With most countries easing lockdowns restrictions, consumer spending this holiday season is expected to soar. Sadly, if history is any indication, then you can bet that most business owners will remain unprepared in the weeks and sometimes days leading to the holidays. 

Why wait till there are days left to the holidays before you come up with hour thanksgiving marketing ideas? If you start coming up with ideas for campaigns and holiday marketing slogans now, you’ll find that there’ll be less pressure when the holiday season kicks off.

Did you know that holiday sales account for almost 20% of the annual revenue of most businesses? Well, no worries, with the holiday marketing strategies we’re sharing with you, you won’t just ride the holiday shopping wave, you’ll be in full control of the reins. 

Here are the top 9 successful holiday marketing campaigns you can use this holiday season:

• Audit previous holiday market campaigns

• Identify holiday marketing strategies.

• Create a schedule for syndication.

• Take note of the trends and events of 2021 (and how they’ll impact customer behavior).

• Use Aitarget tools to Prepare Your Holiday Ad Campaigns.

• Avoid false urgency.

• Don’t forget about your existing customers.

• Be ready to react and adapt quickly.

• Prepare for the competition.

1. Audit Previous Holiday Marketing Campaigns

Sometimes the best place to pick up new ideas for campaigns is by learning from the past. And how exactly do you do that? We’ve found that the simplest way is to audit your previous holiday campaign ideas. Not only will it help you understand your audience better, but it’ll get your creative juices flowing so you can come up with new holiday ad ideas.

Keep in mind that an audit isn’t the answer to everything. Consumer behavior changes regularly, and the events of 2020 definitely caused a massive shift. Not everything that worked for you in the past will work now. 

Also, with Covid-19 still a major issue, you can expect most holiday shopping to take place online. So, look out for digital marketing campaign ideas and holiday slogans for advertising as you run the audit. Your past sales campaign ideas may no longer apply today, but you can still pick up a thing or two from them. 

You can also get inspiration from previous online marketing campaign ideas to come up with your holiday ideas for this year. Focus on your best holiday social media campaigns, they can also inspire you to come up with winning ad ideas for 2021.

Your performance statistics are not the only thing you should be looking at. Your customer data also plays a part. Did your customer base change significantly? Have their values changed? Understanding your customers will help you create holiday messages that resonate with them. 

2. Identify Holiday Marketing Strategies

Having a well-planned marketing strategy can help boost your revenue and increase customer retention by improving customer relationships. When you put together the best holiday campaign ideas, techniques, marketing strategies, and innovations, you are sure to make some profit this holiday season. Here’s a look at some of the best marketing campaign ideas that can help boost sales and develop a long-term customer relationship.

Personalize Your Website

One of the best holiday advertising campaigns you can employ is to personalize your website for holiday shoppers. You can use catchy holiday slogans for advertising to personalize your website. These slogans can also act as promotional campaign ideas for your social media pages.

Add elements to your website that suit the holiday season. Redesigning your homepage for the holidays will help enhance your customers’ user experience. Try out a Halloween theme for your website to draw in Halloween shoppers. You can also switch things up and use different themes for Thanksgiving and Christmas. 

Try out Video Marketing 

Nothing conveys the holiday season better than a video. The best part about video marketing is that it helps promote your whole brand and not just specific products. Major brands like Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and Amazon use video marketing to create campaigns that evoke emotions and delight customers. 

Are you looking for an affordable way to make memorable video ad campaigns? Then check out Aitarget’s video tool. With Aitarget’s video tool, you can create personalized videos that fit your needs and brand identity for different segments and format videos for various platforms. 

Offer Free Rewards

Holiday promo ideas are plenty, and one idea you can try is offering free rewards. Although the holiday is a time for gift-giving, many customers still end up making purchases for themselves.

Free rewards motivate shoppers to spend more money with your company. Examples of reward items you can offer include free shipping or free item(s) when they spend more than a specific amount. 

Why not create a challenge and offer the winner a prize? You can ask your customers to come up with thanksgiving marketing slogans and offer a gift to the user with the most creative slogan.

3. Create a Schedule for Syndication

Content syndication is a popular method of gaining online traffic to your website. It is the process of republishing your content on third-party sites. The beauty of content syndication is that it is scalable. You can leverage the same content multiple times. 

Here are some of the benefits of content syndication.

Improves Brand Awareness

A key benefit of content syndication is its enormous potential to help raise your brand’s reputation. By contributing niche content to third-party websites, you’ll be able to establish your brand as an authority within a particular industry. It also increases your credibility as other companies/websites will want to republish your content.

Affordable

Content syndication remains an affordable marketing strategy, especially for small businesses that don’t have the budget to launch a full-scale Christmas marketing campaign. Sometimes you may need to pay a fee, but even then, the opportunity for lead generation and to get potential customers into your marketing funnel more than makes up for it. As for the third-party site, they get free content for their website. 

Time-Saving 

It takes less time to republish content than to create a new one. As the content owner, you get more engagement and multiple benefits from republishing an existing article than you probably would if you took the time to produce new and original content for your website. The third-party site gets free content that they don’t have to spend time creating. They can then generate traffic to their site using both original and the republished content. 

So, how does content syndication help with promotional campaign ideas? Well, content marketing is a great way of reaching new and existing customers.

You can come up with different holiday article ideas that you can share on your blog and third-party websites. Examples of holiday blog ideas you can create are:

• holiday gift guides, 
• Christmas outfit ideas, 
• Thanksgiving outfit ideas, 
• gift ideas for kids, 
• top 10 holiday songs, 
• best holiday dessert recipes, etc. 

By republishing these articles on third-party websites, you’ll be able to do some free advertising and possibly convert some of their audience into buyers. 

4. Take Note of the Trends and Events of 2021

Marketing is a fast-paced business. You may be working on a new campaign strategy that you believe will take your company to the next level, but the slightest trend shift can turn your unique holiday promo ideas into yesterday’s news. 

New trends and events occur monthly, quarterly, and yearly. They often change how you interact, attract, and push products to your audience. Due to this ever-changing state of the marketing world, you must stay up to date with the latest trends and events of the year and use them to come up with your holiday marketing slogans. 

5. Use Aitarget Tools to Prepare Your Holiday Ad Campaigns

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your business is to leave the marketing to experts. You may not have the budget that larger retail companies do, but with Aitarget, you can get the same quality. 

Aitarget is your one-stop shop for omnichannel feed-based thanksgiving marketing campaigns. Aitarget can help you create unique ads that are both immersive and align with user preference. 

Create mass personalized video ads from your product catalog using Aitarget. Some of the tools you can employ for your thanksgiving marketing campaigns include:

• Video editing tools to create personalized video ads
• Customizable templates that make it easier to create attractive, high-quality video ads. 
• Scaling of ad campaigns in Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram. 
• Workflow automation and tracking of ad results. 
• Automatic update of product data in your ads. Any change you make to your product feed parameters (such as price) is updated instantly on the ad.

6. Avoid False Urgency

The holiday season brings out a sense of urgency in buyers as they rush around trying to complete their last-minute purchases. Some brands will capitalize on this and create a fake sense of urgency through countdown timers, ill-conceived giveaways, or discounts.

If there’s one thing the pandemic showed us, it’s that consumers are quick to panic buy. Creating a sense of urgency with consumers is okay if you don’t care about customer relationships and only think about your profit. But the holiday season is more than just a time to make a quick profit. It’s the best time to bond with new customers and deepen existing relationships with old ones, it’s the best time to form a relationship with new customers and deepen the one with existing ones.

Customers are more likely to make repeat purchases when they cherish the relationship with your brand. Instead of trying to whip buyers into a purchasing frenzy with countdown gimmicks, create a real reason to buy using incentives they’ll appreciate. You can offer online shopping and take it further by making sure your website is mobile-friendly. You can also offer same or next-day delivery, product reservation, etc. 

7. Don’t Forget About Your Existing Customers

You can segment your audience into new and existing customers and offer time-sensitive discounts to the existing customer segment. You can run ads that offer up to 50% off on purchases to existing customers. But make it time-sensitive, that is, set the ads and the offer to expire after a few days. 

Another campaign idea that is perfect for existing customers is to reward them for their loyalty. Customers want to feel appreciated, especially during this busy period. Rewarding their loyalty tells them that you care and that you don’t take their business for granted. You can show your appreciation to loyal customers by:

• Sending gift cards (print or e-cards) to them that offer up to 15% discounts;
• Inviting them to take part in private sales and exclusive offers;
• Sending personalized thank you cards.

8. Be Ready to React and Adapt Quickly

The holiday season is one of the busiest times for retailers. With so many people to respond to, it’s common for issues to arise. How you deal with them can make or break your holiday sales.

How effective is your customer service experience? Are they quick to respond? Do they provide solutions or show buyers the steps to solve the problem? More than 50 percent of people stop doing business with a brand due to terrible customer service. Your customer service team must be ready to respond to any inquiry and handle any issue that customers may have. 

Users talk, share reviews and recommendations with their friends and family. If they are happy with your customer service, they’ll help promote your brand through word of mouth. If the opposite occurs, then their reviews can discourage potential new customers from visiting. 

What about your website? How fast is it? Do you have a team on the ground to deal with any technical issues? Can it handle the number of people that may be shopping at the same time? If you offer a delivery service, make sure they are ready to move out once an order is ready to be delivered.

9. Prepare for the Competition

A lot of people started different side hustles last year with e-commerce business being one of the more popular side hustles. But what does that mean for your business? It means more competition. 

Your holiday ad campaigns will need to be unique. So, put on your thinking hats and develop sales campaign ideas that not only draw in potential customers but also convert. 

Another way to develop better marketing campaign ideas is to observe what the competition is doing. What successful holiday marketing campaigns are the bigger stores running? How can you scale that down and apply it to your holiday campaigns? Can you pick up any holiday marketing tips from them?

You can review their keywords and use that to come up with holiday article ideas. Use these keywords to generate holiday blog ideas as part of your content syndication strategy. 

Final Thoughts

There you have it, 9-holiday promotional ideas for small businesses that are sure to make your business have a profitable holiday season.

Which will you be trying out first? Why not try video marketing? You can share a video on your website and all your socials. If you’re thinking of video marketing, then you’re thinking of Aitarget.