The Ultimate Timeline Guide for Setting Up a Holiday Marketing Campaign

Holiday Marketing Campaigns can be a great way to circulate large revenues in the organization. Most successful organizations in the world prepare all year for a successful holiday season – because it’s that time when they make the most sales.

While successful Holiday Campaigns can bring in huge revenues and profits, the non-successful and non-smart campaigns can also bring in losses, low ROI, and low SERPs for the firm. Whether it’s Black Friday, Thanksgiving, New Years, Christmas, or a Cyber Monday, each Holiday Campaign has similar plans – to generate greater revenues than any other weekend in the year.

For this reason, we have created a detailed guide to help you set up a holiday marketing campaign. Not only that, but we are also going to walk you through a timeline guide, which should help you design your marketing campaign, according to your needs.

First Step – Define an Ideal Timeline For Your Campaign

The first and foremost step should be to define an ideal timeline – so you can not only complete your campaign in time but can also achieve great benefits from it. Read along and learn how to create a stellar timeline for a powerful Holiday Marketing Campaign.

Stay One Step Ahead!

An early head-start on a task always has great benefits. It doesn’t matter if it’s about waking up early in the morning or generally starting one step ahead. For example, if your peers only have a defined plan for this year, make sure you’ve already planned for this year, and the next. This way you’re always going to have an edge over them.

Begin Early

The first and foremost stage in any campaign is planning and preparation. According to most Project Management experts, you should spend the most time during the preparation and planning phase because that’s when you have to make crucial decisions. 

If the baseline of your campaign is weak, it will turn your whole campaign into a disaster. So while you are staying one step ahead, make sure that you are also beginning early. This way, you can spend more time planning and prepare for what’s to come.

Let’s take Christmas as an example since it is the most famous holiday of the year. Most e-commerce businesses start their campaigns around Black Friday. Ideally, a Christmas campaign looks something like this:

April – July: This is the baseline of the campaign where you have to plan and prepare an error-free strategy to go about your campaign.

August – September: This is where you kick-start your campaigns and start spreading brand awareness.

October – December: After you’ve successfully created brand awareness and sales intent, you start full-blown sale campaigns which actually make a significant impact in maximizing your holiday sales. 

Suppose this is a great timeline for a Holiday Marketing Campaign, but there’s always room to start early, isn’t there? So Instead of starting in April, why not start planning for your campaign during mid-march? This way you’ll have even more time to plan – and who knows what more ideas may come out for you during those extra 15 days.

What About Other Holidays?

Explained above is a guide for generating an ultimate timeline for setting up a Christmas marketing campaign. In like manner, we can develop timelines for Thanksgiving, New Years, and Sales events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.

However, one thing should always be kept in mind – If you start early, you will have a significant edge over your competitors. 

Avoid Unpleasant Encounters – Test and Polish Your Websites and Tools

While you define a timeline for your campaign, you also need the right set of rules and an efficiently working website to implement it correctly. Therefore, make sure your website is in fine condition and test it for its uptime and efficiency. 

Moreover, make sure you have all the necessary tools across all your channels to measure the required analytics and results. 

You also have to ensure that your tech, website, and tools can withstand long-standing work hours and high traffic loads – otherwise, it won’t matter how good your campaign is. In other words, if you don’t have the right mindset to deliver, your talent by birth that makes you stand out won’t really matter. 

Creating a Super Engaging Holiday Content – Know When to Publish!

Holidays are a season when everyone is looking for gifts and offerings for their loved ones. In addition to your perfect timeline guide and an effective marketing campaign, you must have access to a meaningful content creator. 

This content creator should know how to deliver catchy subject lines, meaningful and appealing illustrations, and engaging content. After you’re done with the content, one of the important tasks is publishing that content. 

If you’re on a marketing campaign for Christmas and you start sending out Jingle bells jingles right from October, it may look a bit weird. However, if your content has an accurate elixir of emotion, freshness, and uniqueness – it might just click with the audience if you bring the content to life during mid-November. This is around the time when people are starting to look forward to Christmas. Therefore, making it an ideal time to kick-start your high-end sales campaigns. 

Add Humor To Your Campaign – Get Quirky With Memes

With the increasing influence of social media, especially the sass and sarcasm of twitter, getting creative and on-point with memes can turn out to be a great idea. You want people to know your brand right? What’s a better way to get noticed than making people laugh?

Careem, an Uber-like brand operating in South-East Asian countries happens to be one of the most quirky, creative, and sarcastic organizations. They are known for constantly bringing to life the catchiest tag lines for their promo codes and discounts. Their billboards in the cities are super eye-catching and the epitome of creativity. 

Whether it’s Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Easter, there’s always room for some laughter. Especially during Halloween, you’re in for a whole lot of jokes and sarcasm. But with the extra enlightened millennials, there’s always a risk of being way behind the latest meme trends. In other words, if you are going to be unorthodox, your memes have to be ON POINT.

Lastly, we hope you are able to extract at least something from our detail-oriented ultimate guide for setting up a holiday marketing campaign!