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Dan Dryfhout is an avid digital marketer from Ontario. Dan loves snowboarding, mountain biking and in some occasions, long walks on the beach. He moved out west to better serve these passions, especially the beach walking...

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5 Social Media Marketing Tips for The Holidays

Remember last month? You know, that one day when you were working till midnight to get your clients’ holiday campaigns into market? Or all the days leading up to where you were stressed trying to create a strategic holiday campaign? Working in the marketing world, the holidays are always a bit hectic, but getting ahead of your holiday campaigns will alleviate stress and put you on the road to success! Today I’m going to share 5 strategies to help you succeed with your holly jolly Social campaigns, which is sure to land you on your boss’s ‘nice’ list.

5 Social MEdia Marketing Tips for the Holidays

Tip 1: Create a Strategic Content Calendar

During the holiday season, marketers become swamped with deadlines, campaign launches, and even planning for the next year. The biggest fault we find with businesses is that they do not plan and prepare for the rush, and this leads to disappointment and the holiday blues. If you ask me when you should create your holiday strategy, I’ll tell you that you’re already weeks behind!
Make sure to know your key dates and events over the holidays, and break out how long each set will run. Make sure to take note on holiday specific shopping habits as well. For example, Black Friday will tend to have a gradual ramp to towards the holiday, and its peak with be the day of. Christmas will see a large ramp towards the 25th, but on the holiday, traffic will be predictably low due to everyone being with their families.
Here at Vovia, we leverage Google Sheets to create living content calendars to ensure we take advantage of posting during key times. Not only does the Google Sheet remind you when to post, it will also allow you to create a post ahead of time to ensure you know what your posting, and that those messages are well integrated and timed.

Tip 2: Share Your Brand Story

Make sure to introduce your brand before you start selling things! And with social you can be more subtle in your approach, which we find resonates better.
How many times have you noticed a new product or company after the holidays? The period between Christmas and New Years is an excellent time for you to introduce yourself to your non-customers. This can be delivered in 2 different folds:

  1. Introduce your brand to consumers who have never heard of you – For this to be useful and authentic, businesses must be open about who they are. You have to introduce yourself, talk about what benefits you can give, and generate interest. After you generate the interest, you can then deliver a message to this new user about introductory offers, or even an offer like 10% off first purchases.
  2. Re-introduce yourself to consumers who have heard of you, but may have decided to go with a competitor – For re-introducing your brand, it is a little trickier to decide how to run a strategic campaign to this audience. Finding what potential customers biggest friction with your company is the golden key here. First, you must ask yourself “Why did John Doe decide to go with Competitor A over us?” Was it their customer service had better hours? Are you shipping rates higher? If you don’t have access to audience insights tools, I would suggest simply asking your existing customers on your social media channels what they think you can improve upon. Once you find this insight, you can craft your ads and campaigns around delivering strategic messages on how you have improved since, or by twisting the message to your benefit. Sure, you can’t beat Competitor A on how long their customer service hours are (as every company knows this is near impossible to change), but we can deliver a campaign that highlights customer testimonials on how easy our customer service was to deal with, especially in the online world with returns.

Here is an example from Sonnet – a Canadian Insurance Company. I was personally targeted for this ad after I abandoned a car insurance quote. Tell your story, and use your data to make it a relevant one!

Tip 3: Using Strong Visual Elements = Success

Every advertiser wants their chance to show you their offer, but the holidays are especially noisy and inventory is limited. This makes advertising a virtual battlefield during the holiday season! If you want to be competitive in this space and time, make sure your ads stand out with strong visual elements. It is highly recommended to leverage more than one type of ad format as well, like Video, animated GIFs, and images, to grab the user’s attention.

Here is a perfect example from Dollar Shave Club during the “Perfect Gift for Almost everyone”
Campaign. I love this creative, and it definitely grabs your attention.

Tip 4: Connect Emotionally with Your Audience

There’s a reason Facebook added reactions (love, laugh, wow, cry, angry) to the “Like” button. People want to be able to express themselves when their emotions are evoked form a Facebook post, and your businesses content has to compete with posts from your audiences’ friends, family, and their social influencers.

People are on their social networks to see what’s happening in their friends’ lives. When you create posts or ads, make sure you are making a positive impact on their social experience. Engage your audience by creating relate-able/ emotional content that will make them feel a certain way, and your ad will resonate with them on a deeper level.

Tip 5: Complete the Purchase Funnel

Now that we have great looking, engaging ads in our campaigns, it’s important to make sure consumers are falling in love with your company and completing the purchase funnel. The best tactic for lowering users in the purchase funnel is to remarket to these audiences.

My preferred remarketing tactics are as follows:

  • Website Visitors (with time spent requirements) – These are users who have visited specific pages that are related to our campaign, and are the users who have spent the most time on site.
  • Soft Engagers – These are users who have visited the site, and performed softer actions, but have not completed the full purchase. For example, shopping cart abandoners who didn’t finish buying your product.
  • Video Viewers – Videos create great awareness and generate a lot of engagement, but usually fail to drive conversions and sales on their own. get more value out of your video campaigns by remarketing these video viewers with a product focused ad to close the loop. Consumers will be far more likely to buy now that they are receptiveto your brand message and excited by your video.

I Want to Hear from You

I hope these 5 holiday marketing tips will help you out this holiday season as you plan out your social campaigns. We’ve seen these strategies work first hand, and would be happy to put these tactics to work for you.

Don’t be a Grinch! What are your tips and ‘must haves’ for your holiday campaigns? What kind of remarketing lists do you leverage? Let me know if the comments below!