I know, I know… I am a little bit early with Christmas but with good reason my dear business owner! Santa is coming to town and he is bringing a large sack of money with him. So we need to prepare the Christmas marketing of our businesses. Last year, the trillion-dollar record was broken! With an average of $1,496 per household.
That makes the mind wonder about this year’s Christmas. We are more at home than ever before, so people might very well reward themselves. In any case, you will want to have a slice of the big Christmas spending pie.
We, of Mark’d Agency, want to make sure your business benefits optimally from Christmas shopping. Here is our Christmas gift to you: Christmas marketing ideas for your small business!
Christmas marketing for holiday season 2020
Christmas is special. It gives us that happiness and gratefulness feeling. This brings a psychological change to our way of thinking. Emotionally driven behavior is empowered by a massive magnitude that suppresses our rational thinking. Just ask yourself this: did you ever buy more during Christmas than you normally would? Exactly.
Therefore you would be wise to budget extra resources for your marketing arsenal during the Christmas period. People are more likely to buy during the Christmas period making it the ideal time to reach out to them.
To successfully activate your potential customer into a buyer, you will need to use a little bit of Christmas magic. Instead of your normal marketing, you have to prepare your own Christmas marketing campaign. The most important aspect of your campaign should be integrating the Christmas feeling into your message because the Christmas feeling is what makes the consumer more buying orientated.
Further down the article, you will find marketing tools, business promotions ideas, and how to bond with your customer.
2 Must-have Christmas marketing tools
There is only one task for your marketing tools within your marketing campaign, engage with your customer. You will want to make them warm and ready to buy when Christmas arrives. Therefore you will need to put a sequence of marketing actions into place. Let’s prepare your customer for Christmas.
ConvertKit your visitor to a paying customer
We are going to use ConvertKit to plant your business inside the head of your customer. The email marketing tool of Convertkit will be the key to doing this. By setting up an email marketing campaign focused on Christmas, you will start associating your business with Christmas in the heads of your customers.
Email marketing strategy to prepare your customer
E-mail marketing is a delicate process. Please don’t just start promoting your product right away. That would be like asking a girl to marry you on the first date. Make us of a 4-week timetable in which you will prepare your customer to buy for Christmas.
Start building a bond of trust with your customer in which you introduce the idea of Christmas at first. Firstly, gently push your customer towards just thinking about Christmas. You can do this by asking a Christmas related question or telling a personal story.
Now that your audience is thinking about Christmas, you can start introducing special Christmas content. Make sure you are providing free value for your customer. For example, if you own a bakery give your customers a Christmas breakfast guide. In this guide, you will tell them how to have an unforgettable Christmas breakfast with their loved ones. Just hand these guides out in your store and send them online.
After three weeks of building trust, you can start promoting your products or services. You have established a level of trust with your customer through the valuable free content, the customer knows your level of expertise and feels familiar. Ideally, you will promote your product 3 times in the week of Christmas shopping. Adding a countdown will increase the urgency to buy and will help boost your sales.
Why ConvertKit?
ConvertKit has a minimalistic approach with its email automation designs. It's very powerful because the customer isn't going to be distracted. The cleaner your business messages are, the higher the conversion ratio for a visitor to become a customer will be.
ConvertKit has a free plan where you can make use of their product. You have a maximum of 1.000 subscribers but that does come with unlimited traffic.
Example of an email campaign sequence:
Your email campaign could look like this (1-4 stands for the weeks):
- Introduction/personal story about Christmas
- Free content (blog, video, handouts)
- Free content with even more value (e-book, handout)
- Promote your product 3 times in the week of Christmas shopping
KWfinder: know what your customer wants
KWfinder is a keyword research tool from Mangools and the ideal tool for the job. What job? Finding the Christmas products or services the masses are looking for!
A keyword is a searchable term used in search engines like Google. By identifying keywords you can learn what the market is looking for. You will want to use this in your battle with your competition. With a good market and competitor analysis tool, you can spend your market budget effectively on marketing activities or products that work.
The basic price plan of Mangools suites for most small businesses. You can always upgrade your plan later on when you need more search results per day.
Make your business Christmas friendly
There is nothing to get customers more in a buying mood than a design that gives them the holiday spirit. During the Christmas period, you need to transform your business a bit. I know, it sounds like a lot of work but that doesn't have to be necessarily the case. You can lift your Christmas game to the next level by designing Christmas imagery for your website and physical store.
Free designing tool
A great free tool to use for this is Canva: https://www.canva.com/
Just open Canva and create a free account. You can also log in with your Google or Facebook account. After you log in, go to the right search bar. Type in what you want to create, for instance, an Instagram post. Canva will select the appropriate sizes and you can start!
If you don’t want to start from scratch you can make use of the free templates Canva offers. Simply put your theme search term in the left search bar and click search. In the picture below I searched for a Christmas template.
Customize with Canva
The free templates offered by Canva are great but they do lack the personal feeling effect. It’s a good thing that you can easily customize the templates to look exactly how you like it.
Tip: always put your brand colors in the imagery you create with Canva. This is very useful from a neuromarketing perspective. With every message you send your customer will start to associate certain color patrons with your business.
In the picture above you can see one of the free Christmas templates available to you. It looks very fancy but it isn't quite Mark'd-ish (that's quite the word). To give a Mark'd feeling, I added our brand colors into the design. Now it does fit our brand!
You can simply click and adjust the colors and effects. It’s very easy to use and you don’t need to be technical whatsoever.
Christmas business promotion ideas
In this chapter, we are going to take a look at specific niches and how you should adjust your marketing strategy to your niche. There is no 'one template to rule them all (any Lord of the Rings fans here?)'. You will have to dive into your niche to find out what works and what doesn't. Below you will find examples of different marketing strategies within different niches.
Christmas marketing ideas for E-commerce
E-commerce… there is no other niche that benefited so greatly from the holiday season than e-commerce. In 2019, online holiday sales rose by 13.9%. The expectations for this year are even higher because most people are avoiding regular bricks and mortar shops due to the pandemic.
The most powerful marketing strategy for e-commerce is making use of gift bundles! Combine your best sellers into one bundle. It will make the average order value higher and you have won’t have to compete in discount wars. Just give a nice discount on the unique bundle you created. Be aware that your bundles make sense. No-one needs a chainsaw for their daughter’s dollhouse.
Christmas marketing ideas for Real Estate
If you are working in real estate you might be wondering what all this Christmas marketing talk is all about. Mark, how do you expect me to give a massive discount as e-commerce does! No, you can't. However, there still lays opportunity within the Christmas spirit.
Christmas makes us think about everything and everyone we are grateful for. It’s a moment of perspective. You think about the past years but you are also looking towards the future. Everyone wants to have a brighter future. Make use of this state of mind by presenting a home as a new start. The opportunity to start a new life dedicated to happiness. After all, who doesn’t want to be happy?
Make use of strong copywriting. For instance, you could write the following in combination with the picture below: "Will this be your place where you and your loved ones celebrate an unforgettable Christmas?”
Tip: the use of Christmas decorations on a home will transfer the emotions that Christmas brings to the home. If you look at the home below you see a typical Christmas decoration at the door. As simple as it is, it does give you that cozy feeling of Christmas.
Christmas marketing ideas for Hairdressers
For hairdressers, we have the ultimate pressure medium: your mother in law (tam-tam-taaam). The Christmas dinner is sneaking into your scope but your hair looks like an exploded hedgehog. We all know this feeling. As a hairdresser, you need to anticipate the natural pressure on looking good for the Christmas dinner.
The pressure we feel to be ready for something activates an old part of the human brain. Your mind will work out of fear which is the strongest emotion to activate people. Now I am not saying we should scare your customer to death but use a lighter form of scaring. What could work very well for hairdressers are e-mail marketing campaigns (ConvertKit) and Facebook Ads.
Make use of storytelling and picture the Christmas dinner. “The dinner table is set with beautiful silver cutlery. The entire family is looking at their best. Elegant dresses, fine jackets by the men, and haircuts like everyone is about to audition for a James Bond role… Except for you! You are looking like Bert from Sesame Street.
And all because you forgot to get an appointment at the hairdresser. The choice is yours, are you going as James Bond or as Bert from Sesame Street?
Christmas marketing ideas for Personal Trainers
The personal fitness sector has been hit really hard by the pandemic. Many gyms are not allowed to be opened or need to adjust their maximum amount of people inside the gym. It's almost a good thing that Christmas is coming and people will require getting rid of calories.
So the options for indoor fitness are limited but there are still opportunities to be found outside. Literally outside in this case. Lately, fitness brands are rising through organizing outdoor events with enough space to spread the people in the open air.
For example, you could organize a Christmas Dinner Afterburner in the open air. I would most certainly join that event after eating my own size in food.
Just like the hairdressers, the best way to activate people to make use of your services are e-mail marketing campaigns (ConvertKit) and Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads are more powerful than ever before because people are spending more time on their social media.
Christmas marketing ideas for Construction
Most of the construction workers are taking a well-deserved long holiday break. In the winter it is difficult to build anything and therefore most companies close for a few weeks. So why would Christmas marketing be interesting to you?
Just like with the real estate agents/investors, your focus should not be on Christmas itself but on what Christmas does with people. It is a moment of reflection. We look at our past and more importantly to the future. As a construction company, you should make use of this moment of planning and dreaming. Integrate a smart marketing campaign about the future into a Christmas piece of content.
For instance, you could make a Christmas themed video about having a vision for a great new factory hall. In that same video, you will show one of your most prestigious build halls with all its features. This will inspire entrepreneurs to build a hall. Furthermore, you should address the topic of investing in a factory hall and what it means for the future of your client.
It could look something like: "With a new factory hall, you can increase your production capacity by 200%, making 2021 your year. Now is the time to grow and secure the future of your company." Supported with the video you made, this should activate the fear of missing out on your customer.
Christmas business wishes
Last but not least, Christmas business wishes! It is old as stone but yet it's a bottleneck for most companies. Technology made life easier for us. Certainly, as a digital marketeer, I am happy with our technological advances but there are blind spots of which we need to be aware.
With technological advances came certain laziness upon us. We stopped writing the cards and started printing the text. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, no that came later. Instead of typing and printing a personal Christmas message, we wrote:
“Merry Christmas”
Really guys? That’s even worse than not sending a card at all. The good news is that a lot of companies are doing it this way. Meaning that creates opportunities for businesses who do decide to give their business wishes a personal approach. When you have a low volume of customers you would do wisely to write short personal messages yourself.
If there are too many addresses then you could still decide to print messages on wishes. However, please don't use a standard letter type like times new roman. Make us of letter types that look like they are written. Furthermore, address your customer personally with their name and end your wish with your own name instead of only your business name.
There is market share to be conquered when you focus on a personal approach. It all starts with small gestures like handwritten notes. Don’t miss out on this and grab a pen.
Merry Christmas and happy hunting in 2021
We will end this article with the earliest holiday wishes ever. I hope you found this article helpful and that we have contributed a little bit to your hunt for Christmas shoppers. I would personally like to thank you for reading our content and supporting us in our first year.
As the entire agency, we wish you a happy 2021 and that all your ambition might become reality. There will be a lot of free value coming your way in 2021 so make sure to look regularly on The Branding Blog. If you don't want to miss anything and want to receive subscriber-only content, make sure to sign up at the bottom of the page.
Merry Christmas!
Mark Verwoert (Mark’d Agency)
