How to Plan a Perfect Holiday Social Media Campaign: 6 Tips That Will Help You Out

The holiday season is a time of massive sales. It doesn’t matter what holiday people celebrate – Thanksgiving day, Christmas day, Black Friday, or Cyber Monday. People buy different gifts while the eCommerce business experiences a growth of income.

Therefore, if you want to make a breakthrough with your sales during holidays, you should run a social media campaign.

But how to stand out with your social media campaign when your competitors are on the alert as well?

In this guide, you will learn how to plan a #SocialMediaCampaign during holidays, along with a few actionable tips. Click To Tweet

Shall we begin?

Mistakes That You Should Avoid In Your Holiday Social Media Campaign

Right before you dive into a holiday madness, you should prepare your social media campaign. Keep in mind that your time is limited. Thus, you must run a social media campaign fast and make sure it will pay off.

During the preparation of the campaign, you should avoid a few mistakes like using a profanity filter, that can hit your pocket and lead you to a low volume of sales. Let’s review them.

• You don’t analyze your competitors

Competitor analysis is a crucial part of any business model. Marketers tend to research competitors constantly. It helps them keep the business afloat and develop new strategies and ideas on how to win the competition.

Nevertheless, marketers put competitor analysis aside during the holidays while being obsessed with other activities. It is a big mistake that you shouldn’t make.

Instead, try to keep your eye peeled for social media campaigns that your competitors run during holidays.

How can it help you?

First of all, you will be able to understand why they have more sales compared to you. Secondly, you might get some fresh and unique ideas for package deals. Eventually, you will get more sales.

Don’t neglect to research your competitors’ activities during holidays.

• You don’t send “thanks” emails to the customers

One thing is to sell your products to your customers, and the other thing is to make these customers loyal to your brand. In other words, don’t shy away from sending “thanks” emails to your customers.

Devote your time to send these “thanks” emails. You will see that your customers will appreciate it.

• You don’t draw attention to the level of customer engagement

People are eager to buy more from you during the holidays. Therefore, the level of engagement on your social media profiles is high. You should use this activity of your customers for your benefit.

How to do this?

You can do this by monitoring social media posts and ads. Pay attention to what people ask in the comments. Get ready to answer every question your potential customers ask. Otherwise, you might lose a customer.

• You neglect retargeting

Retargeting plays a fundamental role in your marketing campaigns. It helps you reach out to a warm audience with a targeted message. This message nudges people to convert into paid customers.

Unfortunately, many companies neglect using ad retargeting while prefer to level up the sales by focusing on cold traffic. This approach is exactly what you need.

Your social media campaign will have more chances to increase sales by targeting people who visited your site. And your website will have lots of visits during the fests.

Don’t make the above-mentioned mistakes.

How to Run Social Media Campaign During Holidays

Now, when you are aware of what mistakes you should avoid, it is time to run through a step-by-step process of creating holiday social media campaigns.

This process involves five stages. Let’s review them.

Work on creating a social media marketing calendar

You can’t miss the holiday time when you have an opportunity to get more sales. And one of the first places to start your sales campaigns is social media.

Social media allows you to create and publish posts that would sell your products.

First and foremost, you should take care of creating a social media marketing calendar. It will help you prioritize the posts and schedule them for publishing.

What should this calendar include?

• Branded images
• Captions
• CTA
• URLs of the landing pages
• Teasers
• Received approvals

Try to create engaging posts that induce emotions.

Submit your ads for approval

You should approve your social media ads preliminarily. It will help you increase sales by retargeting campaigns and targeting cold traffic.

All major social media platforms allow you to schedule your ads. In other words, you can choose start and end dates for each campaign you’re going to run.

You may rest assured that your social media ads won’t be launched accidentally.

Why should you plan social media ad campaigns ahead?

Because the holiday season is always tough in terms of the number of social media ads companies launch. Therefore, your social media ad might take some time to get approved.

Plan your social media ads at a reasonable time.

Get ready to invest

PPC will cost higher during holidays. The necessity for this is that the level of competition rises. Moreover, many advertisers are willing to bid higher to win more sales.

If you want to be competitive, you will have to raise your bids as well. So just like investing in the proper tools and WordPress plugins for enhancing your blog or buying a fast web host to rank higher on Google, you’ll have to go the extra mile to advertise your product on social media.

Likely, you can set up a bid limit on Instagram and Facebook. It will help you control your money outlay.

What’s more important, it would be great for you to announce your sales right before they happen. Notify your audience about promotions and big events that will go live soon.

You must impress your audience with attractive offers in advance. Thus, it will help your potential customers find out what benefits they can get if they buy from you.

Brainstorm ideas around holiday messages

You can’t launch a social media holiday campaign without a proper message to your audience. When you brainstorm the message, you must follow one golden rule – don’t prioritize sales over your attitude towards customers.

What does it mean?

The message must reflect the idea of the holiday that is taking place right now. It must bring joy, positive emotions and reflect your loyalty.

The best approach is to unite a holiday theme with your branding. Again, don’t put a focus on making more sales during the fests. You should rather work on creating engagement with the audience than sell.

You can use different content design tools that will help you create outstanding holiday social media advertising—for example, a free online ad maker from Visme. You can either create a design social media ad from scratch or use one of the templates.

As you can see from the example, the message reflects the holiday spirit and communicates with the audience. It offers benefits and nudges less to make a purchase directly.

Be open to the influx of messages from your potential customers

Be ready to receive tons of messages at the time of the holidays. Thus, make sure that you have cleared your inbox and have a team member who would handle all the upcoming messages.

You should expect to answer the messages around such things as – shipping dates, order status, product information, discounts, etc.

You must show a high level of customer support for all costs.

Tips on How to Boost Up Holiday Social Media Campaign

To boost a social media campaign during the holiday season, you might need to apply some additional strategies. Thus, let’s review six actionable tips.

• Feel free to share downloadable resources at zero costs

You know that holidays are a great opportunity to gain more traction with your audience. And you can do this by sharing courses that people can download free of charge. The only thing you need from them in return is their emails.

Why do you need to gather email addresses?

When you have an email list, you can be in touch with your potential customers directly. By using a simple email newsletter service, you will send a bulk email blast that would help you drive conversions for your products.

However, to get people to share their email addresses, you must use an actionable lead magnet. The goal of this lead magnet is to provide people with a value they can get by choosing your product.

Here are some examples that you can use by yourself:

• an exclusive offer
• a free online course
• a discount
• a second product unit with a 50% discount

Remember, your purpose is to attract your potential customers by offering something “for free” and incline them to share their emails.

• Launch a holiday giveaway on Instagram

If you launch a holiday social media campaign on Instagram, you should run a giveaway. It will help you promote your products, increase the number of followers, and boost brand awareness.

A key component of any giveaway is its planning. For instance, let’s say you want to promote a new product during the holidays. You need to raise awareness around the product foremost. Hence, you should plan a giveaway taking this nuance into account.

When you decide on your goals, you can start preparing a strategy on how to accomplish them with the help of giveaways. You need to think about a giveaway theme, structure, and rules.

Let’s say your giveaway’s goal is to get more followers. Thus, you will have to think about the type of prize, the rules of entry, and how you’re going to retain your followers.

Another great way to benefit from running giveaways is by partnering up with other brands within the same niche. It will allow you to target each other’s audiences and reach out to a huge number of new potential customers with a single post.

• Use Influencer marketing in your social media campaigns

Influencer marketing is a powerful tool that helps businesses spread the word about their products or services. Therefore, you can build a partnership with Instagram influencers and skyrocket your sales at the time of the holidays.

When you’re planning to build a partnership with some influencer, you must stick to these two conditions:

1. Be ready to represent a clear idea of what you want to achieve, how your product should be featured, and the number of sales you’re going to make
2. Create a straightforward pitch (an influencer should understand your claims easily)

Make sure your product resonates with the target audience of the influencer.

• Show appreciation for your audience by running campaigns

How to make your customers loyal to your brand?

You can earn loyalty from the customers by taking care of them. And the best way to do this is to run a customer appreciation campaign.

There are different ways to show your followers care. Let’s review some of them.

1. Use user-generated content to give your customers a virtual shout-out
2. Create a promo code for your followers specifically
3. Send simple “thanks” emails

The more you appreciate your customers, the more loyalty you’ll get in return.

• Give back to the community

Charity has always been in trend. People like brands that are open to give back to the community.

Did you know that 33% of consumers prefer to buy from brands with an active social position?

You can support a charity that would reflect the business values of your brand and would resonate with your audience. Other than that you can donate some sum of the holiday sales to a charity. Believe it or not but you will get a reward for this activity eventually.

• Launch a new holiday-inspired product

A holiday product release is a good opportunity to build more awareness around your new product.

A product launch takes lots of time. It requires you to develop the product, plan a launch strategy, create launch assets, prepare a promotion, and so on.

Hence, you should get everything ready tight before the holidays start. Don’t neglect a holiday season to give a boost to a brand new product you have released.

Feel free to use these tips in your practice and benefit from holiday social media campaigns.

• Look for alternative channels

Most of your competitors will probably publish on the usual marketing channels – Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. – where competition to reach your target audience will be difficult.

Instead, think about using a channel like Quora, which has over 500 million monthly unique visitors. Creating content on Quora is a great way to demonstrate your knowledge of relevant topics and building an optimized acquisition channel.

There are some Quora marketing tools that can help you tremendously build your Quora presence. For example, the Q-stats Quora Marketing Tool shows you statistics and SEO insights for every Quora question.

You can see what keywords are ranking on Google and even receive an Opportunity Ranking Score for every question. Find questions people are asking about your product or industry and bring value to them!

To Sum Up

Running a social media campaign isn’t complicated, even during the holidays. You need to plan it ahead of time and implement the tips suggested in the post. Make sure you tie your campaign to the holiday theme. Prioritize building relationships with the customers over sales. Think out of the box and take care of your brand awareness.

If you have more holiday social media campaign tips, feel free to share them in the comments.