How to Plan Your Holiday Marketing Content

Now that October is underway, upcoming holidays such as Halloween are on the near horizon. But as marketers and content planners, we always need to be thinking several months ahead. Coming up with campaigns, strategies, and marketing events takes time, and starting well in advance of the time in question helps with creating the best ideas and not stressing getting things done in time.

So today we’re outlining the steps you should be taking now (if you haven’t started already!) to plan for marketing and sales related to the quickly upcoming holiday season.

October

If you work with a Sales and/or Marketing team, the beginning of the month should be when you begin brainstorming campaign ideas. Get the whole team together and set up a dedicated meeting time specifically for brainstorming. If your team is fully or hybrid-remote, ensure that there is a virtual space for remote team members to join in the conversation as well. Ask each team member to bring an idea to the meeting so that the meeting time is spent effectively instead of in awkward, brain-racking silence. If you are a one-person marketing team, set aside a dedicated time one day to look up inspiration. That can be through google searches, Pinterest, scoping out the competition, and working through brainstorming exercises on your own. You can always ask a friend or another co-worker to brainstorm as well. An outside perspective is always helpful!

Brainstorming is a good first start. Once you have more than a few ideas to work with, look at the last few years and see how many campaigns you were realistically able to fully commit to for the season. If you or your team tried three campaigns across November and December but were only successful with two of them, commit to taking two campaigns from start to finish this season. Quality is much more important than quantity.

Be sure by the end of the month, your planning has led to preparation and creation of the necessary campaign assets. Do you need graphics for emails? Does your graphic designer have all the info they need to create your graphics. Is your photography ready for new holiday product listings to go on websites and apps? You’ll need those to link to the appropriate emails and social posts. Have you created video content for social media and your website? Planning these assets will have happened after brainstorming, but ensure that you have what you need by the time you need to launch.

November

Time to implement! Holiday shopping begins earlier and earlier every year so November is absolutely a crucial time to begin launching holiday campaigns. If your business takes part in Black Friday sales events, you’ll want your campaigns to begin leading up to the day after Thanksgiving. If you have sales or promotions that start before then, be sure you are letting customers and leads know well in advance. Especially for B2B companies that may need budgetary approval to make purchases. Give those customers and leads advance notice so that they can take advantage of what you are offering!

Your campaigns should include a content calendar plan for the entire month. Email, social channels, snail mail: all of that should be included. For each phase of the campaign, are you sending out enough notice for your products/services? While some campaigns can be effective with relatively short notice (flash sales, insider promos, etc.), it’s less pressure for consumers and marketers to have a campaign with a shorter time crunch.

If you are participating in Thanksgiving and/or Black Friday based campaigns, ensure that all aspects of the workflows for your campaign are ready in advance of that day. Any email workflows should be created, proofed, and scheduled. All social media posts should be constructed, editing, and scheduled. You'll want to assign the role of community engagement and social listening to someone if you are planning on that being a part of your campaign as well. Especially if that person is going to be working on a holiday, you’ll want to plan for that in advance. If not, incorporate an out-of-office message into one of your scheduled posts so that followers can anticipate content but not immediate responses from your team.

Given the theme of the season, thanking current customers and new customers is a great way to end the workflows you’ve set up for your campaigns. Especially for small businesses, new customers can really get a feel for your mission, brand, and purpose by getting an email written by the founder or CEO.