It’s the holiday season and that means it’s the time to start thinking about holiday promotions. Before you offer up a promotion, make sure you do the planning necessary to make it a successful one. Here are some tips for holding an effective holiday promo. 

 

Select the Right Season

 

When doing any kind of promotion or sale for the holidays, you’ve got to plan ahead and part of that is knowing which season works best for your customers and which holiday your customers are interested in. Sometimes Halloween is better than Christmas. It depends on the business and when you do you’re your best sales. If you’re a retailer and you sell Christmas gifts, your best season is, of course, going to be between November and December. First and foremost, you have to figure out what works best for you. 

Select the Right Platform

 

Next, you need to select the right platform. Are you going to do your promotion on Instagram? Are you gonna do Facebook? There are a couple of things to consider when you’re selecting your platform. The biggest consideration is where your fans hang out. If you’ve got 1500 followers on Facebook and you only have 200 followers on Instagram, this might be a golden opportunity if you’re doing a giveaway or promotion to grow your Instagram followers. However, usually, you really want to go where your audience is. I would tell you to go where you have the best audience or go to the platform that you wanna grow the most.

Know the Rules

 

Once you’ve decided where which platform you want to use, you want to know the rules of the platform. For example, if you’re going to do a promotion on Instagram, it’s perfectly OK to ask people to share and tag but you absolutely cannot do that on Facebook. It’s against the rules. You can suggest people tag and share the post but you can’t make it a factor in winning. You definitely don’t want to break any rules and have your account locked or even deleted. It’s not worth it so make sure you follow all rules for your platform.

 

Create Great Graphics

 

When doing a contest, great graphics are super important. It is very difficult to have any kind of promotion or sale if the graphics are not solid. That includes less text and more pictures. You want to make it very simple for people. They should be able to glance at the graphic and have a firm understanding of what it is you’re talking about. Is it a sale? Is it a giveaway? What is it? They should be able to glance at the graphic and know immediately what your promotion is about. You don’t have to give all the details in the graphic. That’s what the caption is for.

 

Your Promotion Should Make Sense

 

If you’re going to do a giveaway, it should really make sense for you and your company. So what does that mean? It means unless you’re Apple, don’t give away an iPad. It has to make sense for you so, if you’re a retailer, a gift card for your business makes total sense. Also, just so you guys know, statistically only 60% of people who get a gift card will actually use the gift card, and out of the people who use it 70% of those people will buy more than the gift card is worth. I am all about gift cards. For a retailer who sells tea and goodies for Christmas, giving away a gift basket is a great way to do it but so is giving away a gift card because, ideally, they’re going to spend more money than they actually get in the amount of the gift certificate. 

 

if you’re selling digital packages you can do giveaways too. I don’t like to discount services but you can give away a bonus. For instance, if you purchase this digital program between Black Friday and giving Tuesday I will put in this additional 30-minute webinar, or I will add this PDF, or this ebook that’s worth another $50 so they’re getting bonus material. Make it a giveaway instead of actually providing free services because you don’t want to start discounting your services. This can cause you to start discounting your services at other times too and open a can of worms that you want to keep closed. 

 

Make sure to give away something your audience actually wants. A great way to find out what your audience wants is to talk to them. Find out what they’re interested in. Ask them in a post. We struggle with that as a company because we provide a service instead of a product so a lot of times we may give away a service that’s worth $250 but the people winning may not appreciate the value if the service being offered. We found that we do better with smaller prizes such as apps that we use to do our Instagram posts.

 

Don’t Start to Soon

 

I really don’t want to hear about Christmas before Halloween. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. People went nuts this year and I’m going to blame Covid, but on September 1st all the Halloween decorations went up. I think it’s because people were trapped at home and needed a distraction. If you’re doing a Thanksgiving or Christmas promotion you should be ready to roll with that by November 1st. 

 

Don’t Overdo Your Emails

 

If you’re sending emails to people and you normally send one email per week, that’s awesome. Do not start sending an email every day. Just because you put ‘Twas in the subject line doesn’t make it ok. You’ll still make your audience nuts. Maintain a schedule that makes sense. It’s OK to ramp it up some if you normally only do once a month. You can send twice a month or even weekly, but you don’t want to come out of left field and bury people with emails. It’s a rare customer that handle an email every single day.

 

Don’t Overcomplicate It

 

The harder you make it to enter, the less likely people will be to participate. I see this a lot. “Go to our Facebook page and like our page, then go to our Instagram account and like that, then share our story on your story, and tag 3 friends. That’s too hard! Keep it simple. If it has more than 3 steps, it’s too long. Simplify it and make it as easy to enter as possible. 

Let the Holiday Promos Begin!

 

Hopefully, this has given you some inspiration to launch your holiday promo and gain some sales, followers, or whatever it is you hope to achieve. Happy holidays!