The Christmas season is almost upon us. And like most businesses you’re probably looking to capitalize on the season with that big Christmas promotion. If you’re still fine-tuning the details of your holiday season marketing promotion, don’t panic. We can help with a few tips to help you perfect your marketing plan and get that Christmas promotion going.

Define Your Goals & Objectives

The first step of any marketing plan is to define your goals and objectives and the same rule applies to your Christmas marketing plan. Before you can get started on your Christmas promotion, you need to decide what it is exactly you are hoping to achieve. Do you want to increase traffic to your website, increase social media followers and engagement, increase leads by 10 or 20 percent, or all of the above?

Here are some examples of specific objectives for a Christmas promotion:

• To increase visitors to website by 35% by the end of the campaign.
• To increase followers across all social media channels by 25% by the end of the campaign.
• To receive 1000 new leads across all platforms, by the end of the campaign.
• To increase email subscribers by 20% by the end of the campaign.

Establish Your KPI’s

Key Performance Indicators (KPI), help you determine the success or failure of any marketing promotion. It provides a bar by which to measure the performance of your promotion. So after defining your main goals and objectives, the next step is to determine your specific KPI’s.

For example, if one of your goals is to increase social media engagement, the KPI for this goal will likely include total number of new followers, total number of likes, shares, re-tweets, etc.

Here are some common KPI’s to consider for any marketing plan:

• Sales Revenue
• Leads Generated
• Landing Page Conversion Rate
• Social Media Growth
• Mobile Downloads
• Mobile Traffic
• Website Traffic

Segment Your Audience

Always remember the rule – you can’t be all things to all people. The individuals in your target audience are likely at various stages of the buyer’s journey. Some may be in the awareness stage where they don’t yet recognize a need for what you’re selling, some are in the consideration stage where they’re considering their options and actively looking for a specific product and some may be at the decision stage and completely ready to buy.

These individuals all have different needs and require different strategies and tactics to appeal to them. And don’t forget about your loyal existing customers who you are no longer trying to convince to buy your product but rather, trying to convince them to keep buying your product.

Segmenting your audience in this way will help you better define the specific goals and strategy you want to take for each. Quick note, you don’t have to include every segment in every promotion.

For this year’s Christmas promotion, you may just want to focus on getting new customers and so your aim is to target individuals in the consideration stage and maybe also reward loyal customers, so also focus on strategies to delight your existing customers.

Design Your Promotion Plan

When you have accurately defined your goals and objectives, established your KPI’s and segmented your target audience, it’s time to design your plan. This involves establishing the specific channels and tactics you’re going to take to achieve the goals and objectives you’ve set out for yourself.

In other words, will you be employing email marketing, social media marketing and if you’re using the latter, which specific platforms will you be using? Will you be employing a display campaign and if so, where will the landing page be located – on your website or will it be an entirely new page created just for the campaign? What kind of content will you be creating for the campaign – blog articles, E-book, video demonstrations, etc.?

Whatever channels and tactics you decide, just ensure that it aligns with the goals you set. In other words, if one of your goals is increase your social media followers and engagement, it stands to reason that there must be a social media marketing component to your Christmas campaign.

Qualify & Nurture Leads

Once your plan has been fully designed, the last thing to do before going full speed ahead is to define how you are going to qualify and nurture the leads generated from the campaign. It’s great to get individuals to share their contact information after getting to your landing page but how will you utilize this information for the success of your business?

Here are a few tips on how to qualify and nurture your leads:

• Set up an introductory automatic email response that gets sent to every new lead. Include some type of call to action, typically a request to learn more, in this email. This will help you better establish which leads are at an early-stage and still need time to decide if they want what you are selling versus those who are ready to buy.
• Once you’ve established those leads that are further along the buying process, open up the line of communication either through email or phone calls and establish what it is they are specifically looking for.
• When that is established, direct them to a sales person who is ready to make a pitch to them.
• For the leads at an earlier stage, send a follow up email thanking them again for whatever action they took and do a soft pitch by offering them free resources about your products or a free sample.

And there you have it – just a few simple steps to make your Christmas marketing plan WOW!

Get more digital marketing tips to help your Christmas promotions soar from our free eBook. Click to download.