No matter what time of year it is, there’s always a big event on the horizon: the holiday season. 

Even though it may still seem like the distant future, the holiday season is a key marketing event for brands, and soon digital advertising for the holidays will be taking over the digital landscape. 

Getting your holiday marketing campaign ready in time can be the difference between ending the year on a high note, or getting a sack full of coal. 

Because there’s so much pressure and competition around holiday marketing campaigns, you might feel lost about how to proceed. 

Thankfully, we’ve put together this step-by-step guide of all the considerations you need to take before, during, and after planning your holiday campaign. 

Take a look at our tips and tricks, and find holiday marketing examples that will inspire your brand to take holiday marketing to the next level.

Step 3: Defining the Target Audience

Not only do you need to have clearly defined goals, but you also need to know who your holiday marketing campaign is targeting. 

If you leave your potential audience too broad, you won’t be able to create the personalized messaging and content needed to drive the most conversions. 

While you may have buyer personas or customer profiles already built out for your digital marketing and content marketing efforts, take the time to research and refine your targets to relate to the holidays in particular. 

This is an important season, and understanding your audience becomes that much more important during peak selling periods.

Step 4: Creating an Offer & Landing Page

Once you’ve picked your theme, set your goals, and segmented and defined your audience, it’s time to put together your holiday offer. 

Whether you want to create an eBook, whitepaper, online course, helpful resource, video, product deal, or other assets, you’ll need to put together a compelling offer that audiences will want. 

After you’ve created the holiday offer that your campaign will center around, you’ll need to design the landing page that your traffic will funnel into. 

Your landing page needs to have engaging and compelling content, visuals, and forms that capture information and get you ready for holiday marketing in full force.

(And if you want our tip, interactive landing pages are sure to increase your conversions.)

Honestly, this is the part where people start to overthink things and get lost in the weeds—obsessing over the color of a button or whether that snowflake GIF is “too much.” Just keep it simple and direct. Your users are probably getting hit with a thousand holiday deals per day, so making your offer ridiculously clear (and unmissable) is the only thing that will actually get their attention. You don’t have to win a design award, unless that’s really your vibe, but get them to the point as quickly as possible.

Also, consider running a quick A/B test before going all-in on your main campaign assets. Even small tweaks—a headline, a slightly punchier CTA, or swapping out an image—can end up making a surprisingly big difference in conversions. You don’t need a full-blown analytics team for this; there are plenty of lightweight tools out there. The point is, don’t just set it and forget it. Tinker, measure, and trust the numbers, even if your gut says otherwise.

Step 5: Designing a Promotion Plan & Nurturing Leads

After your offer has been created and you’ve set up your landing page, you’ll need to develop the distribution plan that gets your offer in front of your specific target audience. 

A promotion plan can have many different touchpoints, but many will include: 

• Email Marketing
• Blogging
• PPC Ads
• Social Media 

After your leads come in through your distribution channels, you can add them to your top-of-funnel efforts and create specific holiday nurtures that drive them towards a purchase decision. 

Nurturing typically takes place through emails, so create a template that fits your holiday marketing campaign theme and use visual elements that encourage users to click and open your emails to move them further down the buyer’s journey towards a sale.

Step 6: Considering an Influencer Strategy

An influencer strategy can help you take your holiday campaign to the next level by putting your offer in front of a much wider audience than your typical promotion techniques can achieve. 

An influencer strategy involves using an influencer in your industry to promote and talk up the benefits of your products, services, brand, or specific offers. 

When you get a well-respected influencer to promote your brand, their followers will trust the influencer’s opinion and will be more receptive to checking out your company.

Step 7: Taking Notes for Next Year

After the holidays wind down and your campaign comes to a close, it’s not quite the end of your overarching holiday marketing campaign. 

The analytics and results of your campaign can not only tell you if you’ve hit your predetermined goals, but it can also influence the campaign you build for next year.

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