The holiday season is a wonderful time to market your brand or small business and attract new customers who are looking for gifts to buy during the holiday season. Using your social media accounts to attract potential customers can mean some quality leads that actually result in sales. Below are some tips to optimize your small business’ social media for the holiday season.
Choose a Holiday Theme
Having a consistent style to your posts will help your followers and customers identify your brand more quickly. You can choose a variety of different holiday aesthetics depending on what your usual brand aesthetic is. For example, if you’re a clothing brand that has a lot of marketing imagery centered around bright and cheery settings and colors, choosing to make your holiday theme something dark like a cozy cabin might be too different to work for your brand. Instead, choose something that is still on brand, like a bright winter wonderland theme.
Make sure your website can live up to your expected amount of business for the holidays as well. Almost 94% of consumers agree that they will mistrust a website if the web design is faulty, so ensuring that everything looks and runs great is important to making sales.
Make it Personal
The holiday season is one made up of joy and togetherness. If your office has holiday-themed events, such as a cookie decorating day or an ugly sweater party, post content about those events. If someone feels more connected to your brand, they may feel more compelled to purchase your products. In addition, it will encourage your employees to participate in any fun activities you have around the office and lead to more team bonding.
Play Up the Little Holidays
The year is littered with little “holidays” like national cookie day, national salesperson day, and so many more. Find a list online of the different days of celebration and select a few that are relevant to your business. These days are inconsequential, but they give you an opportunity to post unique holiday content that can help you stand out from the mass of Thanksgiving or Christmas themed posts. You can even have small discounts associated with the day to encourage holiday shoppers to purchase from you.
Keep it Local
If your town or city has other local small businesses, you should think about contacting them to do events like pop-ups or just work together on different projects or discounts. If you decided to do a giveaway, which I’ll talk about in the next point, pairing with another local business is a great way to expose both of your brands to your customer base.
Hold a Contest, Giveaway or Offer Bundle & Save Coupons
Contests and giveaways are awesome ways to get new followers and more views on your accounts during the holiday season. People love the idea of getting free things, and the return in terms of followers and views can really outweigh the amount of money you spend on the products you give away.
For a contest, make a post that announces the contest with all of the requirements in the caption. No matter what kind of business you have, you can hold a contest for the most festive photo with your product in it, but you can also do a more specific contest if it works for your product. For example, if you have a coffee shop, you can have customers draw on the disposable coffee cups you serve hot drinks in.
For a giveaway, you should make a post with an image of the products you’re giving away and post the requirements of the giveaway in the caption. You can have different requirements for your giveaway versus a contest, like having the people who enter follow your other social media accounts or sign up for email or SMS updates. SMS updates have a click-through rate four times higher than email, so having prospective customers sign up for SMS can be a great asset to your business. Make sure to be clear about when the giveaway ends and how you’ll contact and announce the winners to avoid a flood of DMs about those topics.
To increase sales, offer a bundle and save coupons. This coupon is only good when your customer purchases a certain amount of items.
Use Stories
Stories, which are available on Instagram and Facebook, can be a great way to announce new or short-term information to your followers. A story will be available for 24 hours and then disappear from your page, so it is a great platform for seasonal content. For example, if you’re holding a flash sale, posting it on your business’ stories can encourage people not only to check out the sale but to consistently check your story in the future so they don’t miss another sale.
In addition, you can use stories to humanize your company a little more. If you show small personal moments throughout the day, like the smoothie you had for breakfast or the setup you have while you’re working, can make your business feel less like a faceless company and more like a brand made up of vibrant individuals.
Make a Posting Schedule
It really can not be understated how important a posting schedule is during the hustle and bustle of the holiday season. Certain social media platforms have algorithms that like consistency, so the more often you post on the same day or time the more likely your content is to be seen by more people. Try to start out with a plan that covers the entire holiday season, but make sure you’re flexible to changing it up as the season progresses. For example, if you want to plan to post on National Cookie Day, you don’t need to completely figure out what that post will be until a week or so before, but knowing that you want to post will save you from a last-minute scramble to get something posted.
Create Unique Posts About Your Products
The last tip in this list is to make sure that you create posts that are interesting and unique. If you’re just making generic posts about your products, potential customers are going to scroll onto the next product available. Here are a few ways to spice up your posts:
- Try to use cool facts or statistics. For example, if you’re a jeweler promoting your sterling silver products, you can make a post about the history of silver and how it has been used as a jewelry material for over six-thousand years.
- Sum up the year. Making a post about what products have been most popular, how much you’ve accomplished as a brand, or any other small personal details about the year can really help your brand feel personal and relevant.
- Use customer reviews. Customers are more likely to trust each other’s opinions over the company’s opinion. If you get a particularly descriptive or positive review of a product, use it as a way to make your product seem more appealing to your followers.
Keep in mind these social media marketing tips and you will be on your way to a successful holiday marketing campaign.
Did you try any of these out? What are your favorite ways to market during the holidays? Tell us in the comments!
“Devin is a writer and an avid reader. When she isn’t lost in a book or writing, she’s busy in the kitchen trying to perfect her slow cooker recipes. You can find her poetry published in The Adirondack Review and Cartridge Lit.”
