales for businesses, so it isn’t difficult to see why investing in video could be one of the best ways to get your offers seen by the people who matter most.

Creating videos can be simple, and thanks to easy-to-access technology, they don’t have to cost a fortune. For example, you may decide to simply create a “talking head” video with one of your most charismatic employees, talking your customers through what you’re doing for the holiday.

Holidays can be a hectic time for businesses, especially those in the ecommerce space. Not only is there an increase in orders to process, but there can also be a rise in employee leave since they want to enjoy the festivities too!

So, executing a holiday marketing campaign during the chaos can be, well… tricky. This is where scheduling and automation come in.

Some ecommerce stores start creating plans for an annual holiday sale practically as soon as the last one is over. This means they can take the time to produce assets, which can then be fed into a schedule. Once a schedule is created, not only is it easier for employees to follow during the busier months, but it can also allow you to feed elements of the schedule into automation tools.

For example, automation tools such as Hootsuite or Later can manage your social media posting throughout the holiday marketing campaign. And tools such as Mailchimp can be used to achieve the same for email marketing.

More Information

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A simple way to improve your profit during the holiday season is to stay connected with your customers. This could include using many of the ideas we’ve already highlighted in this guide or could simply be through including holiday marketing messages in usual communications, such as organic social media posting and monthly newsletters.

Consistent contact with customers will help you build brand recognition and value, increasing customer trust along the way.

Of course, we had to include this tip in this guide! After all, it’s undeniable that the biggest tool that many businesses use to drive profit through holiday periods is by offering generous discounts to their customers.

This can be seen clearly during Cyber Monday and Black Friday, for example – both days which are entirely dedicated to heavily discounted products.

How you discount your products is up to you. Typically, businesses will use big events like Black Friday to offer the largest discount of the year.

Holiday marketing campaigns can be a great time to try out paid advertising. This is because it’s typically a time of year when greater profits can be made, offering the opportunity to increase your ROI from marketing spend. It can also help you amplify the impact of other investments you’ve made in your holiday marketing.

For example, if you invest in creating some great videos for your holiday marketing campaign, paid adverts can help you get that content in front of more people. Paid advertising can be hyper-targeted based on a range of factors, so it’s a unique way to ensure the best people see your campaigns.

More and more shoppers are browsing holiday events on their mobile devices – 64% of online purchases made in the US in 2022 were via a smartphone device.

So, it’s important to push your mobile strategy during this time. This means ensuring that your website is created using a mobile-first approach. You also need to develop your marketing campaigns in a way that drives traffic through all devices back to your site.

Find Out More

Learn about Mobile First Design in our full guide!

Holiday marketing is an important activity for many businesses, especially those in the ecommerce space. Without the ability to leverage popular shopping holidays, online stores will fail to generate profits to their full potential. Use the tips and ideas we’ve outlined in this guide to ensure that you get the most from your future holiday marketing campaigns.