How to use holidays to enhance your marketing
With 4th of July coming up I wanted to take a look at how you can use holidays in your marketing strategy to help drive business goals. Holidays are a great way to tap into the popularity of what people are talking about. It's kind of like when you see something trending or going viral and then you see brands including that viral thing in their email or social media posts. If a lot of people are already talking about a subject, it is a great opportunity to quickly create some relevant content and join the conversation!
Plan Ahead - Prep and Timing is Key
I encourage you to take a look at the calendar and mark upcoming holidays in your content and marketing calendar. Planning ahead and staying organized is crucial when it comes to holiday marketing! The more time you give yourself to plan and create quality content, the better. It really sucks to be scrambling before a holiday, trying to throw something relevant together. More often than not, it ends up being a waste of time because you're not going to see the positive increase in traffic because you haven't put out a quality product. Plus, you don't want holiday marketing to get in the way of you enjoying some time off with friends and family! Hustlers need holidays too.
Make it Relevant - Relate the Holiday to Your Business
There is nothing worse than when brands send out holiday communications without relating them back to their business! What is the point of sending out a "Happy 4th of July...Check Out Our [insert product here]." It feels really impersonal and will not win you any followers or customers. If you have products that directly relate to the occasion, like a baby clothing store that is promoting their Abe Lincoln or Obama onesies for President's Day, then that's simple and straight forward. But what if you're a skincare brand trying to send out a Halloween post? Well you could include messaging about the 3 products you need to bring your skin back to life (get it...zombies) after all that Halloween makeup. It's let's you join the holiday conversation, while directly promoting your products. Another example is this post your reading right now! I sell a service (helping hustlers succeed), so how do I get in on the conversation? I write a post about how business owners can take advantage of holidays in their marketing, see what I did there?
Get Pretty - Image Based Holiday Marketing
Pinterest and Instagram have made images and visuals a really important part of holiday marketing. If you open up your Pinterest feed in the next couple of days, I can almost guarantee that a decent portion of it will be dedicated to red white and blue crafts, recipes, and decorations. This means that the faster you can create not only written but visual content to get up on social media ahead of a holiday, the better. Pinterest is a huge web traffic driver, so put together a really unique DIY or how-to, take some high quality photos and get those things online! I guarantee you'll see a bump in followers, engagement, or traffic (depending on your goals) just due to people looking at hashtags related to that upcoming holiday. And what's even better is if you can create evergreen holiday content! That means you can but out that content, tweak and update it a little bit, and push it out around that holiday for years to come.Holiday marketing is a great way to get your brand/product/business in front of people who may not know who you are. It's a fantastic way to expose your company to new potential clients and customers. And best of all, it's a chance to have fun and be really creative with your marketing! So I challenge you to choose an upcoming holiday and make a plan for how to take advantage of it in your marketing strategy.
How do you use holidays to promote your product or business?
