It’s the beginning of October, and you’ve probably noticed the stores starting to gear up for the holiday season. Maybe you’ve rolled your eyes at the holiday display in the back of a department store or at your neighbor who’s started to play Christmas music. Although it might seem a bit early to roll out your holiday marketing campaign, it’s the perfect time to start working on it. When you start working on your holiday marketing campaigns now, you’ll be more than prepared when that week before Thanksgiving rolls around.

Know What You Want to Promote

The first step to preparing your marketing campaign for the holiday season is to figure out what you’re going to promote. Do you have holiday-related products that you’re going to push? Do you have a big-ticket product or service that you think is going to be a big seller during the holiday season? Or, maybe you just have a product that you really want to push this holiday season. Once you choose the products or services you want to promote during your holiday marketing campaign, you can start strategizing the best ways to present those items with holiday-related content.

Look at Last Year

When you’re beginning to plan out your marketing campaign, it’s a good idea to look back at previous holiday marketing campaigns. What went well during the holiday season? Did your audience respond particularly well to certain types of content or certain types or products? Did some of your attempts remain largely ignored? Find out what went well in your campaigns and expand on the ideas to improve your audience response even more. Avoid making the same mistakes as last year and figure out how to improve your attempts that didn’t go as planned. Because the holiday season is so much about tradition, you can usually predict how people will act. Therefore, using past holiday seasons is the best way to create a strategy for this holiday season.

Start Creating Content

Although it might seem early, October is a great time to start creating your holiday content. Start taking holiday-related photos and come up with holiday-related blog posts. The holidays are an extremely busy time for everyone. For this reason, you’ll be happy to have a bank of content to choose from when the season starts. Although it might be a bit early to start rolling out your holiday content, it’s the perfect time to start creating a bank of content you can pull from. That way, you can choose the best content for your campaign, be sure that you won’t run out of content, and have options to pull from on weeks where you’re too busy to create new content.

Create Holiday Offers

Creating content is a great way to prepare for your holiday campaign, but you should also consider crafting holiday offers to go with the content. Maybe you’ll create a holiday shopping guide or a guide of the top side dishes to cook for holiday meals. For retail businesses, you might consider which sales you’ll create during the season and when you’ll roll them out. Holiday-specific offers are a great way to increase click through rates and gain new contacts during the holiday season, so it’s a good idea to come up with ones you can use throughout your holiday marketing campaign.

Clean Up Your Email List

A good portion of digital marketing, especially during the holidays, is done via email. Email is a great venue to connect with previous customers and leads to show them the value your company can offer. However, during the holiday season, people are bombarded with even more emails than usual from companies sending them special holiday promotions and deals. For this reason, it’s important to clean up your email list and segment it properly to ensure you’re able to send out content that is highly relevant to the recipients. During this busy time of year, recipients are much more likely to open emails that are very relevant to them and are very likely to delete emails that blend in with the rest.

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