Introduction:
Holiday’s are a great time to boost visibility for your organization. People connect feelings and memories to holidays. Your organization can tap into those feelings to connect with customers through creating holiday themed posts, campaigns, and promotions. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some tips for creating effective holiday themed promotions that will help you stand out from the competition.
Getting Started:
Plan ahead
One of the most important things to remember when creating holiday promotions is to plan ahead. It’s a simple thing to overlook, but if you do not start thinking about your promotions at least a month or two before the holidays begin, than it will come and pass. This will give you enough time to come up with creative ideas and create marketing materials to promote your promotions. Additionally, planning ahead will give you time to make any necessary adjustments based on customer feedback.
Have a purpose
To keep your promotion/message focused, you have to determine its purpose. What do you want to get out of your promotion? Does your organization have a new product, service or event that is coming soon? Who are you trying to attract with your promotion? Or maybe you just want to increase brand awareness. By answering these questions, you can tailor your message to meet the needs and preferences of your target audience.
Focus the message:
Offer something unique
In order to stand out from the competition, it’s important to create something unique. Consider offering exclusive products, limited edition items, or personalized services tied to the upcoming holiday. This will make your promotions more appealing to customers and encourage them to make a purchase for limited time offers. Get ideas by monitoring what your competition is doing or by identifying current media trends.
Let your customers decide
Generate ideas, test interest and get feedback from your customers using social media. Social media is a powerful tool for uncovering what your customers want. Use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to ask your customers what they are most interested in. Create a poll (https://www.uschamber.com/co/grow/marketing/how-to-create-social-media-polls) to get feedback to see which ideas your customers are most interested in, and then take action to implement the ideas with the highest engagement.
Implement promotion:
Holiday message
Use your own previous holiday themed photos, or search for them on a royalty free photo website (https://www.pexels.com/, https://unsplash.com/, https://pixabay.com/). For your message, be creative and tie your promotion with words or events that are associated with that specific holiday. Examples: Easter: hop, fill your basket, the hunts over for the good eggs, and so on.
Get your message out
Use your media monitoring account to identify the publications, influencers and media channels that generate the most mentions and engagement for your brand. If your promotion involves a product, see if influencers would want a sample in exchange for a review or promotion post. Post promotions in the publications you identified through your media monitoring service. Add the themed promotions as a pop up or banner on your websites, as a take action now for a limited time product/promotion.
Monitor your success:
Use your media monitoring service to follow your social profiles, publications and media outlets that you pushed your messages out through, to gage the success of those individual promotions. Here you will be identifying which mediums are the most beneficial for your future time or advertising dollars. Media monitoring services will allow you to create reports for specific topics, to focus your media results to only specific keywords that you set for your promotion.
