It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas! As the days get colder and the nights get darker, it’s time to gear our businesses towards the festive period! Organisation and planning will be your best friend when making the most of this year’s Christmas period and making this year your most successful yet. We have put together a nifty ‘How To’ guide in three parts on how to create a winning marketing strategy which revolves around three key stages. Research, planning and implementation.
This first blog post revolves around stage one of your Christmas marketing campaign…research. Before any large campaign, it is good practice to research thoroughly before creating any content as researching various aspects will give you the skeleton for a winning marketing strategy.
Past Campaigns
If this is not your first Christmas in business, it’s time to look at your past campaigns to see what worked and what didn’t. Venture through your past social media posts, email campaigning, blog posts and paid ads to see what got you the most interaction, hits, and leads to sales and what seemed to miss the mark. Identifying past successes and failures will give you valuable information on what to focus your energy on this year and give you a clear direction in your marketing efforts.
If this is your first Christmas in business, look at some businesses you admire and their past posts to see what successes and failures they have had. Take inspiration from their marketing campaigns, however, do not compare yourself too much!
Target Audience
Before creating your strategy, think about the kind of audience you wish to attract and look at what audience you are currently attracting. By knowing who your audience is and identifying who you want your audience to be, you can identify which social media platforms will be more beneficial for lead generation, which blog content will attract more of your target audience, and what style of campaign will be more appreciated (think classic Christmas over modern Christmas campaigning). Looking at your metrics for your social media posts, past ads, blog posts and email marketing will help you identify who your audience is.
Identify Pitfalls
Before starting any campaign, it’s a good idea to identify any current pitfalls you may have in your landing page, links, and web content. Take some time to research your own online content and check current links, webpages, and landing pages to make sure there are no current errors that may cause a customer to leave your site. Also check all links present on your social media to make sure they are leading customers to your landing page with no errors.
Key Dates
Research what key dates are involved in the Christmas period. While the big festive dates such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas day itself can all be used as great marketing inspiration, there are also smaller dates that can also present marketing opportunities such as World Kindness Day and Christmas Jumper Day. It is important to identify such dates to create inspired content for your audience, all of which can generate leads to your service or product. Here are our marketing ideas for Black Friday and Cyber Monday here!
Budget
Check your current financial assets. Before we get to planning our content, themes and offers, it is important to check your current finances to see what funds you have available to allocate to your Christmas campaign. Paid ads are a great way to lead customers to your content, and by identifying early what budget you can allocate to paid ads, you can plan how much of your time will be spent on creating the most engaging ad content.
Omi-channels
From researching your target audience, you should have an idea on what platforms your audience is most likely to use and what content they are likely to appreciate on each platform. You should also research which channels you wish to post the most content and research what type of content does the best on each platform. For example, reels are currently doing better on Instagram and LinkedIn is better for more informative content. We recommend taking an omnichannel approach, using each platform and altering content to make the most of each platform although we appreciate this is hard work, the omnichannel approach (using Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok, as well as blog posts and email marketing) leads to more potential leads to your website.
Now that you’ve researched these main aspects, it’s time to move onto the next stage in creating a marketing campaign - the planning stage.
You do not have to create a successful marketing campaign all alone, we are here to help, and with our consultation service, we can tailor a winning marketing campaign for this festive period for you, specifically for your business model. Book Now!
Check out our consultation service where we will tailor a marketing strategy just for you and your business, helping you make this year your most successful yet!
About the Author
Carris is our Operations Supervisor and Digital MArketing Assistant at CMM. Carris (alongside her best friend Abbie) is one of the founders of Inky Apparel Creations.
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