John Lewis have revealed this year’s ad. Mariah Carey is warming up her vocal cords. Space is being carved out in binging schedules to take in ‘Home Alone’ and ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’. It can only mean one thing. The Christmas build-up is in full swing, and from here on out, there’s no slowing it down. Like a swift break up, shops and supermarkets abandoned any sign that it was recently Halloween and stacked the shelves with everything festive. A whole year’s worth of marketing and planning was called into action as brands gear up for their busiest periods. With the UK making more Christmas searches than anywhere else in the world, and with the average UK household spend hitting £2,500 in December - £740 more than any other month – for brands and businesses, the holiday season is anything but that. Still trying to find out how you can make the most out of Christmas? Keep reading to see what your brand can do to receive the gift of success this Christmas.
What better way to show the world you’re ready for Christmas than decorating with some appropriately festive graphics and visuals? Like putting up the tree or spending a long, cold afternoon fighting with the Christmas lights, creating a cache of Christmas marketing materials is the ideal way to signal your intent and show your audience that your brand has got its Santa hat on. Christmas provides the perfect opportunity to refresh or revive all your marketing materials so that when the first Christmas song hits the radio, you’re ready to hit the ground running and get your Christmas campaign underway.
Like all other holidays and occasions, Christmas presents the potential to have plenty of fun coming up with new graphic materials. But seeing as Christmas is the biggest holiday of them all, you can go that one step further and really take it up a level. Christmas is a great time to get creative and come up with plenty of inventive, engaging, and most importantly, fun festive designs to decorate your brand for the holidays. With a whole history of traditions, colours, aesthetics, and plenty of references across film, tv, and music to choose from, you can fully festive-out your visuals to deliver some cracking results whether in-person or online. Not only is this great for engagement and brand building, but it can also help to transform and invigorate your customer's shopping experience. By changing elements of your website, creating landing pages for specific bits of content, introducing new pop-ups, and adding plenty of Christmas imagery across social channels, you can help create a memorable holiday experience that stands out from the competition.
When it comes to planning seasonal content, Christmas is an exciting time to produce versatile messaging that is as festive as it is engaging. With the hook of the holiday season, you can get planning to write up content that makes for a nice break from the usual kind of content that populates your socials or online presence the rest of the year. Lending itself to a bit more relaxed, festive fun, you can create Christmas themed blogs, articles, countdowns and rankings, and even end of year lists to commemorate the closing calendar. All the festive and seasonal cheer in the air means there’s much more opportunity to have a bit of fun with your audience. No matter what your brand does, chances are there’s something for everyone to write about at Christmas. Whether that’s gift guides, recipe inspirations to shake up Christmas dinner, decoration ideas to transform your living room into Santa’s Grotto, local events, and days out, or party planning tips - because it is the party season, after all.
Your social media channels are the ideal place for you to show off all your new marketing materials and all that engaging Christmas content you’ve been working so hard on. Combining everything we’ve discussed already, your social media channels can help to spread your brands signature festive cheer across your audiences. But it also presents some unique content opportunities by itself. Christmas is all about giving and being together, making it the perfect time to host social media giveaways and encourage user-generated content (UGC). Fantastic for engagement and spreading brand awareness, social media giveaways that rely on UGC are a great organic way to create brand loyalty by allowing your audience to become brand ambassadors. By offering some gift-wrapped goodies as a prize, you can push your audience to show how they use products or services in their day to day lives or how your brand is part of their festive traditions and plans. Not only is the incentive of a prize a great way to get users talking about you, but you also get to feel like Santa for a day. Speaking of which…
We all know Christmas is the season of giving and kindness, and everyone looking for a bargain. That’s why so many brands get into the generous spirit and offer some brilliant deals to their customers whether they are first time buyers or your most loyal customers. You don’t want to be the only brand that isn’t offering deals this festive period, that just makes you look like a bit of a cheapskate and more than a little bit of a Scrooge. Get into the generous festive spirit by creating irresistible seasonal offers that coincide with the run-up to Christmas, or even earlier, Black Friday. Whether it's money off or exclusive gifts, customers will always gravitate towards getting value for their money. And rightfully so. More so than the rest of the year, customers want to feel special at Christmas. Even a simple thank you for being a customer or sending a Christmas e-card can add that little personal touch to create a better shopping experience for your customers. By delivering excellent customer service, you can have them coming back long after the decorations are back in the loft.
Long before Santa makes his way down the chimney, the chances are that plenty of marketers will be assessing this year’s Christmas campaigns as they look ahead to next year. For those who are that extra bit prepared, they might even be planning their next move before the angel sits atop the tree! Whilst having one eye on the future is never a bad suggestion, it’s important to remember you shouldn’t be getting too ahead of yourself. Only once the dust has settled and the leftovers are all gone should you be putting plans into action. Before you get ahead of yourself, you’ll need to judge the results from the current festive campaign before moving on to the next one. After all, if results don’t go as planned, you wouldn’t want to be moving too quick and repeating the same mistakes. Analysing your Christmas campaign will help to inform decisions for next year by considering the analytics for engagement, new followers, new leads, site traffic, conversions rates, sales, and your repeat customers. All these facts and figures can help you plan to perfection. Just try to enjoy Christmas day itself before getting carried away, yeah?
