I recently provided some ideas for a great holiday marketing campaign. In the spirit of the season, I’d love to talk about how to build a holiday marketing campaign. Here is a 7 step path to carrying out a successful holiday marketing campaign with marketing automation.
1. Identify your goals
The first step to carrying out a successful campaign is identifying what success will look like. You need to come up with a realistic goal and a time frame for achieving that goal, like 1) 1,000 new leads before Christmas or 2) a 10 percent increase in sales before the end of the year.
Once you’ve identified goals that can be both achieved and measured, you need to identify benchmarks and key performance indicators to measure the progress of your holiday marketing campaign. With your eye on KPIs, you can make adjustments to your campaign as it goes.
With your goals identified and benchmarks laid out, you should have a target audience in mind. With marketing automation, you can easily create campaign-specific buyer personas, and also target specific audience segments.
2. Segment your audience
Marketing automation makes it easier than ever to target your different audiences with newfound specificity. That means that you can identify not only their needs and interests, but even what sort of content that segment responds to the most.
Since the winter holidays are such a busy shopping season, people are used to receiving a slew of emails, offers and promotions. Stand out from the rest of the holiday noise by using your marketing automation platform to tailor your offer like never before.
3. Make your landing page
Your holiday marketing campaign will need a unique landing page, which will be eye-catching, concise, and preferably something seasonal to tie in to the holiday spirit.
Your landing page needs a title and copy that communicates exactly what the prospect can gain from interacting with your business. A successful campaign will have appealing visual elements. Most importantly, you’ll provide the visitor with a clear call to action as well—tell them what you can provide, and then offer an easy and intuitive way to get it.
4. Set up lead nurturing paths
From your landing page, the next step is to set up lead nurturing paths to aid your sales pipeline. At this stage, you should have a plan in place for qualifying your leads, and then you will use your marketing automation platform to nurture them during your campaign and into the future.
Email is usually the backbone of a successful marketing campaign. Your 2018 holiday marketing campaign will do likewise. Reach out to the different segments and nurture them as the campaign continues.
If you’re using social media effectively, it will look different than your email and blog content. Prospects visit social media channels to see something interesting and new, so keep these fresh and use them to augment your outreach on other channels.
We’ve talked before about some less-conventional ways to reach out to prospective customers, like using forums such as Quora. Keep these channels in mind this holiday season—utilising different channels can give you a much needed edge over your competition!
5. Go live and promote
At this point, you will be ready to start your holiday marketing campaign!
Everyone watches the clock around the holiday season, whether it’s the 12 days of Christmas or the instant that the New Year is rung in. This means it’s a perfect time to set up a marketing calendar and reach out to your leads. Once you go live, promote your holiday marketing campaign through your different channels. Remind prospects how much time remains before the holiday deal will end through periodic reminders, targeted through marketing automation to different segments.
6. Look and learn lessons
Marketing automation will make it easier to see where your holiday marketing campaign met the expectations laid out in step one, and where it fell short. If a certain email didn’t prompt the click rate you were expecting, figure out why that was. The response to your holiday marketing efforts should inform your thinking for a campaign in 2019.
This is a simple template for carrying out a successful holiday marketing campaign using marketing automation technology. If you’re interested in running a great marketing campaign this holiday season and would like some help, reach out to us! Give yourself the gift of a successful marketing effort.
