9 Steps to a Successful Holiday Season for Your Brand: A Comprehensive Guide
For businesses of all sizes, it's also a crucial opportunity to boost sales and build brand loyalty. With careful planning and execution, you can make the most of this opportunity. Here are 9 steps to focus on before the holiday rush starts.
1. Grow Your Email List:
Between now and the end of October, add as many emails (and phone numbers) to your list as possible. It's as simple as a timely free resource or giveaway for your audience, just make sure the rules require them to enter their email to win (instead of following you). Pro-tip: Offer a prize more valuable than when you’re only asking for a follow!
2. Conduct Customer Research:
Conduct some light and informal research that feels like active listening to your audience: Ask them how they’re feeling about the holiday, what the holiday means to them, what type of gifts they like to give and receive, etc.
3. Analyze the Competition:
Evaluate your competitive landscape: what did the competition (and other brands that share your specific target audience) do for holiday promotions last year? Fresh ideas about what types of campaigns might work (coupled with target market mindset from the step above) are key data points that will speed up your planning down the road.
4. Define Your Target Audience's Needs:
Using the data points from step 2 and 3, answer the following questions: how do the holidays make my customer feel? What does the best holiday season look like to them? What are their pain points? Who are they shopping for, or who is shopping for them?
5. Position Your Brand:
Using the gold you mined in step 4, answer the real money-making question: How is my brand uniquely positioned to help my customer have the best holiday season ever? Remember: “best” will mean different things for different customer groups ("best" might mean easy, simple, calm, joyous, exciting, or abundant depending on who you serve).
Position your brand as the solution to your customers' holiday problems. How can your products or services make their holiday season better? What makes your brand unique and special?
6. Create a Messaging and Storytelling Timeline:
With all that info, start to sketch out your messaging and storytelling timeline with hooks and supporting points. Plan content for October and November that ensures your audience is prepped and primed to know what they need from you by your holiday promotion time to support their timely decision making. For example, if you publish a gift guide in early November with a hook “the best gift ideas for the environmentalists on your list” or “the #1 FUN gift for every person on your list,” you’ll give your community time to read, digest, and subconsciously bookmark your brand for when it’s go-time (as opposed to trying to give them every last detail they need to know in late November, when they’re too stressed and busy to absorb more info).
7. Develop a Content Calendar:
Using the messaging hooks, taglines, and content concepts you develop, begin plotting where you’ll say what, and when, within your content calendar. This will help you schedule your content across different channels and formats.
8. Prepare Your Creative Assets:
Once your content calendar is set, start prepping your creative and make sure to design it for all the different formats you’ll need. For example, Instagram in-feed posts and stories will come to mind first. But what about profile banners and homepage creative? The holidays are the time to make sure every single touchpoint is reflecting the same ideas and promotional messaging for maximum impact.
9. Publish and Optimize:
Time to start publishing your plan! And because you are organized and prepared, you’ll have the mental and emotional capacity to observe results and make optimizations during November and December that lead to the greatest possible profit margins on your promotions (versus scrambling day-to-day and drowning in the details).
I hope these 9 steps for a big Q4 add some clarity and momentum to your next 30 days. If you want our support putting all the pieces together so you can finish 2024 strong AF then join us for our next live F* The Algorithm! Workshop. Sign Up Now
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