The holidays are approaching sooner than you may realize. Now is the time to start planning your holiday ad strategy. Luckily, you have us to teach you the ins and outs of planning for the holidays!

 

What worked last year? 

 

Check your analytics to find out what worked and did not work for you last year. What ads, promotions, and posts helped you have a successful holiday season? What content failed miserably? Repeat your successes and avoid repeating mistakes. What wording, offer, or prize has helped you in the past? 

 

What’s Your Goal?

Do you want to create brand awareness, generate store traffic, make sales, or capture more emails? Your objective will determine what kind of content you need to produce, how to execute the content, and which platform it should be on. Knowing what your objective is will help you determine what kind of marketing plan you should create for the holidays. 

 

Plan Ahead

 

You need to know what season your customers care about, how it can benefit your company, and how it will benefit your client. You can plan multiple promotions: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, Christmas, and New Year. Decide what holidays will do well for your company. What works for you? 

 

Provide What Your Clients Want

What makes sense to your clients? If you are a restaurant you can offer a gift certificate If you are a realtor your promotion could be a gift card to a local business. Whatever your promotion is, it needs to make sense with what you do. If your clients aren’t interested in what you offer, you won’t get any engagement. It does not have to be extravagant or have mega value, but it should be enduring enough to make people engage. The larger the prize, the less likely people are to think they can win. 

 

Select the Platform

 

Where do you want to grow? Wherever you want to see the most growth is where you need to set your promotion, ad, or contest. You will get new followers from a contest, but note that they might not be your most engaged followers. It is a trial and error learning process. 

 

Create Holiday Posts 

 

Using graphics for your holiday posting is great, but video content is even better. Video content is on the rise, and there’s no avoiding it. If you want great engagement, video is the way to go. Promote your push before you release it so that your customers know something is coming. If you are doing a Halloween promotion, now is the time to start telling your customers about it. 

 

Create hashtags and a promotion name so that you can start posting it now. People will use your name and hashtag if it is unique and you start using it now. 

 

Take Advantage of Sharing Power

If you are going to partner with another business for your promotion you will get more views. They can promote your business while you promote theirs. Their customers will start to recognize you and vice versa. It is an easy way to reach people that might not know who you are!

 

When should you boost a post? 

 

People often ask us what the difference between boosting and running an ad is. You must know when the appropriate time to boost is. When you are running a special, promotion, contest, or open house in your area you should use a boost. It needs to have a beginning and end to work best for a boost. Boosting is the simplest form of an advertisement on social media. It will work on both Facebook and Instagram. If you want to get traffic to your page, boost a post. People are more likely to see an ad later on if you boost a post early. 

 

Don’t Promote Too Early

Don’t make the mistake of promoting Christmas in October. People get mad when they see holiday ads too early. You can run a 30-day promotion, but even that can be too early. People get burnt out and start ignoring your posts if you begin promoting earlier than necessary. Seven to ten days is the ideal amount of time to run a promotion or contest. 

 

Don’t Oversell

 

The holidays are the perfect time to form a connection with your audience. Not all of your posts need to try and sell something. Learn your audience and make them interested in your content so that when you do post a promotion they are more inclined to participate. 

 

Don’t Make Your Promotion Difficult 

 

It is common to see people make their contests too difficult to follow. If your contest involves ten steps, people aren’t going to deal with it. People have short attention spans and tend to be lazy online. Simplicity is the key to a good holiday contest. 

 

Follow The Rules

When running a contest or doing a giveaway you must follow the rules of your chosen platform. You can not require customers to share or tag on Facebook. It is against their policies. We know you see people do it, but it could be you that gets in trouble. Awe would not take that risk on our page or clients’ pages. Facebook can easily turn your page off if you violate rules or policies. 

 

Tune in For a Spooky Halloween Season

 

In October we will cover all of the spooky topics. Some of these include dealing with trolls and creeps, social media sins, social media horror stories, and scary good ideas for Halloween content. You don’t want to miss out on this festive month!