The Weekly Authority #35
By: Digital Authority Co
Tags: Marketing, Tips, Holidays, Social Media, Digital Marketing

Essential Holiday Marketing Tips: How to Maximize Your Marketing Efforts & Results over the Holidays

Happy Thanksgiving! The holiday season is officially here!

For many professionals and business owners, the holiday season can mean working late or odd hours to try to get everything done while buying presents, planning for and attending celebrations, etc.

To help you take care of all of your business’ marketing needs during the hectic holiday season, I’m sharing some useful tips that have worked for me in the past.

These insider tricks can help you keep track of everything, not miss a beat and do so with less stress — and more time to spend on other things (like enjoying the holiday season with your family). They can also help you see better results (and more new leads) from your holiday marketing campaigns!

8 Effective Ways to Manage Marketing Campaigns during the Busy Holiday Season

1. Plan ahead — The holidays are no time to just ‘wing it’ or take your marketing campaigns day to day. If you really want to maximize results and not waste your time (or other resources) — especially during a season when assets like time can be really limited, figure out your goals and objectives ahead of time. Then, establish a process for measuring the results so you know what is more (and less) effective.

2. Build (& test) your landing pages now — Taking the ‘plan ahead’ tip one step further, get your key landing pages in place ASAP. These pages can be key parts of your online sales funnel, and waiting until the last minute to put them together can increase the chances that mistakes will be made or that landing pages are just not as good as they could (or should) be.

3. Look for ideas everywhere — You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it’s time to develop and rollout a holiday digital marketing campaign. Instead, save yourself some time by figuring out what has worked in the past and what may be working for your competition (or even businesses outside of your industry). Then, put your own spin on it and carefully monitor the results.

4. Automate what you can — Take advantage of scheduling (and other) tools to automatically take care of various aspects of your digital marketing campaigns for the holidays. For instance, you can use Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and/or Mass Planner to manage your holiday social media posts. For your email marketing needs, try using the scheduling options provided by Active Campaign or Mailchimp. With these (and other) tools, you can set up a series of social media posts, emails, blogs, etc. to be published and/or distributed days (or even weeks or months) ahead of time.

5. Know your deadlines — Whether you’re working with campaign deadlines, publishing deadlines or shipping deadlines, make sure you know exactly when they are. If you’re going to be juggling various deadlines, set up a tracking system for these deadlines, and consider creating “alerts” for yourself so that you whenever an important deadline is just around the corner.

6. Consider whether to expand and/or limit your efforts over the holidays — While many businesses heavily step up their digital marketing efforts over the holidays, few (if any) have unlimited resources. This means that it’s important to determine whether you should expand your digital marketing efforts over the holidays and, if so, which ones in particular you should focus on. In some cases, it may be necessary to scale back some efforts so you can focus on others. For instance, you may want to increase email marketing and social media marketing on Facebook and Pinterest over the holidays while scaling back your marketing efforts on Twitter and Instagram.

7. Pay attention to staff levels and capacity — Not only may your staff dwindle during the holidays as people take time off, but the staff who do remain may be overloaded with more clients and more work to shoulder. So pay attention to vacation requests, and have a strategy for offsetting surging workloads (like hiring temporary holiday staff or outsourcing certain efforts), bringing me to the final tip which is to….

8. Hire a pro to step in when necessary — Whether you’ll be off for an extended holiday, you want to have a marketing professional at the helm, or it’s simply time to entirely revamp your digital marketing strategies for the holidays, the guidance of a pro can be your key to success (and better results!). And that can mean more new leads and more new clients for your business.

Top Digital Marketing Mistakes that Even Big Companies Make during the Holidays

Poor preparation or no planning, which leads to poor campaign execution

Campaigns not going out on time

Campaigns not going to the proper audience

Not being ready for an influx of clients

Failing to have landing pages for corresponding ads

Sending people to cluttered, poorly drafted or off-putting landing pages.

Do you have any tips or tricks to share about keeping up with digital marketing over the holidays? What has been more (or less) successful for you?

Tell me more about your experiences — and digital marketing plans for the holiday season — on Facebook and LinkedIn. And:

Check out Digital Authority’s latest blog for more useful tips on digital marketing for your brand over the holidays.

Stay posted for the upcoming weekly when I’ll be making a big announcement about one of the latest (and free!) offerings from Digital Authority!

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to get a hold of me on social media to ask a question about any facet of digital marketing, including Digital Authority’s holiday specials, or just to say ‘hi.’ I look forward to hearing from you!

(note: In the spirit of full disclosure, some links are an affiliate links, which means that I may get a commission if you decide to purchase anything from X company. I only recommend products & systems that I use or have used and love myself, so I know you’ll be in good hands.)

(This article was originally published on DigitalAuthority.co)