Gearing Up for the Holidays: What’s Your Business Doing This Year?
It’s been a long hot summer, but fall is finally approaching. And with the turning of the autumn leaves come the holidays, a steady string of special days stretching from Halloween all the way up to New Years’ Day. Each one is a unique marketing opportunity just waiting for you to find a way to creatively use it to ramp up your sales, establish your presence in the market or maybe carve out a new one. Are you ready to take advantage of this marketing cornucopia you’re about to receive? In the first of our series on Gearing Up for the Holidays, we’ll take a look at what you’ll need to boost your marketing this fall.
The first and most obvious thing you’ll need is a plan. You’ll want to know what you intend to accomplish with your holiday marketing plan. Do you want to build up your customer base? Gain new contacts? Build up your brand to the point that you’re dominating the social media scene? Maybe you want to introduce a new and exciting product to the masses and autumn is the perfect time to unveil it? Perhaps it’s time to expand out of your comfort zone and aggressively break into a new market. Whatever your goals are, make sure the rest of your marketing reflects them. By making a plan before the holiday rush starts you give yourself a chance to get everyone on the same page, anticipate any problems, and hit the ground running.
If you don’t have a plan in place, that’s okay. You have time. Not every marketing campaign needs months of prep time. Some of the best campaigns this year have come together quickly as companies scrambled to try to keep up with the changing conditions caused by Covid-19. If a large, unwieldly company can adjust quickly, so can you.
Now that you have a plan, the next step is to implement it. When you made your plan, you anticipated any problems that might arise and how you were going to deal with them. Now is the time to take these ideas off paper and put them into practice. There will, of course, be challenges you didn’t foresee, because that’s simply how life works. That’s okay. A plan is a flexible document not an iron commandment. Stay light on your feet and be ready to pivot when the unexpected happens.
Most of all, you need be prepared to have some fun. Sure, marketing is serious business, but holiday marketing is a chance to get creative, break outside your usual norms and even crack a smile. Think of the great holiday ads you’ve seen over the years-- the ones that still make you laugh or conjure up warm feelings. Those are the ads that stick with customers.
No matter what may be happening in the world, the holidays are still a special time for just about everyone, even the most miserly Scrooge. They’re also a special time to take your marketing to the next level, so don’t miss out.