Launch a holiday marketing plan in 5 easy steps

Over $465 billion is spent during the holidays.

But if you want to get a nice slice of that pie, you need to develop a marketing campaign before the busy season starts.

Here’s the 5 step checklist for you to follow when planning out your marketing for the holiday rush.

1. Develop your marketing plan

Take the time to define your marketing plan before you start. A plan that defines your objectives, procedures and marketing channels will save you time, money, and energy over the long haul. By structuring your plan, you’re assuring that every step of the way, you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

Questions that you want to answer in your marketing plan include:

• What is my desired outcome?
• How will I measure its success?
• What’s my budget?
• Which products will I promote?
• What types of promotions will I use?
• When will my promotions begin and end?
• What is the demographic and psychographic information of my target audience?
• What are the best channels for communicating with that audience?

2. Design your marketing assets

Design work can take a lot of time if you’re not experienced. Thankfully there are free tools like Marketing360’s banner builder that enable anyone to design professional-looking ads.  

Some basic digital marketing materials you’ll want to consider creating are:

• Promotional leaderboard banner for your website
• Retargeting banners
• Social media assets (posts, videos, stories, ads or live streams)
• Email templates

For your in-store marketing materials, consider designing signage, flyers, banners, and coupons.

3. Write your copy

The channels you advertise on will influence how much ad copy you need.  For example, image ads for Facebook and Instagram can’t have more than 20% of the photo’s dimensions filled with text. Make sure that you’re working within each platform’s respective guidelines.

Remember to ensure that your ad copy is consistent and reflects the same message across all channels. Otherwise, you risk confusing your customers.

4. Schedule and launch

By pre-scheduling your digital marketing campaigns with start and stop dates, you’re minimizing the risk of overspending because an ad was still running even after your promotion was over.

It’s best practice to have someone overseeing a marketing project from the beginning to the end. That includes tracking the campaign’s progress and communicating the results with the team once the campaign is over.

Which brings us to the next step…

5. Record your results and make adjustments

Make sure all of your tracking and Analytics tools are monitoring the results of your marketing campaign. They’re the most efficient way for you to keep tabs on your campaign’s performance. That information will be incredibly valuable for future campaigns.

Also, save your design assets! If something worked really well, consider using it as a starting point for future campaigns.