Holiday Marketing Campaign Planning Tips & Resources

Were you thinking about the Holidays this summer? Neither was he.
Here are some ways to pick up holiday marketing efforts quickly and with results in mind.
This is the most important time of year for sales. Q4 is the time when you make or break your income goals, and your objective should always be to give your team a clear pathway to achieving success.
We are working on holiday marketing strategy all-year-round. If you haven't been, then now is the time to get started.
Now is the time to launch holiday efforts
Even if it’s as small as an email blast with inspirational holiday content, you have to acknowledge your customer who is making their wish-list, planning for events, decorations, etc. Regardless of what you do now, at least make the holiday marketing plan your top priority.

Find Inspiration - Both In and Outside of Your Industry
One of our favorite ways to get started is with the fun stuff – find creative and campaigns for holiday that inspire you. We have some great marketing projects that can get you started on inspiring ways to connect with your audience during the holiday season. But here are also some tips to get the ball rolling:
- Look within your industry and outside of it for years past holiday marketing inspiration. Our process is to start first outside of our industry, such as retail. This is helpful for zooming out before you dive into direct comparable research inside your industry.
- Seek ways to make it sustainable, useful and thoughtful to your audience, like our Holiday Gift Giving Guide with HipCityVeg that also doubled as wrapping paper for their fast casual restaurant audience (and also great content for the advent calendar!)
- Photography, animation, content inspiration is everything when you’re pairing it with paid advertising on social media or even old school print ads. Last year we focused on gift cards with the Starr Restaurant group and ended up surpassing our sales goal by 20% because the content was so fun and festive

Know your audience, meet them where they’re at
Building trust with your audience is all about meeting them on the channels that matter to them (and where they spend their most time).
It’s a proven fact in marketing that people need to hear something and see it 5+ different ways. So that means your plan should include several channels, from radio to email blasts and social media ads – hit em hard so they can’t forget or ignore you!

Develop a clear plan
- Set the goals clearly (ex: sell these 3 products, with these sales goals)
- Target a clear audience, but at the same time create groups so that your messaging relates to them, for example – CORPORATE, STUDENT, HOUSEHOLDS

Hire an agency (EXPERTISE, STRATEGY, EXECUTION)
- Create the creative assets and messaging, in an outline that everyone understands
- Make the timeline clear
- Measure your effectiveness and create a Year End Report to rally the team around improvements for next year
Smart companies increase their internal team’s capacity by hiring the best creatives who have experience in achieving the results.
Here are some useful Holiday Marketing Plan resources
How to set SMART marketing goals you can measure this year
Some great examples of marketing campaigns and tips for 2022 from HubSpot.
Reporting tool for year over year or quarterly results here