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The holiday season has expanded over the years to include the months surrounding Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day. This season of celebration is not just about the holidays themselves, but about the widespread feeling of excitement and cheer in the air. People spend more time with family and friends, exchange gifts, and relax at social gatherings and parties.
If you want your business to have a successful holiday season, you’ll want your take a closer look at your digital marketing and social media strategies. What are you doing to make holiday sales and keep your holiday shoppers happy? Are you just pushing your products or services, or are you really getting into the spirit of the holiday season?
Keep reading to get five marketing tips on how to make the most of your presence on social media during the holidays and into the new year.
Create Holiday Inspired Advertisements and Product Promotions
When the days start getting shorter and a chill enters the air, it’s time to start planning for holiday and New Year’s-themed advertisements.
Your ad campaigns might include a variety of festive and holiday-specific promotions for products that would be perfect as gifts or that are must-haves to start the year off right.
In addition to adding an extra sprinkle of joy to the design aspects of your social media posts and advertisements, you can offer free extras or rewards as a marketing strategy. For example, just throw an extra reminder on your social media posts that you’re offering a small extra gift or stocking stuffer with each purchase (or when they spend a certain amount of money).
Put a Spotlight on User-Generated Content
If you have a beloved holiday-related product or work in an industry that can be closely aligned with the holidays in other ways, capitalize on it! For example, if you have a pet-related business, you could encourage users to share photos of their pets bundled up/dressed for the holidays and enjoying one of your products.
Here’s another example: Your business develops software that helps teachers excel at creating virtual lesson plans. You can encourage your customers to share some touching stories or images of the awesome things planned for their class in the new year or some holiday-related activities they’ve been able to do with their students, thanks to your products.
The point is to encourage satisfied customers to take to social media with content related to your business, products, or services and then include this content into your holiday marketing strategy. For example, you can tag their posts on your Instagram story, quote their stories on Twitter, etc.
This helps your audience see that you’re an authentic and approachable business that cares about its customers, and it enables you to market yourself at the same time.
Optimize Your Social Media for Hassle-Free On-The-Go Shopping
For the grand majority of people that celebrate a gift-giving holiday, there’s no avoiding the procrastination that comes with it. In other words, many holiday shoppers are in a hurry.
Even outside of the holidays, your social media should link back to your main website and promote discounts and special deals, but this is even more important to implement leading up to the holidays.
People are scrambling to get gifts for their loved ones and are more likely to act on a good deal when they see one. If your business is running any holiday sales campaigns like free shipping for orders over a certain amount or unbeatable discounts reminiscent of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, be sure to link to them on your social media posts! It’s all about getting people to your landing page so they can learn more about your great deals and fabulous products. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt to have some festive themes waiting for customers on your website either.
The bottom line is to clearly state your deals when promoting them on social media during the holidays. Make it clear that they are going on for the holiday season only, and spice up your social media advertising with some cheerful, non-sales-y content as well.
Interact and Engage With Your Audience
In addition to asking customers to participate in fun photo ops and share holiday-inspired content related to your products and service on their social media, you can interact with them through built-in features. For example, use Instagram story features such as polls, quizzes, questions, countdowns, and more.
Though Instagram is optimized for this purpose, almost every social media platform gives several options for direct engagement with your followers, and any engagement is good engagement. For example, if you’re posting on a platform such as YouTube or Twitter, you can encourage replies in the comments. On TikTok, you can make videos inspired by popular trends, hashtags, or holiday sounds and encourage people to duet or reply to your videos with their own. If you play it right, maybe your video will even make it onto the For You Page.
Take Extra Care in How You Display Your Brand Around the Holidays
The holidays are a special time of year for so many people. Even people that don’t celebrate a traditional holiday like Hanukkah or Christmas are often drawn to the general feeling of coziness (ever heard of the Danish concept of Hygge?), closeness with family and friends, and excitement for the reset that comes with the new year.
Any successful marketer knows that you have to follow the market trends to appeal to consumers correctly, and the holiday season is one of the most powerful ‘market trends’ of all. As your business traverses the holidays and the new year, it’s essential to consider the image you’re displaying and what kind of brand identity you want to be associated with as you roll over into Q1. Just like many businesses go through an end-of-year review to make decisions about budgeting, growth goals, and new directions, it’s crucial to think about the message you’re sharing during the holiday season.
For example, Apple recently hit the nail on the head with their 2019 “Make Someone’s Holiday” commercial in which two young girls make a heartfelt and unforgettable video for their grandfather. Apple went for emotional appeal instead of being heavy-handed with product promotion, and their ad became an instant winner.
Wrap Up
The holiday season is about more than just gift-giving. People are thinking about the things that really matter to them and considering how they will reach their goals for the new year. To successfully market your business on social media during the holidays, try using a combination of holiday deals/festive product promotions and interaction and emotional connection with your audience.
There’s no reason your business’s social media can’t be used to bring in more revenue and spread holiday cheer at the same time!
