Christmas in July: Planning Your Festive Marketing Strategy

As we navigate through July, your brand is likely working through its most summery advertising campaigns. Whether you're taking advantage of the warmer weather with some outdoor events or creating bold and bright ads that reflect the season, Christmas is probably the last thing on your mind.

However, for many businesses July is actually the perfect time to start planning festive marketing strategies! The lead up to Christmas presents key opportunities for gaining reach, engagement and most importantly sales, but if you leave it too late, you're competition could take the advantage. Starting early allows you to plan in advance, build a cohesive content calendar and beat the seasonal rush. Use the summer months to lay the groundwork so you can get started with promoting your offers and events when works best for your brand.

Let's take a look at how you can take action now to gain a head start in the Christmas marketing competition:

Analyse Previous Results

🎄 If you ran festive campaigns last year, take the time to analyse your stats. Assess what worked well and what didn't, focusing specifically on measurements such as reach, engagement, click-through-rate, and direct sales.

🎄 Look back at what products/services sold well last year. You may want to push your most popular products again or you may prefer to pivot your focus and build a campaign to drive sales for something completely different.

🎄 Analyse the day of the week or time of the day that your website received the most traffic and saw the most conversions for you last year. This should give you key insight for planning this year's content calendar.

🎄 Review your target audience. Are you still aiming to reach the same demographic as last year? Review whether their interests have changed and identify their key behaviours.

Establish Key Themes and Offers

🎅 Decide if your brand is going to have an overall theme for this year's Christmas campaigns. This can help to keep content cohesive and make your brand memorable with customers.

🎅 Finalise festive promotions and offers. Having these offers set in place nice and early will allow you to plan your content schedule and promote them over a longer period of time.

🎅 Ensure you have the appropriate supply or capacity for the products/services that you'll be promoting. Avoid disappointing customers by planning accordingly.

Create Content

🎁 Use the quieter summer months to create the content for your winter campaigns. Build a bank of video and graphic assets to utilise.

🎁 Diversify your content. Strategies that incorporate both short-form video and strong visuals tend to succeed more on social media.

🎁 Keep your videos under 30 seconds (and under 15 seconds where possible). Start on a strong visual, and include human elements, whether that's staff or customers, to help your brand appear more relatable.

🎁 Stick to recommended platform dimensions. 4:5 ratio works well across most platforms, but be sure to check specific network guides before you start creating.

Set Up Content Calendar

⛄ Now you have your assets to hand start to plan out when you want to post and how often.

⛄ Decide which elements will be used for paid advertising and what will work best to post organically with your already existing audience. Consider posting offers/products that have previously been popular with your customer base.

⛄ You can using scheduling software to have your content organised in advance. You'll have plenty of time to adjust accordingly ahead of your campaign launch.

Launch Campaigns

⭐ Depending on your products/service you could decide to launch your campaigns any time between now and Christmas. Ensure that you launch with plenty of time to meet demand, allowing for scheduling and delivery times.

⭐ Consistently analyse your stats, so you know whether to pivot, invest more money or produce more products. By preparing early this will give you plenty of time to change things up if you need to.

⭐ Engage with your audience. If customers are enquiring about your promotions, be sure to respond to them in a timely manner with a helpful response.

Ready to get started on stand out winter campaigns for your business?

OCOCO Media are here to help! Contact us today to book a complimentary consultation with our expert team and start achieving results.