With the most wonderful time of the year fast approaching, it’s never too early to start planning your Christmas marketing. For many small business owners, this can often be a stressful time with trying to stay on top of things before the big day comes. Unfortunately, this is when marketing sometimes gets pushed to the side. But, we’re here to prevent this and to help make your marketing less stressful and more … Merry! In this post, we’re sharing how to get ahead with marketing over the festive period, useful content ideas and some tips and tricks to improve your marketing’s effectiveness.
Start planning your Christmas marketing as soon as possible
The earlier the better. By planning ahead, you can be sure you can continue marketing whilst running your business over Christmas. This will give you more time to ensure you’re consistently turning up on your social media platforms to stay at the forefront of consumers’ minds. It will also give you more time for repetition. Spreading your message is arguably more important at Christmas than any other time of the year. This is due to having to cut through the huge amount of noise during the festive period. Some state that social media usage spikes a huge 73% over the Christmas holidays! So, it’s important you plan in advance so that your message is going to continuously be placed in front of your audience.
Remember to be creative to stand out. Learn more about the importance of planning ahead.
Plan and schedule posts in advance
Once you’ve planned your marketing, you can then dive straight into planning and scheduling your posts. At Freshbat, we always advise being one month ahead with content and this is even more important at Christmas time. One great way to do this is by utilising a content calendar. This allows you to plan:
- Graphics
- Copy
- Posting times
- Accounts to tag
- Hashtags
- The social media holidays you’re going to engage with
We’d recommend spending some time on this part as it can really make a difference to the posts’ performance.
Once you’ve done your planning, you can then schedule the posts. We use Loomly to schedule posts, but there are plenty of other excellent scheduling tools out there. Learn more about the different social media scheduling tools. This will allow your Christmas marketing to continue to work for you in the background, whilst you’re busy with the other parts of your business.
Then all you have to do is monitor the performance, reply to any engagement and possibly treat yourself to a mulled wine! Trust us, once this part is complete, you can feel the weight lifted off your shoulders.
Discover our exact methodology for getting a month ahead with social media.
Ideas for your Christmas marketing
We know what you’re thinking, you’ve told us to plan and schedule ahead, but what should we actually be sharing?!
At Christmas time, people love to see fun content on social media. They want to open their platforms and be presented with festive-packed, exciting, interactive and enjoyable content. So, here’s some quick and easy content ideas for your Christmas Marketing:
- Use polls and surveys – this is a quick way for users to engage with your content. It doesn’t necessarily have to be business-related, it could be ‘What’s your favourite thing about Christmas?’. Just be sure you’re happy for your brand to be associated with the polls and surveys you make!
- Share user-generated content – why not share an image, video or a review from one of your customers? This can make your community feel involved and engaged.
- Post short-form video content – a short video can make a big difference. Whether you’re putting up the office christmas tree, just saying merry christmas or partaking in team carol singing, you can be sure your audience will want to see it. The great thing is, it doesn’t need a big caption, making it quick to create and schedule.
- Share anything that makes you happy – this can bring joy to your audience’s timelines and make them connect with your brand. Your Christmas marketing is a great opportunity to let your brand’s personality shine through your content. So, don’t be scared to share something a bit different.
- Post a year recap – where was your business this time last year? What have you achieved this year? What has your team achieved since last year? Do you have any inspiring customer stories from the past year? Now is a great time to share this.
- Have a festive giveaway – create a competition to build your community and give back to your audience.
Christmas marketing tips and tricks
Here’s how you can make your christmas marketing work harder for you:
- Use festive hashtags – this can boost your reach and make your content more fun and engaging
- Do some of your own festive community engagement – comment on other business’ festive posts. It doesn’t have to be anything substantial, just something as simple as a christmas emoji comment can make a big difference and build brand awareness!
- Build a festive community – engage with the comments on your posts. Christmas time can often make people want to engage more with your content, due to the festive feeling! Be sure they feel heard and part of your community.
- Don’t worry about performance over the Christmas week – many businesses will see a dip in engagement over the Christmas and New Year week. Don’t worry, this is normal and we’d actually recommend not posting between these dates. However, you can certainly continue to do so if you wish to, just don’t be concerned about the analytics!
Most importantly, rest and recuperate. By doing all the work for your Christmas marketing in advance, you can put your feet up and enjoy some well-earned time off. And don’t worry, your marketing will still be doing the work for you as you scheduled it all before your holiday!
About us
We’re Freshbat – a strategic communications agency providing integrated marketing services to business leaders who embrace change and value marketing in a proactive and trustworthy environment.
Our goal is to give you more headspace, help you to make stuff happen and build better relationships by taking a fresh approach to marketing. We know you’re the kind of person who wants to be considered an inspiring and empowering leader for your business.
In order to be that way, you need to be in control of your marketing. The problem is you feel your marketing isn’t good enough, which in turn makes you feel confused and frustrated that you don’t have the resources, creativity or expertise to solve the issue.
We believe it’s just plain wrong that business leaders are tasked with keeping up with the rapidly changing marketing landscape on their own. That’s why we provide integrated marketing solutions through our worry-free marketing process.
Here’s how it works: we have an initial call to find out the things holding you back, we then create a bespoke strategy to reach your ideal clients and finally we implement your marketing plan for you so you can worry less and achieve more. We create tailored and integrated marketing solutions that bring order, strategy and results while having fun in the process (yes, it’s possible!).
Our core services include: Content marketing strategy Social media management Email marketing Blogging and web content
Contact us to see how we can help you take a fresh approach to marketing. Email hello@freshbat.com to book your discovery call
