Tips for Planning Winning Holidays Campaigns in 2022

The holiday season is a huge marketing opportunity that has the potential to help you grow your business and make significant sales. It’s up to you as a business owner to leverage this chance and create an effective holiday marketing campaign that allows you to take advantage of the $1.3 trillion in holiday retail sales anticipated for 2022 in the U.S. alone.

To help you out, we’ve put together this guide to planning effective holiday marketing campaigns that will help your business make sales this holiday season. Let’s dive in.

The Importance of Holiday Marketing

If you haven’t already been making a focused marketing effort for the holiday season, this is the year to start. After all, the holidays are one of the times of year during which people spend the most money, making this season a huge opportunity for your business to generate revenue. 

Holiday spending is expected to surpass $1 trillion in the US for the first time ever this year, with the average holiday spend per household having been around $536 in the 2021 season. Just Black Friday and Cyber Monday alone have been projected to generate over $10 billion in sales. 

The bottom line? If you can take advantage of the holiday spending frenzy with a strong marketing campaign, your business can see some massive sales. 

Why You Need to Start Planning Now

If you think that it’s too early to start thinking about holiday marketing now, think again. Consumers are already thinking ahead to the holidays, so you should be too. 

56% of shoppers plan to complete their holiday purchases before December, with about 40% beginning their holiday shopping even before Halloween. And it’s more relevant this year than ever, as fears of high delivery times and supply-chain shortages motivate 39% of consumers to start shopping earlier than they previously would have this holiday season.

It’s also important to mention that an effective marketing campaign takes time to plan. Taking enough time to plan ahead allows you to be strategic, use your resources wisely, and avoid making mistakes in order to have the most successful possible holiday marketing push.

How to Plan Your 2022 Holiday Marketing Campaign

So now that you know how important it is, let’s get into the top tips and suggestions for how to plan a winning marketing campaign for the 2022 holiday season. 

1. Start Early

We already mentioned it above, but the most important thing you can do for a successful holiday campaign is to start early. That’s right; you can already begin thinking about how you want to market your business for the holidays now.

As a first step, we recommend creating a timeline for your holiday marketing campaign including dates by which you would like to:

• Have creative assets made
• Have creative assets approved
• Have posts published
• Etc.

This way, you will know exactly when to start really focusing on that holiday marketing push. 

2. Set Clear Goals

Before you can start executing your holiday marketing campaign, you’ll have one critical step you absolutely can’t skip: setting goals. 

Goals will help to guide you as you make decisions about your campaign further along in the process, serving as a constant reminder of what you want to achieve with your holiday marketing. They will also help you measure the success of your campaign once it’s over so that you can see how you did and gather valuable insights for next year.

Good goals must be specific, clear, and easily measurable. Some examples of goals that a business may choose for their holiday marketing campaigns might be:

• Increase sales by 20%
• Have 5,000 people use our holiday coupon code
• Achieve a click-through rate of 4% on holiday promotion emails

3. Choose Your Marketing Channels

Once you have your goals set in place, your next step is going to be choosing which marketing channels you want to use. Here, it’s important to focus on the marketing channels that you believe will be most effective for reaching the goals you set in the previous step. 

Options for marketing channels that you might consider for your holiday campaign include:

• Email marketing
• Text message marketing
• TikTok 
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Snapchat
• Blog posts
• Website marketing

When choosing your marketing channels, it’s important to keep in mind the following considerations:

• What is your capacity for holiday marketing? How many different marketing channels can you realistically commit to? 
• While platforms are you already active on? On which platforms do you have an existing audience?
• Which marketing channels and platforms does your target audience use?
• Which marketing channels have been successful for your business in the past? 

4. Define Your Campaign

Now it’s time for you to decide what you’re going to include in your holiday marketing campaigns. This is where you get to be creative and have fun. There are several questions you’ll want to think about, including:

Which Holidays Will You Market For? 

Options for the holiday season include:

• Halloween
• Thanksgiving
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• First day of winter 
• Diwali
• Christmas
• Hanukkah
• Kwanzaa 
• New Year’s Eve

To help you choose which holidays to include in your marketing campaign, think about factors such as:

• How many holidays you have the bandwidth to include
• Which holidays align with your brand
• Which holidays your target audience celebrates
• Which holidays are relevant to the place where you are located

What Story Will You Tell This Holiday Season?

One of the most enjoyable parts of marketing is telling a compelling story to your audience that helps them get to know your brand. While not all forms of marketing are story-based, storytelling is an incredibly powerful marketing tool able to create real connections and inspire emotions (and emotional spending). 

So take some time to think about whether you may be able to fit storytelling into your marketing campaign this year. 

For example, maybe you’ll tell the story of the single father who delighted his kids by buying them affordable gifts from your business. Or you might tell the story of the holiday magic that allowed you to open up your business during the holiday season years ago.

Ultimately, the story that will work for you is one that is personal, genuine, and true to your brand identity. 

What Promotions Will You Use?

An incredibly important tool for holiday marketing is the holiday promotion, which helps encourage people to make purchases from you by offering them deals and sales they can take advantage of for a limited time. Part of your holiday marketing planning should be choosing what promotions you want to use. 

Some options include:

• Special holiday bundles
• Holiday themed products and services
• Marketing certain products as gifts
• Coupon codes for your online store
• In-store promotions such as 20% off on all products on Black Friday
• Discounting certain items 

What Visual Language Will You Employ? 

Another fun part of designing your holiday marketing campaign is deciding how you will want your promotional materials to look. Whether you hire a designer or use your own visual skills, this is your chance to let things like colors, fonts, images, and so on help you market your business. 

It’s up to you to go as traditional or creative as you want with your choices, but some tips to consider include:

• Use attention-grabbing colors like red
• Contrasting colors can also be very attention-grabbing
• Using traditional holiday imagery such as the color blue, snowflakes, pine trees, snowmen, and so on will help signal your audience what your marketing campaign is about
• Keeping your visual language consistent across different marketing channels will help strengthen your brand identity 

What Marketing Strategies Will You Use?

Finally, you can decide which marketing strategies you will want to use on your chosen marketing channels. There are so many options here, including:

• Marketing videos
• Influencer marketing
• User-generated content
• Contests
• Giveaways
• Paid ads

We recommend choosing your marketing strategies by thinking of the same considerations you used to choose your marketing channels.

If you’re stuck and looking for some creative holiday content and promotion ideas to help inspire you, check out Promo’s blog where we always keep you updated with new, fresh holiday marketing ideas. 

Once you’re done with this step of the campaign planning process, you should have a list of tasks you need to do, assets you need to create, copy you need to write, and so on that will lead you right into the next steps of your holiday campaign planning process. 

5. Create Your Holiday Content Calendar

With an idea of what content you want to create for your holiday campaign this year, it’s time to put together a holiday content marketing calendar. This will be your map for exactly what content you’ll post during your holiday campaign, when and where you’ll publish it, and more. It will become an invaluable resource for helping you keep track and stay organized, making sure that all of those amazing holiday content ideas you came up with actually get posted.

When creating your holiday content calendar, keep in mind that it is recommended that for each promotion you run, you create a minimum of three types of content:

• An announcement of the offer that you’ll publish approximately two weeks ahead of time
• A reminder of the offer that you’ll publish approximatey one week ahead of time
• A last chance to get the offer that you’ll publish a day or two ahead of time

6. Create Your Content

Now it’s time to actually create all of your content, make your videos, write your copy, and so on. You want all of these assets to be ready ahead of time so that when the time comes to post them, all you have to do is click the “publish” button. This will help you avoid a lot of stress by making sure you’re not rushing to create content on the day you planned to post it. 

To help you create videos quickly, check out Promo’s online video maker. You can use it to make custom holiday marketing videos in only minutes. Want to save even more time? Check out Promo’s library of holiday-themed templates. 

6. Schedule Your Posts

Something that will help you reduce your stress even more is using a tool like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to pre-schedule your social media posts so that they will automatically publish on the dates you choose. This way, you won’t have to put in any additional work as the holidays approach and it’s time to actually execute your campaign. Everything will have been done and scheduled ahead of time so that you can just sit back and let your hard work pay off as your pre-planned campaign executes itself.

7. Analyze Your Campaign

Last, but certainly not least, is what comes after the holidays. Once everything is said and done, it’s going to be time to look back and analyze how your campaigns went. You’ll want to track the success of every campaign to see what went right, what went wrong, and what you should do the same or differently for next year.

Here, you’ll need to revisit those goals you set back in step one. Use the analytics tools and your sales data to see whether you missed, met, or surpassed your goals. Digging into these figures will give you a lot of valuable information about how you can improve your marketing efforts to have an even more successful holiday campaign next year.

We Wish You a Merry Holiday, and a Profitable New Year!

When it comes to marketing, there’s one secret ingredient to successful campaigns that help your business grow: planning ahead. By starting your holiday marketing planning now, you can reduce your stress levels, make smarter and more strategic decisions, and take advantage of the massive holiday spending season. So what are you waiting for?