Tag Archives: Christmas campaign

How to plan your Christmas social media strategy

I know that a lot of small businesses have already started their Christmas campaigns on social media, and during any holiday period, especially in the lead up to Christmas social media will be alive with engagement. This is because that’s where consumers find products they want, promotions that give them a discount and ultimately make their purchases.

Having a good social media strategy will drive success in your business up to Christmas, and with 4.8 billion users on social media, promotions during this time is crucial. Having said that, it is a challenge to come up with different ways to catch your audience’s attention, especially with the amount of competition out there.

The steps to creating a successful campaign or strategy.

Depending on the kind of business you have, you may choose different approaches – some may choose humour to spread laughter; others may go for the traditional look, whilst some may turn to nostalgia. No matter which way you want to approach your Christmas campaign, you will want it to feel magical, evoke an emotional or inspirational response so that you build a stronger relationship with your audience and strengthen your brand.

Step 1 – Look at what you did last year.

Look at what you did last year – what worked and what didn’t work? Of course, what worked last year might not work this year, so you need to be aware of your specific audience and customers, so you need to look at what they like and want from you.

What social media platforms worked for you last year? Did you sell more on Facebook or Instagram, or maybe through your website or online shop? A lot of you will also have a TikTok account this year, so that might be another way for you to develop your campaign.

Look at the type of posts you put out last year. What gave you the most engagement…and what posts brought you in orders? 


Step 2 – Set SMART goals or objectives.

Set objectives (or goals) and think of a catchy concept. In other words what do you want to achieve through your Christmas campaign? Here are some ideas…

  • Increase my sales by xx% in the month of December.
  • Increase sales for a specific product.
  • Get more traffic to my website shop/online shop.
  • Get new customers.

Make sure that you don’t have too many goals – one or two is enough. Make sure each of your goals is SMART… Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

Once you have your goal(s) in place, you can look at your catchy concept – what is going to draw customers and potential customers in? This is about making your social media pages attractive and maybe having a specific hook. Examples of specific concepts could be:

  • You sell candles that you make and decorate with festive designs. As well as this, you could source some plain LED candles (for those who have small children or worry about having lit candles at Christmas with all the decorations) – and decorate them with your festive designs. This opens you up to a whole new market.
  • If you make biscuits, give ideas on how they can be used to create different Christmas themed sweets – maybe a kit so people can paint or create their own designs.
  • You make hanging decorations for Christmas trees – you could include a range of decorations for other events at Christmas, such as ‘Baby’s First Christmas 2023’, ‘First Christmas in our new home 2023’, ‘Happy Christmas Birthday’ or ‘First Married Christmas’. You could offer further personalisation on these such as names or date/year.

You just need to put your thinking cap on and try and come up with a unique idea.

Step 3 – Understand your audience.

This might seem really obvious, but take a moment to think about your customers and followers – who are you aiming your Christmas social media posts at? To reach your goals, you need to understand what your audience wants, what they like and don’t like…and when they are active on social media, so you are posting at the optimum time to tempt them in.

For example, your audience might prefer videos of your products instead of images. You might get more sales from a ‘live’ event showing your audience your products or a small range of them.

This harkens back to looking at what worked last year – try out the type of post that was most successful last year and see what happens. It’s worth trying a range of posts to see which ones work for your particular audience.

As part of understanding your audience you also need to create engaging captions. Your posts need to be visually appealing, with captions that you’re your audience in so that your posts lead to great engagement and convert to leads or sales. You know your audience best, so write for your specific audience – looking at previous posts and what was the most popular (from your insights) will help you understand what your audience best reacts to. 

Step 4 – Create a content calendar.

To me, this is one of the most important aspects of your campaign. Once you know the kind of messages you need to create, know what your goals are and who your audience are, you need to decide which social media platforms you’re going to use. For me, that’s simple as I only really use Facebook and Instagram.

Now you can create your calendar – you can do this online or on paper. I always plan mine out on paper. Start by writing down each day – from where you want to start your campaign to Christmas Day (or beyond if you’re planning on a post-Christmas sale.

Then decide what you will be posting each day, including the content, the images you’ll use and post type (whether it be single post, multiple images, carousel, reel, ‘live’ video or recorded video etc). Then jot a couple of notes next to it about the caption and don’t forget a list of at least 5 hashtags per post.

Step 5 – Create your posts.   

Once you have your content calendar or plan, you can start creating your posts. If you’re going to video once a week, film them all in one go, with outfit changes.

Batch create posts using a tool such as Canva.

You don’t have to make them all at once for the whole month – I usually make mine a week in advance.

Then schedule your posts. These will form the bulk of your campaign, and once scheduled you can concentrate on replying to comments, sorting out orders and postage. There will always be time to react to something or add further posts is you want to but get your main post ideas ready.

Step 6 – Adjust your branding. 

Make sure your posts are all themed for Christmas – redo your Facebook cover to show a festive theme, or maybe create 4-5 new Facebook covers showcasing different products or any offers you have on – and change your Facebook cover every week in December. 

Some people also adapt their logos for Christmas too.

Don’t just use your social media to get your products/services out there. Make your email or newsletter festive and if you have a blog, you could write about a specific process you use in making your products or just highlight a couple of your products each week (making your blog look Christmassy) and telling your audience about the benefits of your products/services.

Conclusion

Christmas is one of the most busy and intensive times of year for small businesses and their marketing. Competition is fierce, so you need to think of new and innovative ways to stand out from your competition.

By planning ahead, you are going to be in the best position to reach your goals and make your sales. You’ll feel better being organised and knowing what you’re going to concentrate on selling each week – and you’ll know what posts you need to have to encourage those sales. Having your social media posts planned and even some of them done, means you don’t have to quickly react or be sitting at your desk or with your device in hand trying to think what the hell do I post today?

For a list of ideas for fun and engaging Christmas posts, sign up to my newsletter. You will receive 102 general social media post ideas to start with – and in my next email, which goes out at the end of the October, you will receive a list of fun and engaging Christmas post ideas. Click on the link below to sign up!     

Sign up to my newsletter here!

Create an effective Christmas Marketing Strategy in 16 steps

An effective marketing campaign will engage new or potential customers, boost your sales, and build and strengthen relationships with your existing customers.

Your customers are primed and ready to start spending, so make sure you are not missing out on the action. Although we’re already just into November, there will be plenty of customers out there; some will already have done most of their shopping and will be looking for last minute bits; at the other end of the spectrum, (like me), some won’t even have thought about Christmas shopping yet, so will be looking avidly over the next few weeks.

Planning your marketing strategy for the holiday season will ensure your business grows and puts you in a great place to start the New Year.

So how do you get started? It’s simple…

Define your SMART goals

I know, everyone talks about goal setting, but for this time of year, (or in fact any time of year), goals are what keeps your business growing, learning, and improving. These goals need to be specific for your Christmas campaign and SMART, (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely). LINK

For example, your main goal might be that you want more sales. Your SMART goal would be, ‘To increase my sales and profits between now and the end of 2021 by 20%, compared to the same time last year.’

This is specific, it’s definitely achievable, it’s relevant as it’s Christmas and people typically spend more money, and it’s timely, for the same reason – it’s a holiday time when people are spending more.

Once you have your goals in place, so you know what you’re aiming for, now you can think about the marketing – HOW are you going to achieve those goals?

Here are a few ideas that could help ramp up your sales this year…

Customise your packaging

Having customised packaging is important for your brand and creates a great ‘unboxing’ or ‘unopening’ experience for your customers…and it’s all about the customer experience! If you have unique packaging with the name of your business, it adds a bit of class and feels more luxurious to your customers.

Exclusivity

Following on from customising your packaging, you could produce a special Christmas edition of your product, and your packaging could reflect this.

Create an online catalogue

Christmas is the perfect time to revise and refresh your marketing materials. With the many great, free resources available these days, creating a digital or online catalogue is relatively easy to do. Canva is one tool you can use to help you do this…and they have some very professional templates.

I remember my children browsing through the Argos catalogue and putting circles around the things they’d like for Christmas or birthday. But with printed catalogues almost outdated, digital is still very much what people want. Good photos of your products are necessary for this and can show off your products in a very professional way. With digital catalogue you can also make each image a link to the relevant product page on your website or online shop. This makes buying and browsing so easy for your customers.

You can market your catalogue on your website from a tab, in a blog, in your email list and on social media, as well as on your Google My Business page, which will give you the best chance of getting those sales.

Remarketing

What’s this? You see it all the time, but probably don’t realise it. Whenever you go onto Amazon to look for something. If, for example I go onto Amazon and look for Organic Shampoo. When I click on a product I’m interested in, there’s always something else that pops up. Underneath the item I’m looking at, it will say ‘Consider a similar item’ and point me to something similar. They always have a section too, that says ‘Frequently bought together’… and for the purpose of this example, it shows me conditioner and a body wash from the same brand.

This is remarketing – giving other ideas around the same theme…and even the same product from a different organic shampoo company.

Collaboration

Collaboration is about teaming up with another small business that would complement your business. For example, if you sell luxury coffee, you could team up with a small business that makes coffee mugs or insulated mugs. You then both promote each other’s business. If you sell coffee, you could say that with an insulated mug, people can now enjoy the luxury of a good coffee on the go. You get the idea!

Once you have a collaboration, this can carry over from Christmas into the New Year and include other holidays. It could be the start of a beautiful relationship!

Have a cut-off date

Bear in mind, that there are many postage deadlines in the lead up to Christmas, so if you offer postage on your items, ensure that you have a cut-off date to ensure that your customers get your products before the big day. If a customer lives near you, you could let them collect up to Christmas Eve, but if you must post locally, it will take longer. If you ship worldwide, that cut-off date will be sooner. Just keep this in mind and don’t make promises you can’t keep as that is very damaging to your business.

You could also consider offering free shipping – people are willing to pay a bit more for a product if they get free shipping, so it’s well worth thinking about.

Your opening hours

Don’t forget to update your website, social media, and Google My Business page to show your opening hours over the Christmas period, so you don’t disappoint any potential customers.

Have a stock of your products

This is really obvious but ensure that your most popular products are in stock. You don’t want to run out and have to turn people away or have to email to say that you don’t have a product they’ve ordered on your website or online shop.

Use your email list

If you have a list of email subscribers via your blog or website, use this to advertise your products too. You don’t have to be pushy and salesy, as I know a lot of us don’t like to do that, but you can point your subscribers to your promotional campaign or exclusive offers.

As they subscribe to your regular email, you could even offer them a special discount code.

Don’t forget to ensure that your email marketing for November and December uses festive imagery to ensure you are getting your readers into the spirit of things!

What does your product do for your audience?

This is the age-old, sell the solution, not the product. The most successful products will always focus on the customer – and showing how that product benefits the life of the potential user. What problems does it solve?

Let’s go back to the coffee example. Your luxury coffee might be organic – why is this important to your audience? How does it enhance their life? You could say it energises and enriches your mind, keeping you focussed on the important things in life. If your product has a specific ingredient that you want to advertise, give the benefits of that ingredient and why it is so good. It could be that it’s a good choice for the planet because of the way it’s produced.

Again, you get the idea, any product has its selling point.

Create bundles

This is an amazing way to sell your products. Simply bundle some of them together. For example, buy luxury coffee and a festive mug together at a slightly cheaper price than if they were sold individually. The benefits of bundling items together are that customers see them as a bargain – a bundle increases the perceived value of an item. If you couple this with your bespoke packaging, your customers have superb gift ideas. If you also add free shipping to bundled items, this will make it even more attractive.

Create ideas with a gift guide

This is a simple idea that can help your sales. All you have to do is to create a guide of ideas using your products. It’s a collection of your products that will make good presents…and give ideas as to who they could be for and why.

For example, it could be ‘Gifts for men’ or ‘Gifts for the coffee lover,’ ‘Gifts for Mum or for your best friend.’ Then include the items you sell that are relevant to men, coffee lovers, friends etc. Create a landing page, which is easily done in Mailerlite for example, which displays your products in one place. You can them promote that landing page on your website, in your email, blog or on your social media sites.

It’s about suggesting who your products might be suitable for and marketing them as such.

Keep on top of your images

Log into your website and have a look at it from a customer’s perspective. They need to know that you’ve got a festive promotion, or a gift guide, or online catalogue. Make sure that there is something bold, front, and centre on your homepage to advertise the fact, with links to the relevant pages or products on your shop.

Change the images on your product pages to show your products with a more festive theme.

If you’re on social media, update your cover pages to advertise your festive products and ensure that you have some great images on Google My Business. You could update your profile picture to you in party mode or wearing a Santa hat – depending on what you do!

This is time consuming, but absolutely worth it for the sales you will generate.

Keywords

Just as you update your imagery, also update your keywords to include what you’re doing this Christmas. Here’s a few suggestions…

  • Christmas gifts
  • Christmas gifts for men/coffee lover/best friend/Mum
  • Buy Christmas decorations
  • DIY Christmas decorations
  • DIY Christmas decorations for kids
  • Festive food

This does require some research to ensure you get the right keywords or hashtags for you and your business and products. Once you have them, use them on your posts, on your website, blog, and social media.

Offer gift cards

Whilst most of us like to look for that perfect gift for our loved one, there will be customers out there who just don’t know what they want to buy. This is the ideal person to sell a gift card to – they can spend what they like and the person they buy for can choose exactly what they’d like from your product range.

If you do offer a gift card, make sure there is a simple graphic on your homepage, or a link to a landing page, specifically dedicated to gift cards in your online shop or web page.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday

These two days are your best friends when it comes to selling your products for Christmas. These two events are heavily advertised on TV, all over the internet and social media. If you don’t join in, you will lose out on some fabulous sales.

The other joy these days bring, is that it will really set your business up for Christmas sales. If someone has bought something from you at a reduced rate on Black Friday, they will know your business and may think of you when buying their last-minute Christmas gifts. But there are other things you can do to encourage this…

  • Offer a special 10% off discount for the rest of the year, for anyone who buys from you on Black Friday or Cyber Monday
  • Add in a little free gift
  • Offer free postage
  • Tell them that if they recommend you to friends and family, by sharing your post and one of their friends buys from you, they get a free gift, or 20% off their next purchase from you

Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t the only days each year that your business can use to get seen and sell more. Here are a few more in November and December.

  • Small business Saturday – 27th November
  • St Nicholas Day – 6th December
  • Free shipping day – 14th December
  • Panic Saturday – 18th December

There are many others throughout the year too.

Finally, finally…

Don’t forget that elusive time of year – between Christmas and New Year. It always feels a bit like limbo land, but as a lot of the ‘January’ sales start on Boxing Day in the UK, it’s a great time to continue pushing for sales. People are happy, they’ve eaten and drunk too much, they have a bit of money in their pockets…and time on their hands to scroll through social media on their phones. If you have an ad on your page, or a post pinned to the top of your page, saying your sale starts now, you will be seen by your customers and followers.

You could do a ‘flash sale’ with a ‘Santa didn’t get me what I wanted’ type title! Have heavily discounted items that you want to move quickly.

If you still have Christmas themed products, heavily discount them selling for a ‘Buy now for next Christmas.’

Then in the New Year, you’re ready to launch your new range of products or services starting anew.

Don’t forget that the aim of a Christmas campaign is to have satisfied, happy customers, who will want to come back to buy from you again in the New Year. And make your brand stand out in the crowd, so people remember you and your business. I hope this has helped you plan your campaign.

Let me know how you get on with yours.

How to run a Facebook Christmas Campaign to sell your products

Christmas is usually the most important time of year for anyone who sells products or services. With around 93% of people owning a mobile phone or device, millions of them will be logging into Facebook (FB) looking for gift ideas, Christmas related posts and funnies. So it makes sense to use FB to reach some of this massive audience with your posts.   

christmas-2618269_640Christmas is the season of giving and all over the world, people get excited about everything that surrounds this magical time of year. So, let FB be your ‘Santa’s little helper’ and get started now on your Christmas campaign.

If you market your business, you’ll know that a giveaway is the way to get better engagement, more followers and sales. But as everyone who markets their business also knows, you need to stand out from your competition. So how can you run a successful Facebook Christmas campaign?

As an example, let’s say you run a jewellery business, selling jewellery that you make. You sell online via an online store and to the public directly through your market stall. You have a website where people can see your products and you have a business FB page.

What are you hoping to achieve by running a Christmas campaign?

  • Increase your sales of jewellery online and face to face
  • Raise the profile of your business (your brand)
  • More people looking at your product range on your website
  • More ‘likes’ on your FB page
  • Increase the enquiries you get about your jewellery

Now you know what you’re hoping to achieve, you can get started.

Your target market

The first thing to look at is your target market. Who do you want to sell to? What do they do for a living? What can they afford to buy and where do they live. You can get this by looking at your current customers and also look at who engages with your social media pages, your website and/or your blog.

If you have a FB business page, you can look at FB insights. This does take a while to get your head around if you want to fully analyse everything, but as a basic guide…Go to the Overview tab to export your FB Insights data. A pop-up box will appear with three choices…Page data, Post data and Video data. If you click on each of these in turn, you will be able to see key engagement metrics for your page. Facebook do a guide for more in depth information – click here

If you use Instagram, you can also look at their guide for analysing insights on your Instagram account. And you can use data and the details to run a Christmas campaign on Instagram too. Click here to see how to look at your Instagram insights.

cat-1898637_640You will have your unique brand for your products or services, but it’s a good idea to look at branding your products for Christmas and apply that branding to your FB posts and your website/blog. Famous brands do this every year, for example, television programmes such as Dr Who, will have a Christmas special episode, fast food outlets will use Christmas themed wrappings for their burgers, pizza etc. and there will always be a popular musician who will release a Christmas album, such as Cliff Richard! Everyone jumps on the bandwagon at Christmas, so why shouldn’t you too?

When you advertise your products for Christmas, give the ad a Christmassy theme, spice up your website or blog with some Christmas pages and look at packaging your products with Christmas paper, ribbons or offer a gift wrap service (either free or for a small charge).

Your campaign     

It’s up to you when to start your campaign, but generally campaigns start around the September/October point.

As I’m specifically talking about a FB campaign, let’s look at what kind of posts you can put up to attract business. The important thing to remember is that, although you want to be selling as much as you can during this period, it’s also important that your customers get something of value, something that makes a difference to their lives – what’s in it for them? How will they benefit from your campaign? So how can you do all this and still make a profit? Here are some ideas…

Offers/discounts

Everyone loves a bargain, so run a special offer for Christmas on a particular product or service. Make it clear that it’s for the Christmas period only.

sticker-473635_640Offer gift cards so customers can buy a gift card to give to family and friends.

You could run a ‘buy one, get one free offer’ or ‘buy one, get the second half price’ for a limited time. Big companies like Boots the chemist, do this every Christmas with their ‘buy two, get the third free’ offer.

Run a ‘recommend a friend’ offer – if one of your customer’s recommends a friend, then when that friend buys something, your customer gets a free gift or a money- off voucher.

Competition

Run a Christmas themed competition with a special prize – make sure that the prize is appealing and worth entering the competition for. You can do the results of the competition ‘live’ on FB or via a pre-recorded video for more impact…and you could do the same with the run up to the end date of the competition – for example, ‘only one week left to enter our fabulous competition to win a xxxxx’.

Share Christmas themed updates     

You can add value to your customers’ lives by sharing Christmas themed updates. For christmas-dinner-3011500_640example, if you are a restaurant, you could share your Chef’s favourite Christmas dish, dessert or menu; Hairdressers can share easy to do hairstyles for Christmas parties; Beauticians can offer special packages so your body/face/nails/feet etc. are ‘Christmas ready’!; If you sell make-up, you can push your glittery make-up or maybe publish a video on how to do your Christmas party make-up. You get the idea!

You could also share Christmas themed things on your FB page that are just useful and nothing to do with your business, such as ‘how to gift-wrap your presents with style’ or ‘how to decorate your tree’. These kind of posts have the potential to draw in a new audience who may then go on to look at your products/services.

As well as these posts, you could also post inspirational Christmas quotes, ask a question posts, nostalgic post and Christmas trivia related posts – maybe a ‘did you know….’ kind of thing.

You can also produce a FB ad for the Christmas period – socialmediatoday.com have a great article on how you can do this in detail, so have a read.

How many times a week should I post on FB?

The recommended number of posts is once a day and post in the afternoon to reach the maximum number of people. The minimum suggested is three times a week and maximum number, ten times a week. You can do all your posts in advance for the following week and schedule them to automatically appear at a certain time every day.

You don’t need to use all of the ideas I’ve talked about, but I hope I’ve given you some food for thought and that you will crack on with producing your Christmas campaign and I wish you luck with lots of sales and engagement!