We all want to use the festive season to our businessy advantage right!? Of course we all so why waste a perfectly good opportunity to build some Christmassy brand hype around your business this year! In todays Christmas edition episode, I’ll be revealing three BIG Christmas inspired creative marketing campaigns ideas for both product and service based businesses. the best part is they are 100% customisable and flexible to suit you and your brand values. They are all designed to help you create some big brand hype in the month of December. Too busy tying up client projects or filling Christmas orders ?! Listen the 3 ways to market your brand at Christmas to build hype on the podcast instead! – Episode. 014 on >>Apple Podcast<< or >>Spotify<<
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Thank you, Olivia x
Stick to your Brand Strategy and Values
Time: 00:51
Firstly we need to layout some ground rules, Christmas is not a time for you to lose sight of who your brand for the sake of some tacky marketing tactics. Obviously Christmas is a great time to market you brand, because more eyes scrolling and high time for sales. But how you marketing your brand at Christmas says a lot about you and to your customers. You must uphold your brand values through the year, don’t let them fly out the window for the month of December. Because Christmas marketing that don’t align with you brand won’t help you in the long run, your customer are expect a certain type of brand behaviour from you, don’t disappoint them!
Real Brand Value Examples
What I mean is if your brand is built on being carbon neutral and green, don’t start introducing tinsel and other non-decomposable materials! The same way if your brand is suppose to be all-inclusive don’t promote competitors that fuel exclusivity. If your brand is built on luxury don’t start discounting your prices for the sakes of December sales. Business owners you should be sticking to your brand guns, don’t give into the Christmassy gimmicks of marketing for the sake of a sale! Don’t sell your brand soul this December.
How To Use These Marketing Idea Correctly
I’ve come up with three different festive way you can build hype and promote your brand this Christmas. These three ideas can be complete customisable to your brand and smart goals. I’m just really merely providing you with a Christmas sledge, you can direct it how you see fit. I’m not saying that these are the best and only marketing idea. I’m merely providing you Christmases themed inspiration, helping you build a certain level of hype whilst using the festive season. These ideas are core marketing concept, not quick tactics or extra offerings such as gift-wrapping and free delivery these idea are promotional campaign ideas to help you build awareness and grow your audience and traffic.
Build Brand Hype Idea One | Advent Calendar Format
Time: 02:57
My first Christmas marketing idea is the Advent Calendar Format. This isn’t a traditional advent calendar where you get chocolates for each day, no this is even better. This is where you offer your ideal customers and clients a piece of helpful content, freebie, webinar, discount every single day. You’ll be providing something free but valuable to your ideal customer or client, meaning they’ll be reminded of your brand everyday and you’ll be easy a lot of there problem everyday.
This is a great way to build hype around your brand in December, make sure what your offering only gets better and better throughout the month. Similar to how in a normal advent calendar the 25th door is usually the biggest one. You know there is going to be a bigger and better chocolate behind it. The same concept goes for you, your audience we’ll see what your offering throughout and should be able to see it getting better, making them not want to miss out and increase buzz around what they might receive on the big day.
Real Business Examples For both service and product based business
Let say you’re a Content Creator, you could at the start of December offer a quick easy checklist to help them get organised, further into December you could offer a list of IG stories idea, half way mark you could be offer a 10 minute tutorial on how to create IG visuals on Canva. Over the hump you can start offering an excel content calendar for them to actually be able to fill out and show them hoe to repurpose 1 piece of content across other social media accounts, you could always start include discount code for platform that might help your audience. The biggest and best offer could include something like a 1 hour live webinar you’ll discus your best content creator advice, answer question live etc.
You get the idea, but if your product based business you might have to do things different. So if your more a maker and seller you might want to start of with, maybe you might want to start of with how to pick the perfect present, a little video on how to wrap like a pro, to better offers such as discount codes, free gift wrapping, buy one get an extra free, A gift card with £5 budget already on it etc.
Something to think about
However, on Christmas day, most business owners will be detached from their phone & emails. Let’s face it they will be celebrating with loved ones, traveling and eating and the last thing I they’ll be thinking about is a business advent calendar freebie in all honest. So maybe provide your big and best offering on another day, maybe Christmas eve or Christmas eve eve!
Leveraging your Email list
But here’s a biggie your audience should be invited to participate, you don’t want to put all your time and effort into offering so many free goodies without anything in return. This is where you can leverage your email list, once signed up they are included within the advent calendar month. Use your social media account to promote your brand advent calendar, show them what others have received from your brand maybe even see if you can receive a free testimonials from people already joined. Also keep making hints to what might be coming next. So that people on the fence, can see what they could have had from you if they’d joined earlier.
Build Brand Hype Idea Two | Mini Christmas Video Series
Time: 07:40
If you turned on the TV recent you’ll be greeted with adverts specifically Christmassy adverts. Brands today go all out on their Christmas adverts, but why? Well it comes as not surprise to me that actually TV adverts that evoke a emotional response from people are 3 times more likely to influence your customers purchasing decision.
Obviously as a small business owner we don’t have TV advert budgets, but we do have the power of social media and can also up-level with paid adds. Video is all the rage, so why not create a mini video series for your brand this Christmas. I’m not referring to quick low production value ticktock videos or trending reels at the time. But high quality strategically well thought out videos that promote your brand this Christmas with the power of feeling and meaning. These video should resonate deeply with your ideal audience and be in keeping with your brand values.
Real Business Example For Service and Product based businesses
So is you’re a small virtual assistant you might want to show another business struggling to fill handmade orders. And then your VA business offering a helping hand so that they can keep up with Christmas rush, show the business owner now enjoying filing the orders but also enjoy Christmas again with friends, whilst your ticking off more thing on their to do list. You could say something like ask for a helping hand this Christmas or Making sure small business owners enjoy Christmas again. This is a transformation example, showing them a future version of themselves if they purchase your product or service this Christmas.
But if you are an Etsy seller making hand crafted embroidery you could show you audience how much love is filled within your items. Showing them the process of you creating the item, from choosing yarn to packaging the order, then the person receiving said gift from a loved one and the line could be made with love or spread more love this Christmas.
How it should work
All in all it should be created to resonate deeper with your audience then a quick trending ticktock video. Think intentional about what it is you want your views to feel whether that’s love, happiness or laughter. The mini Christmas video series doesn’t really need your views to actively sign up like the advent calendar idea, it’s more focused on gaining engagement online and evoking a feeling from them to help remember you and influence them to purchase from you. You can distribute the videos to a wider audience online and hopefully you’ll receive some great traction online.
Why produce more than one Christmas video
The reason why I suggest a series rather than one is because we’ll we have horribly short attention spans. As you’ll be using social media to publish these videos, everything after let face it 24 hours can be consider old. But I’m not telling you take make a video a day that’s crazy! But by having a weekly series your inviting views to follow along with your Christmas videos in December. Plus another video might resonate more with your ideal audience over anther, and it a great way to start a conversation and build traction.
Build Brand Hype Idea Three | Christmas Branded E-Magazine
Time: 11:43
If you didn’t like the other ideas, and thought advent calendar is too much work over Christmas, the video seemed like a nice idea but you don’t have time to learn how to edit or record for that matter. Then this Christmas marketing idea might be just right for you a Free Christmas Edition E-Magazine for your brand. It’s fine if you don’t produce magazine for you brand all year round. This could be just a freebie you offer at Christmas for both previous and new customers. If you already running a blog its really won’t be that difficult for you!
Physical vs electronic
This idea can be fairly simple, you can offer it as free download or you could purchase a bulk order of real printed copies, sometimes customer might want to have the physical item. Specially if it’s design beautifully festive, and could be something they want to sit visible on their coffee table. Plus, if they do it invites their guest to possible flick through it, which is always an exciting thought. However, due printing cost you’ll have to either decided it worth paying out for and putting it under your business marketing expenses or if it this effects your profit margins too much. Let customers to decide if they want the free PDF electronic version or the printable, which they have to pay a small sum for, you can give customers a choice. You could always run a charitable scheme along side the printable ones, and use some of the profits to donate to a charity. So there’s an extra incentive to purchase the printable copy.
Simplicity of the E-magazine
With the Election version you can create a simple layout on a pdf, but there are other platforms to create your electronic magazine. I think Issuu is one, it allows you to create stunning interactive layouts, you can integrate moving images and video etc. You could even put in a video of you wishing your reader a very merry Christmas, you can’t do that in a print out version! You could also at the back include a dedication page, like a shout out page to thank everyone who purchased from you within the year, making sure you’re your previous customers are being recognised for their brand loyalty.
The advantage of a Christmas branded magazine edition
Create an e-magazine is a great way to connect with your audience, it’s away from social media so they can’t keep scrolling your not battling for their attention on a feed, therefore once the E-Magazine is open they are more likely to engage for longer. Taking the time to actually read your articles and learn more about your brand and business.
Magazine Content Idea
Obviously it’s up to you on the content you want to include. But if you flick through a magazine today, they usual include sections, like fashion, recipes, gift idea and advertisements with a few longer articles. It would be a good idea to flesh out your magazine with 4 different sections, they could be referring to your brands content pillars in a Christmas themed slant.
But if you’re a personal brand you could actually stick to the normal categorises and edit them to fit you. Like for fashion you could show your Christmas outfit ideas, the recipes you plan to make and just have fun with it show more of your personality. If you’re not a fashion guru say so, maybe make fun of it and show your picture of your past Christmas fopar outfits, make it entertaining to read. But also make sure everything your including is in keeping and aligned with your brand.
It’s also a really good idea to include other brands within it, some of you will be thinking but wait I’ll lose customers. That’s far from it, remember you are the creator and editor remember, and you don’t need to invite unwanted competition. Just other brands that offer a different service or product but compliment your business and could help your ideal audience pain points. Promoting others is such a lovely idea and a lot of small businesses will jump at this opportunity to being involved. In return all you could ask is that they promote it on their website with a link or social media account! Help you both reach a wider audience!
Typing this Christmas episode up
Time: 17:39
It’s time to draw this Christmas episode to a close! You should now feel empower to create some Christmas marketing for your brand. To summarise quickly we have the advent calendar, providing you audience valuable offering every day in December. Then we have the Mini Christmas Video Series, help you connect and influence your customer purchasing decision through evoking a specific emotion. Then last but not least we have the Christmas edition e-magazine, help you stop committing with social media feed and connect within your ideal audience through a range of categories. You know how to build some powerful Christmas brand hype and buzz and not just stick to the simple one off Christmas offerings. These ideas are obviously the foundation, it’s how you customise it and align them with your brand. Plus what you include that really makes them effective and unique to you. It time you used Christmas to the best of your brand advantage.