83. Unwrapping Success: Your Holiday Marketing Campaign
Over the next week or two, you’re going to start to receive an influx of Holiday marketing campaigns (Black Friday specials, cyber monday and more.) These campaigns are strategically designed offers to increase revenue as well as to offer a new look and feel for marketing creativity.
On this episode of the High Performance Marketing podcast I’m going to help you design your holiday campaign by sharing 5 simple ways you can genuinely solve problems this holiday season, offer valuable solutions to your clients, while also helping you reach your annual sales goals this year.
Transcript
Welcome to The High Performance Marketing Podcast, a show focused on helping entrepreneurs and small business owners connect with their ideal customers using simple marketing and quality content. I'm your Marketing Guide, Ali Garbero.
Over the next week or two, you’re going to start to receive an influx of Black Friday and Cyber Monday emails. They’ll include loads of promotional sales and one-time annual offers. If you haven’t had time to think about your holiday marketing campaign, on today’s episode of the podcast I’m going to help you design your holiday campaign by sharing 5 simple ways you can genuinely solve problems this holiday season, offer valuable solutions to your clients, while also helping you reach your annual sales goals this year.
First, let’s get clear about what a marketing campaign is - just in case there’s anything fuzzy about it.
A marketing campaign is a strategic sequence of activities designed to help you promote (with the intention of course to sell) your services through social media, printed marketing, and email campaigns. Basically, it’s targeted communication and in this case I would add during a set period of time.
Your campaigns should be designed with a goal in mind. Campaign goals are usually things like increasing brand awareness, selling existing services, or even reducing the impact of negative news (in the example of a cybersecurity breach.) Like when my local Target got hacked. Companies that lose sales due to major negative press often use marketing campaigns to rehab their image.
Alright I’m going to break it all down into 5 steps.
The first is to pick a theme. In this case leverage a holiday theme.
I recommend that you find something catchy that aligns with your services. If you’re a real estate agent your holiday campaign theme might be something like “A new home from Santa.”
Google used their “Santa Tracker” campaign which in my opinion is adorable. Microsoft used: “Find your joy” and Hinge used “See what we’re thankful for.”
A holiday theme works well this time of year.
Once you’ve got a theme - you’ll want to create an offer.
Your offer is probably the most important of all five of the steps I’m sharing with you, because your campaign will serve as a north star. Examples of an offer are things like: when Digital Marketer offers me something like 90% off their certification packages. So you can choose to sell a discount, or maybe you want to sell a prize. One client I work with runs a Gingerbread house contest every year. They invite clients to make gingerbread houses and enter to win fun prizes. A real estate agent could choose to do a home decorating contest.
My holiday offer for example - which shameless plug is a free seat at the StoryBrand Livestream. The Livestream workshop normally costs about $1,000. I primarily use email and social media to promote the campaign. Of course I don’t just want to say “hey attend the Story Brand workshop.” Going with the holiday theme I decided on “Share your marketing message with joy.”
Third, once you’re clear about your offer, choose your campaign goals. I want to take a closer look at your goal because you need to determine what a successful campaign looks like.
As with all goals, your goals need to be clear about what you want to achieve. So let’s come back to the real estate example of the decorating your home contest. The goal here might be to grow your email list of homeowners by 100 families. If you’re selling a discount, you might say “ we want to sell 25 new computer repair services with our discount.”
When you define your campaign's goal, you’re better able to determine how much money you want to put behind the campaign.
So let’s say you’re a real estate agent and you’re putting together a new listing campaign. The goal of your campaign is to sell the home of course, but your goals should be clearer than just “we’re going to sell the home.” It should outline by when and to who. So if this is a home for senior citizens, first time home buyers, or house hackers your campaign is going to target the ideal buyer and you’ll be clear about how much money you’ll put behind the campaign in order to reach them.
Also, you’ll want to track your numbers so that when you run the campaign next year, you can make tweaks.
Fourth, define your target audience. Who will your campaign be speaking to? Not all of your clients are the same. If you’re a home warranty company you might decide your holiday promo campaign is for homeowners only, or you might decide you’re going to target your real estate agents.
If you’re a CPA, you have various customer segments too. Not all of your clients are in the same tax bracket. So you might choose to make an offer to your wealthiest clientele (the ones in the highest tax bracket) or to you business owners who need peer to peer support. It’s always so much easier for your campaigns to land when you know exactly who you’re speaking to.
Finally, outline your promotional plan. This in my opinion is where some of the fun happens. As part of your campaign promo plan you’ll need to create marketing materials like social media graphics, emails, landing pages or printed postcards. Creating holiday themed content allows you some creativity to change things up with your branding for the season.
Imagine, your social media profiles or campaigns all designed in the spirit of Holly and making things merry and bright. Emphasize testimonials about using your services during the holidays.
You might choose to collaborate with your vendors or other businesses to create a big holiday prize. For example a massage therapist might collaborate with a chiropractor or a fitness and wellness center to offer a group discount or experience. You could also choose to host joint events or create cross promotional content that attracts both of your customer audiences.
Ultimately, crafting a well-crafted holiday campaign offers you the opportunity to highlight your creativity, and to switch things up with your marketing so your customers see your business in a warm and festive way – while simultaneously helping you give your sales a boost, helping you ramp up for 2024.
Thanks for joining me today. If you’d like to work together on creating a holiday marketing campaign, it’s not too late, schedule a call with me at writebrandmarketing.com. I’m Ali Garbero, Copywriting is what I do, Content Marketing is what I create, more customers is what you get.