The holiday season is a time for giving. If you own a business, it’s also a time for selling. But in order to have a successful holiday season, you should prepare an effective holiday social media campaign strategy.
What exactly does that entail? InnoVision Marketing Group is a full-service marketing and digital advertising agency. We’ll assist you in planning, crafting, and executing a social media campaign strategy targeted toward consumers looking for that perfect gift this holiday season.
So if you want to close out the year with a successful quarter and carry that success through to the New Year, keep reading to find out how.
Research
If you’ve conducted a holiday social media campaign before, take a look at what worked and what didn’t. When and how did you get the most engagement?
If you are just starting your business or haven’t crafted a holiday social media campaign strategy before, take a look at the insights on your past social media posts. What was most popular among your followers? Think about ways to incorporate similar posts into your holiday social media campaign.
Also, take a look at your audience and engagement across each social media platform. The platform where you have the largest following is most likely going to be the one where you want to concentrate your efforts and will offer you the biggest payout.
Be sure to use the analytics tools for each platform that will be a part of your holiday social media campaign. Specifically, take a look at the demographics to get a sense of who your audience is and what’s most likely to appeal to them. This will help you in crafting a targeted social media campaign strategy that will appeal to your followers and get you the biggest return.
Strategize
Think about what your end goal is for your holiday social media campaign, whether that’s booking more appointments, selling more products, or just gaining a bigger following. This will assist you in determining which social media campaign strategy will likely work best for you.
For instance, if you’re hoping to increase sales, you may want to do December daily deals, where you offer a special discount on a new product each day leading up to the holidays. Create a sense of urgency by letting your audience know the offer is good for a limited time only.
On the other hand, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you may want your holiday social media campaign strategy to be centered on the “spirit of giving.” If so, focus on giveaways that generate buzz and excitement among your followers. Ask them to comment, like, tag a friend, and/or share your post, for instance, in order to be entered. This will help you increase brand awareness and grow your audience during the holiday season.
Promote, Promote, Promote
The key to a successful holiday social media campaign is to let your followers know it’s coming by promoting the campaign in advance. Make them aware ahead of time of what day the campaign will kick off and create buzz around the surprises that are to come.
For instance, if you have a weekly newsletter, let your customers know to monitor your social media pages or turn on alerts for your posts to snag the best deals and/or participate in giveaways. You should also promote the campaign across all your social media platforms. By building anticipation in the lead-up to your campaign launch, you can ensure you maximize your reach and engagement during the holiday shopping season.
Execute
The key to successfully executing a holiday social media campaign is to create compelling, creative, and clever content. If it suits your brand, be witty and have fun with it. When you have fun, your audience generally will too.
Try to create themes for your content. For instance, if you opt for an Advent Calendar theme with daily deals, you can create an interactive graphic for followers to click in order to be routed to your website and reveal the deal of the day. Or you could create visually compelling content through photos and videos. Whatever your team’s creative strengths are, be sure to capitalize on them in order to execute the most successful campaign possible.
Track
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of your holiday social media campaign strategy, be sure to track your growth and profit along the way. Keep track of how much you grow your audience on each platform during the campaign’s duration and keep track of the sales generated by the campaign through a tool like Google Analytics.
Through Google Analytics, you can even track the campaign’s ROI (return on investment). So if you’re spending money on sponsored posts to promote your campaign, for example, you’ll have an idea of whether your investment is actually paying off.
Capitalize
Once the holidays are over, don’t let your new customer base and audience just fall by the wayside. Keep them engaged into the New Year. Start a hashtag campaign so your followers can upload photos of their new product. Encourage and incentivize participation from your followers so you can capitalize on your success and carry the momentum through to the next quarter. Keeping the buzz around your business going will help you start off the New Year with a bang.
Analyze
Once the holidays are over and you’ve had some time to recuperate after the busy time, use the information you’ve gathered to plan your next moves. What worked and what didn’t?
Take a look at your ROI and figure out where you saw the most growth and gains. Did you receive customer feedback? If so, incorporate that feedback into next year’s holiday social media campaign strategy.
Whether your holiday social media campaign was a success or left some room for improvement, use it to your advantage by actively looking for takeaways from the experience.
If you want more tips on how to plan and execute a successful social media campaign strategy for the holidays, let the experienced marketing team at InnoVision assist. Whatever your goals are, we want to help you accomplish them and grow your business this holiday season.
