Every year, the holiday season presents businesses with a chance to really engage their customers with unique holiday marketing ideas. The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas is an incredible time for online sales. Most of these ideas can be blasted out through social media campaigns.
Holiday sales account for over 20% of all total sales across platforms. This is with online sales leading the way. This is one of many reasons why putting together a solid holiday social media campaign is ideal for your business.
Why Are Holiday Social Media Marketing Campaigns Important?
As we already know, online sales during the holiday season are massive. From the looks of it, these numbers are just going to continue to rise. While it looks like social media is a massive space, the reality is that it is a small space with many competing entities.
There are billions of people on social media platforms, but space is limited. And both big and small businesses are competing for a lot of the same customers. For this reason, it is important that your holiday social media posts stand out.
Not only can you drive sales and traffic using good holiday marketing ideas, but you can also engage and interact with customers in a different way than you can at other times of the year.
Here, now, are 22 holiday marketing ideas for social media campaigns that will help you stand out from everyone else and better manage your online social marketing.
1. Be Visually Relevant
Visuals are a wildly important aspect of social media campaigns. Perhaps this is even more important during the holiday season.
From branding to graphics, the way you visually present your business will directly affect the success of your holiday social media campaigns.
2. Optimize All Your Content
I can’t stress enough how important optimization is. This includes content optimization on any platform, WordPress or otherwise. So when it comes to optimizing your content for your holiday social media posts, make sure you follow all relevant platform directions.
This includes sizing images correctly for the relevant platform, as different systems have varying image sizing specifications. Also, be sure to manage the text content properly, create solid click-through options, and make sure your landing pages are clean and smooth.
3. Use Hashtags
Hashtags are a way to find relevant information and trending topics on most social media platforms. If used properly, the right hashtags can make your content really pop.
Furthermore, if used correctly, the right hashtags will put your content in relevant trending topics that people are searching for. In other words, it gets your message in front of more eyes often reaching a wider audience.
4. Engage Your Followers and Answer Comments
If you notice, the most popular business social posts are the ones that contain interaction between post followers and the business itself. It is very important to engage your followers and the rest of your audience.
When someone has a question about services or products, make sure you provide a detailed answer. When someone comments on anything, be sure and comment back when appropriate. This shows that you are an engaged business and treat people the right way with personal interaction.
5. Website and Social Channel Decoration
Yes, this is a little extra work for you, but decorating your website and social media channels to represent the holiday season is a great idea. This will make both your site and your social channels stand out, and you will capture more attention this way.
When you post content as part of your holiday marketing idea, all of your landing pages and website content will be festive and relevant. This keeps customers in a festive mood and allows for easier transitions.
6. Special Holiday Offers
This is a given. You always want to either provide special holiday offers on services and products or give additional things as part of a holiday package. Posting special offers during the holiday season is a fantastic way to get noticed.
You can offer sales, a certain percentage off, free downloads, basically whatever you want. This works well as a tool to gain new customers and drive current customers to other specials.
Some businesses will even include gift-wrapped additions when shipping items out to customers as a way to show appreciation. This is helpful as many of those customers will return for additional purchases later on.
7. Free Content and Products
Giving away free content and free products also works as a tool to drive traffic and pick up new customers. If you sell physical goods, give away something free as a part of an order.
If you sell digital goods, give links to allow people to download free content that you are providing. A good example of this is a graphic design company that is giving away free downloadable graphics as part of their holiday marketing ideas.
Perhaps you have an eBook available customers can download.
8. Hold Social Media Giveaways
One of your holiday social media campaigns should definitely be a giveaway. You can have a giveaway by showing certain types of content or some sort of email signup form.
A good example of this is if you ask followers to like, share, and comment on your post to be entered to win a prize. You can also have them enter by allowing you to get their email and signup for your newsletter.
Either one of these tactics will gain you a lot of new potential clients, so make sure to include this as part of your holiday social media posts.
9. Holiday Causes and Charities
Highlighting certain causes and charities during the holiday season is never a bad idea. You can let clients know that a certain amount of proceeds from sales during the holiday season will go to charity.
Or you can simply highlight a charity you support, talk about them, and direct others to the organization. This is a fantastic holiday spirit week idea that can really take off for you and your business if used the right way.
10. Create Client Wishlists
Creating holiday wishlists is more for your clients and followers than it is for you. However, if you put some of your own products or services on the wishlists, then that in itself can drive sales.
Create relevant wishlists based on what you think is important for people. A few good examples include busy moms, hard to shop for spouses, active kids, etc. This gets people involved and looking.
You could also implement a wish list system on your website. You’ll see this in other successful online stores such as Amazon. It gives shoppers a way to “remember” what they want.
11. Use Free Posts and Paid Ads
A list of solid holiday marketing ideas would not be complete without us mentioning how you should use both free and paid posts.
Of course, the free ones will be seen by your followers and even shared by them, but creating paid posts on relevant social media platforms is a fantastic way to engage customers.
Most all the major social sites have pretty decent prices.
12. Festive Landing Pages
I touched on this a little in the optimization section. However, you want to make sure that any landing pages you create as part of your holiday marketing ideas are festive.
This is ideal for a number of reasons. It keeps people in the spirit of the season and also provides them a unique and seasonal landing page to view. Since this only happens once a year during the holidays, it will be a unique and fun experience for the customer.
13. Share a Personal Story
One of the best ways to engage customers and followers is to share a personal story. The holiday season is no different.
Sharing a personal or sweet story on one of your holiday social media posts will not only engage your audience, but it will also create a more personal connection between them and your brand.
You can share these personal stories a number of ways including a blog post, social post, interview, or even a simple media caption.
14. Host a Social Media Party
Social media party ideas are always a fun time for all and a great way to interact with your customers. Using Facebook Live, you can create amazing online festive events that are sure to generate excitement.
You can conduct a Q&A session for your followers, give away prizes, or even have a live Facebook sale. Whatever you choose to do, a Facebook Live event is one of the better social media party ideas around.
15. Properly Schedule Content
Scheduling content is always a hassle, holiday season or not. That being said, there are a lot of tools that can help you more easily schedule all holiday content.
Scheduling all your holiday content marketing ideas ahead of time will free you up to take care of other aspects of the business during the holiday season.
You can also schedule holiday spirit week ideas.
16. Advertise
Yes, you can do paid posts and landing pages on multiple social media platforms. However, you want to actively advertise your actual business on these platforms as well.
This will drive visitors to your website, allow them to learn more about what you do and what you offer, and help bring in potential new clients.
Again, advertising rates on most social platforms are reasonable and can be spread out over time.
17. Partner with Other Brands
When you partner with other brands for the holiday season, it allows you to make offers on products and services that you may not have access to otherwise.
It allows the other brand to do the same.
You can bundle these services as part of a deal or some sort of package. See, oftentimes customers need like-minded services or products that are not all available from one business. This is when partnering with other brands can really help.
18. Maintain an Overall Theme
While you may do a lot of different posts as part of you holiday social media marketing campaigns, it is important to try and serve up an overall theme. Your content and posts can be different, but the theme, layout, and look of them should all have some sort of connected feel.
Do you always include a small giveaway? Is there always include an extra holiday image? Do you always include a quote? Whatever it is, maintain an overall theme.
19. Market on All Social Channels
You may think Facebook is the only place you want to market and advertise for the holidays. The fact is, you should market on all social media channels.
For example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even YouTube are effective channels. These are all marketing platforms where you need to present your holiday marketing ideas.
20. Use Video Content
Video content marketing is becoming the most interacted type of social content out there. So why not film your own company video and allow your customers to watch and interact.
Make sure to integrate appropriate themes for the holiday season such as joy, thankfulness, giving and family. These are all relatable topics that can be used as part of a video marketing strategy.
21. Use Vlogging
Vlogging is just one of many different types of blog posts that can help skyrocket your traffic and help you gain clients and site visitors.
If you have never done it before, think video marketing but in a blog-style format.
You can present inspirational videos, take customers behind the scenes, and give them a more personal look at you and your business.
22. Share Quotes and Wisdom
People love hearing and seeing great quotes and receiving wisdom for the holidays. Allow people to stop and interact with your comments by posting inspirational and fun quotes that tie in with the holiday season.
Providing this type of content is a fantastic way to create interaction between you and your followers.
Final Thoughts
Remember, there is rarely a better time to cash in on your client base than the holiday season. As long as you are creative with your holiday social media campaigns, you should be able to really attract more clients and followers.
There are a lot of different holiday marketing ideas out there. I hope some of the above turns out to be useful to you during the holiday season.
A great list of tips, which can be used for the holiday season and throughout the year, thanks for sharing.