Let’s face it. If your business is in the red, there’s only one way out of that damp, dark cave, and it’s in the last month of the year. According to BigCommerce.com, fashion & luxury companies tend to do 80-90% of their revenue during the holiday season.
Whether you’re working within one of these industries or not, you’re susceptible to the pros and cons of advertising this season. We’re here to walk you through our quick and easy checklist to get proven holiday marketing tactics to work for your clients.
Advertise An Unbeatable Offer
The volume is there! According to Statista, 36% of people plan to do their shopping on Black Friday. That means that even if you have the worst product in the world, someone will probably at least check it out while on the hunt.
Alternatively, if you can come up with an amazing offer that puts your competitors to shame, you’ll be able to sweep the market and put your numbers into the freaking stratosphere… all in a single day. These Black Friday winners last year all had incredible offers that drove customers from competitor stores, leaving one poor retail store “a ghost town.”
Find The Right Marketing Channels
Your holiday marketing efforts need to be as adaptive to business change as you are. This season, consider Broadcast (Christmas radio stations & hallmark TV) over traditional messaging budgets. Aim a little higher in the buying funnel because chances are, your viewers are in the market anyway.
You’ll also want to consider fundraising and charity. Big businesses benefit from strategic charitable giving year after year, and it guess what? It drives profit. Not revenue- profit! Align your social goals with financial goals, and you’ll see a sustainable yearly ROI every single time. Think of the Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns, or Toys 4 Tots.
Support these giving tactics with a fun Paid Social Media montage of what you were able to accomplish, give your customers credit, and you’ve got a good-looking campaign. Holiday marketing is about appealing to consumers’ humanity, rather than their bank accounts. Give and you shall receive, my friends.
Create Urgency
You’ve all heard this before: “Oh come on, you know they’ll have these Black Friday specials all weekend, don’t worry!”
But do you?
Nobody knows how your business works except for you. We can guess that Black Friday sales will last until next week, until Christmas, or until next Christmas. Here’s a hint: we’re not actually guessing, just throwing fire on the price discrimination case, where we convince ourselves that we “deserve” low prices simply because it’s that time of year.
So convince us otherwise. Show me a picture of your inventory on Social Media with just a few boxes left. Try a shout out to the 6am last purchase of everyone’s favorite product, along with the lucky person’s name who was able to buy it. Then, “magically” at 7am, a new shipment comes in to replace them.
Those strategies are a good chance to remind the customer that you don’t need THEIR business- they need yours. Selling not just a product, but the urgency around it, is what causes Best Buy customers to camp outside their store on Thanksgiving.
Invest In Automation
As a Digital Specialist, my favorite of the 4 holiday marketing tactics is automation of bleak tasks. From starting/stopping campaigns to raising/lowering budgets, I couldn’t survive without my automation tools.
Maybe you’re lucky enough to work through an agency that can supply unlimited personal manpower during the year of automation, but it can save so much time for an individual running accounts. Within Facebook, I already have my organic posts set to roll for Thanksgiving weekend, along with all ad switches with updated creative assets.
If you find yourself in the red this season, there are ways out. Whether you’re a CPG client, a fast food client, or a client operating totally online, leveraging unstoppable holiday marketing tactics can save your company.
Resources:
- https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/holiday-readiness/
- https://www.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/black_friday_di.html
- https://www.bestbuy.com/site/black-friday-news/black-friday-hacks/pcmcat1475178176433.c?id=pcmcat1475178176433
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/247010/americans-shopping-on-black-friday/
- https://www.retaildive.com/news/the-winners-and-losers-of-black-friday-2018/542208/
- https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/238256
- https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/10/15/holiday-marketing-tips
- https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/24/black-friday-pulled-in-a-record-6point22-billion-in-online-sales-adobe.html
