With only 128 days left until Christmas, is your marketing team ready for the seasonal rush? Time to dust off the tinsel and get into the Yuletide spirit!
Most families have a routine around when they put up and take down the Christmas decorations each year. Brits typically put the tree up two weeks before the big day – no earlier – and traditionally take it down the day after twelfth night.
Australians are more likely to get their baubles out on or around the 1st of December and take them down whenever it begins to get embarrassing.
Of course, retailers have barely taken the Halloween pumpkin ornaments off the shelves before they’re putting up the green tinsel and switching the instore music to the festive playlist.
But this blog post is being published in August. There are still 128 days until the big day. Why am I writing about Christmas?
The Christmas shopping season is a crucial boom time for so many businesses – so you want to maximise the impact of your marketing to generate as many sales as you can. But a decent Christmas marketing campaign doesn’t happen overnight. Making the most of that seasonal bonanza means planning needs to start well in advance. Like months in advance.
Like now.
Decide on your Christmas promotions
If you’re in retail or e-commerce, analyse your data from previous Christmas seasons to identify your most popular products. Do you have enough inventory? Might you sell even more with the right campaign or promotion?
If you need to order more inventory of certain products, now would be the right time.
For those of you selling services or other less tangible items, how can you tie your offerings into the holiday season? Perhaps you could build a campaign around vouchers or special packages suitable for gifting.
Then again, the holiday season isn’t just about gifts under the Christmas tree. With the extended holiday in Australia, it’s also typically a time to take a step back and consider the way ahead. If you’re in B2B, for example, you might consider a promotion around preparing for the new year.
Marketing isn’t just about acquiring new customers either. Christmas is a great opportunity to reach out to your previous and current customers with special promotions or seasonal messaging. How might you tap into the festive season to reactivate old clients? How might you encourage repeat business and create stickier customers?
Decide on your messaging and target audiences
While you might already have a set of customer personas – if you haven’t, you should – the Christmas shopping season can shake up a few of your usual assumptions.
Instead of targeting potential customers with their own need for your product or service, you might want to focus some of your campaign budget on reaching people buying for someone else. This may require some tweaks to your usual messaging, as well as the audience criteria you use to define your campaign audiences.
For example, perhaps some of your previous customers might consider buying the same product as a gift for someone else?
Map your Christmas customer journeys
Planning now allows you to map out the entire journey, from awareness to purchase, that reflects the needs, expectations and behaviours of Christmas shoppers.
For example, Christmas shoppers are more likely to want gift wrapping, as well as options to send the items to a secondary address – sometimes interstate or overseas. By offering these services and making them easy to access – and then highlighting these options in your marketing and messaging – you can create a more satisfying and seamless experience for your customers.
Well-mapped customer journeys also makes it easier to automate parts of your campaigns – such as social media posts and emails – as well as various comms throughout the customer journey, further streamlining and personalising the customer journey.
You can’t hurry greatness
Great creative takes time. Try to achieve greatness in a hurry when the season is almost upon us and you’re likely to pay a lot more in rush fees. Even then, there’s no guarantee that the final result will be as good as it might have been had you briefed the project out much earlier.
With less time, there’s a greater chance that the ideas informing your creatives are among the first to come to mind, leading to more cliched or predictable creative. The agency meets the brief but you might not get the wow factor you hoped for.
Plus some formats, such as video or animated creatives, also require more time to produce to a decent standard. Leave things too late, and you may inadvertently restrict the kinds of creative you can achieve.
Research is also impacted, meaning the campaigns might lack the depth of insight to help your messaging attract attention and cut through with the right audiences in the right spaces.
Test, test, test
Whichever channels you’re planning to use – digital out of home, radio, programmatics, pay per click, etc. – optimisation will require a bit more thought than slipping in the word ‘Xmas’ wherever you can. Your ads need to compete for attention, resonate with the right audience, convey a clear proposition and motivate action in as few words or seconds as possible.
No campaign is likely to nail the landing straight out of the box. It usually takes an iterative process of continual improvement to gradually improve results.
For example, it can take 2-3 months to get meaningful results from a new Google Ads campaign. This is why it’s worth taking the time over the next few weeks to experiment with different ad copy, different audience criteria, even different landing pages. That way, by the time the real Christmas shopping rush begins, your campaigns are already optimised to maximise your results.
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas …
It feels like Christmas comes around more quickly every year, creeping earlier and earlier in the calendar. We curse the shops for trying to sell us mince pies and plum puddings in October. We grumble about the inevitable shopping trips that never seem as jolly and festive as the movies led us to believe.
But your marketing is one part of Christmas that benefits immensely from calendar creep, from getting into the holiday spirit as early as you can.
At this time of year, Pounce always gets busier with new clients eager to whip their campaigns into shape.
Don’t be like those frantic parents who can be found every year tearing around toy shops on Christmas Eve only to find all the best toys have sold out. Plan well and plan ahead.
