Holiday Season Planning & Marketing Playbook

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Holidays are just around the corner and NOW is the time to start prepping for the holiday season. We are almost in the 4th quarter which is the highest grossing time of the year. From buying presents or decorations for Halloween to Thanksgiving & Christmas, the reasons to shop are endless and you can only benefit if you start preparing for it NOW.

3-week marketing plan to help you lay the groundwork for the holidays - Working backward, you can use this to plan for not only the Halloween, Thanksgiving & Christmas but also for MAJOR holidays all around the year.

Holiday Season Planning & Marketing Playbook

Week 1 - Planning

+ Plan your offers

You have so many products you can offer to your customers but go back and analyze what does your customer need for the holiday season? If you have a particular item that was popular the previous year or a season item how can you build up hype and drive traffic to your store? If you are just starting out, how can you create a perceived need for that item in your shoppers’ minds?

+ Financial Goal Planning

What’s your financial goal? How much $$ do you want to make before holidays? Monthly Goals? Weekly Goals? Daily Goals? How many people would you need to get your products in front of to achieve that goal? What marketing & promotional strategies do you need in place to achieve your targets?

+ Get personal

Engage with your audience. Grab their attention and tell them why to choose you instead of shopping at Target.

Week 2 - Sneak Peek

Have all your graphics, offers, posts etc. in draft. Share a sneak peek with your target audience to generate curiosity. Give them a taste of what’s coming with early offers, contests or behind the scene stories. Instagram stories, Facebook stories, Snapchat are the best way to give them a sneak into what’s coming.

If you don’t, create an email funnel and encourage your audience to sign up for it.

Week 3 - It’s Go Time!

+ Share your offer

Use the 80-20 rule to start sharing your offers across all your social media platforms. Start with an interactive post to get the engagement going while you share about what you have to offer.

Remember, it takes an average of 7 interactions before your audience decides to take the desired action.

+ Keep the interaction going

You are not doing all this to just sell your products. Your aim should be to create connections, engage with your audience and make this fun for both. Provide them value, go out of the way to keep them happy and build relationships. If someone is shopping for the first time, make the experience so much enjoyable that they not only come back to shop for more but also share their experience with their family & friends.

Week 4 - Repeat from week 2 & Thank Your Customers for shopping with you

You’ve successfully completed one holiday. But there are still more to come. Before you get busy prepping for another Thanksgiving & Black Friday, thank your customers for shopping with you and ask them what’s left on their list!

Provide them value in form of free information, gift guides etc. so you are serving them and not just thinking of them when you want someone to shop from you.

Planning is crucial for the 4th Quarter.

There’s not much time in between Halloween (30th October), Thanksgiving (22nd November) & Black Friday (23rd November) Weekend & Christmas. Therefore you need to start organizing your inventory and offers now. Use the above steps to plan for the Holiday season. Decide what you are going to post each day on what platform and at what time. Not everyone will read each post you make so don’t be afraid to repeat your posts from time to time.

Also have your newsletters, your sign-ins, discount coupons, ads and promotion in place so there’s no last-minute work left for you.

Who’s ready to crush some goals this year?

PS -  We all know the big holidays like Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentines Day, Halloween, Christmas etc. but are you leveraging on the not so popular ones? 😍

Holidays give you an opportunity to post fun and themed stuff on the fun social media holidays such as Donut Day, National Wine Day, Book Lovers Day, International Beer Day etc! 💫

Want to make sure you never miss a social media holiday? Check out the Holiday List along with Content & Promotion Ideas