The holiday season is almost here. And whatever your product, industry, or target market is, this is a great time to create a holiday marketing campaign. This is not only to show your existing customers your appreciation but to capture new leads and turn them into customers.
Since ‘tis the season to give and share, we’ve prepared this step-by-step guide to help you to create effective seasonal marketing campaigns. Let’s get started!
Step 1: Determine the goals of your campaign
Before you start working on your campaign you need to determine what you want to achieve and the outcomes of your campaign.
Your campaign’s goal should be specific, measurable, and within a specific time-frame. It should be relevant to the audience and the services and products you’ll be focused on.
Most probably the goal of your campaign would be to get as many sales as possible. However, don’t forget to make your seasonal campaign more personal. Share some festive mood and cheers to build customer relationships and raise brand awareness.
Step 2: Define your target audience
It’s very important to gather as much information as possible about the people you’re trying to reach. So, to be able to create a smart campaign plan with relevant content and promotions, try to answer the following question about your audience beforehand:
- Which social media channels do my customers prefer?
- Are they using a specific device?
- What’s the time that attracts the most engagement?
Make sure your campaign refers to all segments of your audience. That is, both new and existing customers. Otherwise, you might consider creating two different campaigns to keep all segments of your audience happy.
Here’s an extra tip: If you want to know more about buyer personas and how to create campaigns for specific personas of the hosting industry, we recommend you our free buyer personas template.
Step 3: Create an offer
One of the most important steps to create a campaign is to understand what products and services will fall under your campaign offer. Your offer should speak directly to the needs of your customers. Try to pick up the most relevant product and services for this purpose, which makes the most sense for your earlier chosen audience.
There are many different tactics when it comes to deciding on products and services that you should discount: products you should discount, the most important to be effective honest, and clear with your customers:
- Discount everything equally.
- Generate exclusive offers on your best sellers.
- Promote lesser-known or older products.
- Bundle another product or service.
It’s also a good idea to check your competition. Find out what kind of offer they have, what includes, and what their positioning is. This information will help you to create the most unique offer and stand out from the competition.
Step 4: Create a landing page
Once your offer is ready, you should decide where on your website to place it. We suggest two ways:
- Place the discount banner directly on the product page.
- Create a dedicated landing page – click here for extra tips on how to create a successful landing page.
Step 5: Communicate your promotion
Offer – checked. Landing page – rolling. It’s time to give your campaign the boost it needs. So, to communicate your offers, choose the right channels for potential customers. Unfortunately, not all marketing channels can apply to everyone. Especially those of the web hosting industry. That’s why you’ll need to consider some points:
- Make sure you know how big your existing audience is.
- Decide if your promotion is for an existing audience, to attract new customers or both.
- Keep clear your existing marketing channels.
- Know the budget you are ready to spend.
- Adapt your website to your offers.
And some traditional but very useful indeed channels:
Email Marketing
It’s more likely that you already have a list of customers who might be interested in your offer. Or a list of customers who already bought your products. Or of the ones who sign up for your blog. Well, once you review your database you can create a list of the specific group of customers to whom your offer is relevant. And don’t forget to check the GDPR allowance before sending the campaign.
Blog
Another way to make your offer visible and add some SEO benefits to your website is to create a relevant blog post. Don’t forget to include a visual CTA (call-to-action), which will redirect to your campaign landing page or to the page you place the offer.
Social Media
Social media is a great tool to reach new audiences by using popular industry hashtags or to engage with your existing customers, your community. It’s very important to analyze which social media channels your existing customers prefer and where you can get new ones. When it comes to web hosting or software industries, we recommend Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
The most effective way to join ongoing conversations in relevant Facebook and LinkedIn groups to offer up your products/services and talk about your new campaigns. Check here to find out more about social media tips for web hosters.
Step 6: Campaign metrics
The final, and probably the most important, step is monitoring your campaign’s behavior and engagement. It’s time to determine if we reach the goals that were set before we launched the campaign. Analyzing your campaign’s performance helps us to understand what works and what doesn’t, which tactics work better than others, and what to keep the same or change for the next time.
With that said, thank you for your attention and for reading this guide. You can drop us a line below if you’d like to share your experience with seasonal marketing campaigns with us. We wish you profitable campaigns 🙂