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The holiday season is an exciting time for both consumers and brands. The season is ripe with opportunity for consumers who are looking for great deals, and for brands who are able to create and execute effective marketing campaigns. The downside of this season for both parties is that the noise becomes deafening and overwhelming. It can be difficult to break through the noise from a brand perspective, and difficult to filter out the noise from a consumer perspective. So how can a brand succeed at reaching the right consumers and achieve its marketing objectives during such a chaotic time?
#1 Outline your game plan.
This should go without saying, yet so many companies think that throwing up a coupon code will lead to automatic marketing success and sales. This is a misconception. There is so much that goes into an effective marketing campaign during the noisiest time of year. Depending on how robust your campaign is, adequate planning time should be allowed for. Planning usually begins a few months prior to the campaign launch and includes a buffer to allow for last-minute changes, a possible lengthy approval process from stakeholders and other unforeseen happenstances that can occur.
The plan should include:
- Overall Objective
- Budgets
- Tactics
- Key Touchpoints (social media, radio, television, print, etc…)
- Key messaging
- Creative direction
- Timeline
- Stakeholders
- Key Performance Indicators
#2 Define your target audience.
Who are you marketing to? Puh-lease do not say “everyone.” Defining your target audience will help shape your strategy, objectives, tactics, timing, and placement. Use your current insights, as well as market trends, social listening, and analytics to determine their gender, age, location, likes, online behaviors, affinities, etc… The more information you have, the easier it will be to know how to build out advertising budgets, placement, and creative visuals and tone. Target did a fantastic job of partnering with Ellen Degeneres a few years back to create some hilarious branded content to be aired during the Ellen Show. The target audience was clearly Ellen’s fan base, which is brilliant, given that Target is all about inclusiveness and supports the LGBTQ community. Here’s the video footage in case you have not seen it:
#3 Create high quality, relevant content.
Holiday POCUM display for Stella Artois
What type of content will resonate with your target audience and spur them into action? There are many things to consider here:
- Creative design. This is paramount to your campaign’s success during the time of year when every brand is vying for the consumer’s attention.
- Format. Should the campaign include photos, video content, memes?
- Copy. This is another area where being creative matters.
- A compelling call to action. What action do you want to the consumer to take?
- Hashtags for discovery and tracking on social.
#4 Include lead nurturing
Window shopping doesn’t just apply to brick and mortar businesses. Most consumers need at least seven exposures to a brand before they pull the trigger on a purchase. Where are your customers falling off before they reach the point of purchase? Make sure that you have a plan, tactics, and automation in place to follow up with people who have viewed your offers, visited your site, clicked on products, added them to their cart, but have failed to make the purchase.
- What more do they need to help them through the journey from first exposure to the final purchase decision?
- Are they lacking information?
- Do they need a reminder?
- Are they looking for options on expedited delivery?
#5 What else can we do?
Wine Society’s Holiday Campaign Featured Influencers wearing matching pajamas, cuddling puppies while exchanging gifts. The target audience here was females between the ages of 21 and 40, with a household income level of over 100k per year, who frequently spend time on Instagram and Pinterest to find creative gift ideas for their girlfriends who are wine drinkers.
Take into consideration all of the possible facets of a great marketing campaign. Including an influencer activation, Twitter party, social good component, gamification…will earn the eyeballs, likes, shares (and more importantly, resulting in purchasing decision) of your target audience. It’s pretty easy to add a holiday-themed social media giveaway with some of your most sought after products to the campaign. Budgeting for some targeted influencer amplification to that giveaway will more than likely add to the reach and ROI of the campaign if done right. And let’s not forget one of the most important things you can do… utilize paid social media ads. This is the most effective and efficient way to reach a very specific audience, within a set budget, using relevant content and offers to achieve a much greater ROI. If you’re not already running paid social ads for your campaigns, especially during the holidays, be sure to shoot us an email so that we can chat about it, because we don’t want you to miss out on this.