The holiday season is one of the most popular to run a holiday campaign, and it’s simple to know why: purchasing is at an all-time high. Black Friday and Cyber Monday kick things off and all these Christmas and Hanukkah presents won’t purchase themselves. That is not even accounting for the holiday parties and the groceries and the holidays to warmer climes or to reconnect with families or hit the slopes.
These campaigns could be very, very effective. A four-week Christmas sweepstakes marketing campaign won one of our clients 97,000 leads. However the calendar year is full of holidays, and in case you’re in a very competitive market, you could be hesitant to pit your Christmas or New Year’s marketing campaign against those of your rivals.
Before you start to stress, here are some questions to ask yourself before you slot a holiday-themed marketing campaign into your calendar.
What’s your followers’ favorite holiday?
In 2011, Harris Interactive polled more than 2000 Americans to ask what their favorite holiday was. Of course, the top three were Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween. However, you could be focusing on a more particular demographic than just ‘people who live in the same country’. Christmas and Thanksgiving hold onto the 1 and 2 spots regardless of demographic, however, America’s third favorite holiday depends upon both age and gender. Baby Boomers and seniors (everybody 47 and up) and males rank the Fourth of July above Halloween.
In case your customer base is international, or at least multicultural, then you may consider looking into which holidays are most popular with the different ethnicities in your followers. Including campaigns tailored to them in your marketing calendar is a powerful pledge of good faith, demonstrating outside-the-box thinking and a global mindset.
What holiday is closest to your product?
To put it bluntly? When you sell turkeys, you are probably not going to run a St. Patrick’s Day marketing campaign. It may make news when you did, however, that doesn’t make it a natural fit for your firm, brand, or product.
The answer may not be as clear-cut as that instance, so take the time to inductively figure out the most ‘on-brand’ holiday. What demographics are your goods or services most popular with? Take this into consideration, however, don’t take it literally. Kids’ hockey equipment could be bought by their mothers, however, that does not make Mother’s Day an appropriate holiday marketing campaign opportunity for Bauer or Easton’s youth shin guards.
One of our clients who had great success on Mother’s Day is a site called The Grommet. The Grommet serves as an incubator for entrepreneurs, giving shoppers a platform to purchase all types of local and handmade products. This makes them a natural place to buy presents; it’s a cliche, however, there’s something for everybody. The best holiday social media campaigns connect the best of your merchandise with the best aspects of the holiday.
What goal do you want to achieve?
The social media marketing objective you are pursuing impacts what sort of marketing campaign you select to run; the type of marketing campaign you run effects which holiday is the most appropriate chance. This is a good chance to look at what your competitors are doing with their social media campaigns; you have the opportunity to zig once they’re zagging.
Most commonly, marketers run holiday campaigns for lead generation. This makes sense; the most common type of campaign run on our platform regardless of launch date is our social sweepstakes. However, organizations have had great success with user-generated content material holiday campaigns too. One of our educational clients chose to run a Photo Contest for Christmas, getting students to send their most festive snapshots. As a small business school, it did not see the similar numbers as a few of our more prominent media clients, however, it wasn’t expecting to.
Do you want to run more than one-holiday campaign?
Unless you have many different segments in your fanbase (say, when you were a TV station or a very giant consumer packaged goods organization), we do not advise running multiple social marketing campaigns at the similar time. However, you may want to run more than one-holiday social media marketing campaign over the course of your advertising and marketing calendar. Indeed, The Grommet selected to run a matching Father’s Day sweepstakes to follow their winning Mother’s Day marketing campaign. Because the campaigns followed so closely, the Father’s Day marketing campaign was capable of surf on the similar wave of goodwill. Not to undermine the proud parents who love these holidays, however, each of those holidays put together are not the equivalent of Christmas or Thanksgiving. Running campaigns for the 3 large fall/winter holidays is a trickier business unless your audience is huge enough that you won’t exhaust them, or your campaigns are sufficiently different. Three sweepstakes may not work, however, a poll, an image contest, and sweepstakes may do the trick.
When you do not want to run a holiday campaign on more than one holiday, then choose your favorite holiday and enjoy it to the fullest. That is what holidays are for.