How to Create a Holiday Content Strategy for Your Small Business
Want to ensure that your small business stands out from the crowd this holiday season? Here’s how to create a holiday content strategy.
At some point in time, Black Friday used to be a get-to-the-store-at-dawn, in-person event that required hours of standing in line and physical tackling and pulling to get the items you wanted all year long.
It’s not like that anymore. Nowadays, businesses have to prep their websites to handle online traffic more than they need to staff their retail locations. In fact, data indicates that online retail sales will reach $6.17 trillion by 2023, with e-commerce websites taking up 22.3% of total retail sales.
Not to mention, mobile marketing technology is becoming aggressive in the e-commerce space, making the online shopping experience better than it has ever been.
For small businesses, product-based or service-based, this means that your holiday content strategy is essential.
While it’s important to develop a holistic content strategy for your entire brand, you’ll want to know what to adapt during time-specific campaigns like the holidays. (So, be sure you’ve already established an overall content strategy before creating your holiday content strategy.)
Here is how to create a holiday content strategy for your small business:
Reverse engineer your holiday business goals.
The end of the year is a mad rush to tie loose ends and audit the last 365 days, so reviewing your yearly and holiday business goals is a good first step to creating a holiday content strategy.
Whether you’re an e-commerce brand or a service-based business, your holiday business goals should be the focus of your campaign. If you’re launching a new product line, then maybe awareness is your main goal. If you’re looking to cash in this holiday season, then maybe your conversions and sales are the main goals.
Identify your brand and business goals for the holiday season and settle on key performance indicators (KPI) that you can track. From there, build out your content strategy to work backward from that goal.
For instance, many beauty brands come out with exclusive holiday bundles or limited-time products. For them, sales are important, but the long-term game is to grow and strengthen their customer base by offering limited-time deals.
Therefore, in addition to sales, they’ll want to track new customers vs repeat customers. With this in mind, you can: set up retargeting paid search ads, create blog content with beauty bloggers, plan social media content with influencers, and offer exclusive deals and savings to your email list.
These methods focus on growing your audience to reach those new customers but will incentivize your existing customers to buy more than usual.
What that means for you
Decide what your primary holiday goal and KPIs are. Using those as targets, reverse engineer strategies that will get you those numbers.
Create a multi-channel holiday campaign.
The last thing you want to do is plan out great content, just for it to get lost in the noise. If you’ve ever even tried to open Facebook or Instagram during the holiday season, you know you’re in for a storm on social media. E-commerce brands are posting in full force across their social media platforms during their end-of-year sales.
You have to quickly address all stages of the buyer’s journey in your social media content to actually get first-time buyers and loyal customers alike to pile up their online shopping cart. And that’s no easy task.
While social media is a key piece of the marketing puzzle, especially when it comes to holiday content strategy, know that it isn’t the only piece. Consider creating one overarching message and distributing it across your:
Email list
Website pop-ups and dedicated sales pages
Pay-per-click campaigns
Blog content
Brick-and-mortar store (if applicable)
Remember, these channels should all work together to create one cohesive message and brand identity. That story is essential to determine what you create across channels. I recommend centering this campaign story around a keyword or phrase to help drive the direction of all your messaging.
What that means for you
Avoid getting caught up in algorithms and trends and focus on your big-picture goals. Then, factor in your other channels to ensure that you don’t get lost in the noise.
Consider taking the path less traveled.
Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday – it’s all expected from businesses to have big sales going on. It can be extremely profitable to do so as well.
However, a growing number of brands are distancing themselves from the capitalistic galore of these consumer-made holidays. And by doing so, they’re standing out.
Outdoor retailer REI famously closes its doors on Black Friday. In fact, it gives the (paid) day off to employees and encourages them to spend time with loved ones and/or in the outdoors.
Some brands simply choose to take a different angle by donating their proceeds to charities. Patagonia donates 100% of its Black Friday profits to charitable organizations that fight to protect natural resources like water, air, and soil.
For other brands, it’s not even about capitalism. Instead, it’s about how gift-giving, self-care, wellness, etc. are not meant to be rushed or jam-packed into a weekend. For instance, if a brand’s core value is about being intentional and planning ahead, does a Black Friday sale really make sense.
In these instances, it’s commonplace to see a pre-Black Friday or an anti-Black Friday sale happen before the rush of the online shopping holidays.
Many service-based businesses (such as myself!) believe that giving a major discount is unfair to year-round, loyal clients who sign on at full-price packages and invest in themselves when they feel it’s important, not when it’s “cheapest”. Those brands may simply carry on as though nothing is happening! And for them and their audience, that works.
All of these methods deviate from the standard Black Friday-Cyber Monday deals, and all work phenomenally for the respective customers. It earns respect and ironically, not holding a sale can build customer loyalty depending on your business.
What that means for you
Take a step back and consider if offering a deal is right for your brand and customers during the holiday season. See if there is another way you can make an impact or go against the grain to successfully move towards your big pictures mission.
Analyze your results often.
Setting goals and KPIs is not useful if you don’t measure your results. To get the most out of your holiday content strategy, keep an eye on your tracking and analytics regularly at all times.
Doing so will not only help you identify what’s working and what isn’t, but it will also collect data over time to help you anticipate trends and learn from past mistakes.
For instance, if your holiday campaign content isn’t going viral or gaining visibility, maybe you need to tweak things and give it a boost. Knowing this helps you get through the campaign, but also allows you to know what your audience prefers for future campaigns.
Be prepared to analyze both your quantitative and qualitative data. In other words, you may have actual numbers and graphs to look at, but don’t neglect to gather information on more abstract measurements, such as customer sentiment or brand loyalty.
WHAT THAT MEANS TO YOU
Find the appropriate tracking systems across channels and review the data points that align with your campaign goal and KPIs. Your analytics across channels can give you insight into your unique brand audience. When you make it a habit to do this all year long, creating a content strategy for marketing campaigns becomes enormously easier.
Create inclusive content all season long.
Recognizing diversity, equity, and inclusion no longer earns you ‘brownie points,’ it’s expected. We live in a time when the diversity of your audience and your customer base must be acknowledged or you will pay – literally.
Think about all the different cultures and family structures that exist and be sure to craft messaging and imagery that does not exclude them. For instance, creating a holiday campaign centered around Christmas may alienate your customers that celebrate Kwanzaa or Hanukkah, or don’t religiously celebrate the holiday season at all.
Using imagery of only traditional family gatherings may feel hurtful to your customers that are not able to be with their family for the holidays or have a different definition of family.
While you don’t have to pressure yourself into depicting every possible scenario, be aware of your copy and visual assets. When in doubt, ask yourself: will this unintentionally harm any communities that I am not a part of?
What that means for you
Your intention is different than your impact. Carefully review all your holiday campaign content with varying perspectives before publishing. To learn more about how to do this, read my blog on How to Create Inclusive Content.
Work with a content strategist for custom holiday content strategy
Content strategy grows alongside your business. It’s essential to structure your cross-channel content around those timely and relevant moments, like the holiday season.
These shorter campaigns require a time-specific content strategy that may slightly change your actual ad copy or content visuals, etc. However, this can look different for every brand.
Instead of having to DIY your holiday content strategy, get SEO-backed custom content strategy for your brand – right from your back pocket. When you work with me one-on-one for content strategy consulting, you’ll get:
Bi-weekly, 60-minute calls (2x a month)
Shared hub with meeting notes, content audits, etc.
Content audit & competitive analysis
Internal content management system
4 hours of content review (from me, per month)
New strategies and content opportunities to grow your brand organically online (including social media, email, blog, etc.)
Direct Slack support during business hours
Contact me to get started today.
