It’s never too early to be talking about the festive season, especially when it comes to your marketing. This is the busiest time of the year for most businesses, especially e-commerce businesses. With Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and New Year all happening within 3 months, you should have your plan set for what you want to do during this period ahead of time. If you haven’t got a full plan yet, or you’re not sure what to do for social media over this period, we’ve got you covered with some tips to help you make the most of your social media through the festive season. So let’s jump into these tips!
1. Learn from Previous Data
Whether you did or didn’t do something over the festive season on social media, being able to look at your historical data in Google Analytics and Facebook is hugely beneficial. You can use the data to look where you can make changes and improvements, where things worked well that you could think about replicating this year and which social media platform gave you your best ROI.
If you didn’t do anything over the festive season last year, you can look at your numbers and set yourself a target to achieve by running some seasonal ideas and promotions this year to then compare it to. It’s a constant cycle, so make sure you’re taking advantage of it.
2. Competitions and Giveaways
While this is something you can (and should) be running year-round, the festive season is one of the best times to run a competition or a giveaway. People always love free things, even more so when it’s around Christmas and the festive season. While it is ideal to be able to give away your own items and products over the festive season, it might not always generate the return and results you want. Consider giving away something that is popular, for example, in 2021 the hot item of the winter season was a Hotel Chocolat Velvetiser. While the item might not be relevant to your audience, more of them will engage as the winner will find it’s either a great free gift for themselves or something they can gift to a family member. Just make sure you factor in the cost of prizes and budget to potentially boost it (if you run it on Facebook).
3. Create a Holiday Calendar
Focusing heavily on the month of December here, it’s a good idea to use December as the month to make your social media channels as fun as possible. The easiest way to do this would be to create a separate holiday calendar that highlights all the fun and entertaining Christmas-themed days that you can take advantage of. A few examples include; Christmas Card Dar (9th), Christmas Jumper Day (9th), Gingerbread House Day (12th), and National Hot Chocolate Day (13th). It’s easy enough to incorporate these days into your social media schedule, and would likely provide a variety of fun and season posts to use to engage your audience.
4. Take Full Advantage of Black Friday & Cyber Monday
If you’re an e-commerce business, you should be well ahead of planning your Black Friday sales campaign already. (Points to those of you who already have it finished). This is one of the busiest times for e-commerce retailers, and it’s something you should be focused on capitalising on. For example, are you planning on running any sales or offering a discount specifically for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? If not, you should be. In a time where more and more people are shopping online, this is the perfect time for you to aim for a huge ROI to give you a boost heading into the rest of the festive season.
5. Christmas Gift Guides
You should look to start offering a Christmas Gift Guide towards the middle of November, this way to can tie in with your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns on social media. If you’re an e-commerce business, this should be a no-brainer as Christmas approaches. Particularly as a huge number of people are influenced by what they see on social media during the festive season, you’d be missing out on a huge opportunity to not be taking part in producing a Christmas Gift Guide. This also applies if you are in the food sector of e-commerce, you can adjust the idea to apply to recipes using your products. Bonus points if they are Christmas-themed recipes!
And there you have it! Five helpful tips to help you get started with your festive season social media marketing for 2022. There are so many different things you can do with social media, especially organic social media as it’s free marketing. Take advantage of the festive season and be sure to capitalise on it to get the best results for you and your business this year.
If you need more help with social media marketing, whether paid or organic, contact us at Colewood to see how we could help.
