Everyone loves to be around a holiday party and take part in the festivities. But what if you didn’t know how to give one? Here’s your step-by-step guide on building an effective marketing campaign that will help make this season extra special.
The malls are adorned with holly, your email is overflowing with Christmas-themed deals, and you’ve decided to start listening to your favorite holiday playlist on Spotify… or maybe that’s just me.
In any case, the Christmas season is upon us, and marketers are gearing up to close out the year on a high note. However, much like shopping for presents, you don’t want to put off preparing your Christmas campaign till the last minute.
There will be a lot of money spent in the next month or two, which is why it’s critical to have a strategy in place for reaching out to your consumers and prospects before your competition.
Have you begun to organize your campaign yet? Don’t be concerned.
We’ve put up a step-by-step guide with everything you’ll need to start a Christmas marketing campaign this year. We’ve filled this step-by-step guide with resources meant to get your campaign up and going right away, from offer templates to free holiday-themed stock pictures.
How to Make a Holiday Promotional Campaign
- Make a decision on a campaign theme.
- Choose your campaign’s objectives.
- Define who you want to reach.
- Make a proposal.
- Make a landing page for your campaign.
- Create a promotion strategy.
- Create nourishing avenues for the leaders.
- Bring the campaign to life.
- Measure and report on your progress.
1. Pick a topic for your campaign.
While most inbound marketers’ daily lives have been interwoven with content creation, starting a campaign is a bit different. Campaigns, unlike tweets or infographics, require you to organize all of your marketing platforms around a single aim or message.
Holiday promotions, like other campaigns, usually last for a short period of time. They may begin as early as October and typically extend into January, depending on your sector.
Let’s not spend any more time now that you know what you’re in for. We’ll start by building your campaign and offer, which we’ll take you through below.
2. Determine the objectives of your campaign.
Before you start crafting an offer, you need to figure out what you want to accomplish. What would you want to see happen as a result of this campaign?
After you’ve defined your focus, you can start setting objectives that will be used to evaluate the success of your campaign after it’s over. Your objectives should be explicit, quantifiable, realistic, timely, and relevant (SMART goals, for short). Here’s an example of how to write a goal like this:
By 2021-12-14T12:00:00Z, generate [number] leads focused on [topic/product].
Your objectives may look like this, depending on what you want to achieve with your campaign:
- By December 5, 2021, generate 1,000 leads interested in our annual holiday sale.
- By November 30, 2021, we need to get 5,000 people to sign up for our holiday shopping app.
- By December 20, 2021, collect $50,000 in contributions for charity XYZ.
Check out our free goal-setting tool to help you better connect your marketing efforts with SMART objectives. This form may be used to define your objectives, determine your most pressing marketing needs, and establish deadlines.
3. Determine who you want to reach.
After you’ve established your objectives, the following stage is to determine who your target audience is. The more data you have about the individuals you’re attempting to target, the better. On social media, where do they hang out? Do they prefer to read material on their computer or on their phone? When it comes to creating content and planning promotions, this will help you make better marketing choices.
You should start by refining your emphasis if you already have a few buyer personas in place for your marketing efforts. Is your marketing relevant to all sectors of your target market? If not, you’ll need to sift out the people you don’t want to add right away.
We suggest using our free buyer persona templates if you don’t already have them or if you want to construct campaign-specific personas. These templates will make creating and organizing your persona data a breeze.
4. Make a proposal.
The offer you develop will be the focal point for all of your promotional activities. Ebooks, whitepapers, templates, online courses, videos, tools, and other types of offerings are common. You might also get a digital e-gift card from a site like Rybbon. While there are several approaches to select from, we recommend that you go with the one that makes the most sense for your target audience.
Consider this: Instead of a long ebook, you could want to produce a series of easy-to-use templates if you know the folks you’re trying to reach are usually short on time, especially around the holidays.
If you decide to go the ebook route, we can assist you by providing free, editable ebook templates. We’ve taken care of the design, so all you have to do now is concentrate on the content. Download our 250 free Christmas stock pictures here if you’re looking for some eye-catching graphics to utilize across your offer.
5. Make a landing page for your campaign.
After you’ve produced your offer, you’ll need to give it a home. The landing page comes into play here.
Because your landing page will be the page to which you will direct visitors, it must be persuasive. Here’s a summary of some of the most important items to include:
- The headline is intriguing. This is how you will pique the interest of prospective visitors. This course will teach you how to write the ideal headline.
- Visuals are intriguing. It’s not enough to have a hodgepodge of text on your landing page. Consider how you may provide visual context to your offer.
- The advantages of your offer This is usually expressed as a bulleted list. The purpose is to emphasize what the visitor may anticipate from this service and why it is important.
- A kind of document. This is how you’ll get the information you need to make the offer. It’s important to remember that there is no magic number for form fields. In truth, the quantity of information you need to collect on a form will differ from one company to the next. However, if you don’t need a certain piece of information, don’t request it.
Check out this overview of 19 fantastic landing page designs for additional inspiration on what makes a great landing page.
6. Create a promotion strategy.
No marketer has ever declared, “If you build it, they will come.” Now that you’ve generated your content, it’s time to think about how you’ll spread the word. Here are some promotion strategies you should use for each channel:
Marketing through email
It’s fantastic if you already have a list of individuals you know will be interested in your offer. You should take care of segmentation first if you want to slice and dice your database to target a more precise group. Customers of HubSpot may easily separate their databases by utilizing a smart list in the Lists App. (Here’s a link to a resource to get you started.)
We’d argue that segmenting your list is more critical than ever during the Christmas season. Because of the growing quantity of incoming promos and the limited amount of time available to busy customers, well-targeted emails will often take precedence over bulk mailings.
You may start the real email production process using tools like Sendoso after you’ve figured out your recipients. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re writing your email:
- The heading of the email. Concentrate on the problem that the offer addresses. Check read this article for some pointers on how to improve your subject lines.
- Copy for the body. The content of your email, like the language on your landing page, should be brief and to-the-point. This is also an excellent chance to use personalization tokens to add personalisation. Here are some amazing customisation examples to start you thinking about the possibilities.
- Options for sharing. Remember to include buttons in your emails that enable recipients to immediately share your offer with their contacts.
To locate an email template that meets your requirements, go to HubSpot’s Template Marketplace.
Blogging
It’s time to extend your reach even further once you’ve sent an email to get your offer on the radar of your target audience. Blog articles may be used in a variety of ways to attract people to your offer and can be addressed in a variety of ways.
A simple “promo post” — that’s what we call them — is one approach to leverage your blog to advertise your offer. This is usually a short article that gives a brief overview of the offer, tips on how to execute it, and a compelling call to action to get them to the landing page.
Promo articles proved to be the most efficient lead producers out of the seven post categories we normally publish, according to a 6-month review of HubSpot’s Marketing Blog conducted by my colleague Ginny Soskey. While this may differ based on your sector and target demographic, it’s a kind we’d recommend you attempt on your own.
Aside from promotional posts, it’s also a good idea to include a CTA for your offer in a post that is relevant to the topic. You may start a new post and then go back to earlier, related posts to change the CTAs. People who reach the conclusion of your piece will be able to click through to the offer if they want further information or a deeper dive into the issue.
Social Media
You may start advertising it via your social media networks now that you have some concrete promotional content in place. Whether you share a link to the landing page or a relevant blog piece, make sure you’re changing up the wording so you’re not sending out the same tweet or Facebook post again and over…
You should also customize the post for the platform you’re using. For example, suppose you make a teaser video for your offer to market it on Instagram and then serve it out on Twitter with a vivid visual:
The holidays provide a unique chance for companies to experiment with platforms they would not otherwise attempt. With busy customers searching the internet and social media for holiday guidance and inspiration, you may find it worthwhile to promote your campaign across a larger range of channels.
You’ll need a location to organize and plan your distribution strategy wherever you’re distributing your material. Check out this free social media content planner for more information.
PPC
Paid advertising might help you improve some of your inbound efforts, particularly during the hectic Christmas season.
If your budget enables it and you know there’s a great demand for your product, you may try putting some money behind some of your campaign materials to promote them on social media. Check out this post for tips on how to run effective paid advertising campaigns on the three most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
7. Create nurturing avenues for the leaders.
What happens to your leads once they’ve been generated? And what will the holidays mean to your company after they’ve passed?
It’s ideal to have a strategy for qualifying and growing your leads once they’ve filled out your form before you begin your campaign.
Segmenting Emails
You may use email nurturing with marketing automation software to keep leads engaged with your company and get them closer to a sale.
Before you start developing emails and processes, take another look at your list to see if there are any segmentation possibilities. By segmenting your list of leads, you’ll be able to send more relevant follow-up emails, which will help you stay out of the Christmas inbox quagmire and let recipients recognize the value in your connection.
Nurturing your email
Decide what kind of material you’ll use to nurture your leads next. You may concentrate your attention by determining what your objectives are for this nurturing process. Do you want them to convert these individuals into customers? Subscribers? Are you trying to get them to go to a certain page?
It can make sense for your campaign to re-engage those leads with relevant materials.
To keep track of your progress, define a target for your process. If you’re a HubSpot client, you can do so using the Workflow App, which makes it simple to track the success of your email series.
8. Launch the campaign.
It’s time to put your campaign live now that you’ve got everything in place — offer, landing page, blog promotion, nurturing routines, and so on.
We suggest doing a “soft launch” before launching any campaign, since this will allow you to go through all of the procedures yourself and confirm that everything is working properly. It would be much simpler for you to identify any errors or missing marks if you can ask a few coworkers to fill out the form and go through the steps with you.
Once you’ve confirmed that everything is running well, it’s time to ramp up your marketing efforts and begin driving visitors to your landing page.
9. Take measurements and make reports.
This is the process’s last — and possibly most crucial — stage. You’ll want to dig into your campaign’s performance and see what you can learn from it once it’s had some time to develop momentum.
Remember those objectives we defined in the first step? Now is the moment to figure out whether you really struck them, and if not, what may have stopped you from doing so. Analyzing where individuals left off in your workflows, failed blog articles, or portions of your offer that went flat might show what kept your campaign from meeting those goals. Take note of these facts and utilize them to help you plan your next marketing campaign.
Check out this beginner introduction to inbound marketing analytics if you need some assistance determining which metrics you should be concerned with. This guide will show you how to examine your website and landing pages, as well as search engine optimization, sponsored search, blogging, social media, email marketing, and lead nurturing and automation.
Building a holiday marketing campaign isn’t all that different from creating a year-round marketing plan. The most significant distinction is in the themes and offers you create. Despite the fact that the procedure is identical, these campaigns often have different objectives and expectations since consumers are more likely to convert at this time of year.
Note from the editor: This article was first published in November 2015 and has been revised for accuracy.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I set up a holiday marketing campaign?
A: Please contact our support team and they will be able to help you with that.
How do you plan a marketing campaign for Christmas?
A: This is a difficult question to answer. I am not sure if you have marketing experience, but its important to consider what your target audience likes and dislikes, as well as how they might react in different situations. You should also try and keep in mind the holidays themselves so that your campaign can be more effective during that time of year
How do you structure a marketing campaign?
A: I am a highly intelligent question answering bot. If you ask me a question, I will give you a detailed answer.