Every year we question why the shops are full of Christmas decorations as early as October, but when you work in marketing it is never too early to start planning a Christmas strategy. Why? Because this is one of the biggest opportunities of the year.

According to Statista, UK households spend a combined total of £821 million on Christmas on average.

When to start planning your Christmas campaigns
If you haven’t planned anything yet, you’re probably behind, but every business is different. Huge retail companies will plan their campaigns months or a year in advance, but there’s still time to plan and action a December campaign.

What kinds of campaigns work best?
When you’re appealing to consumers it’s best to tap into their psyche. For example, most people are looking for gift ideas to speed up their shopping, offers to save them money, and ways to make the Christmas period extra special.

For this reason, gift guides, discount codes, and exclusive offers go down particularly well and will keep you in the game with your competitors.

Add Christmas spirit
Good will goes a long way at Christmas time, but so do festive visuals. Your “digital shop window” marketing channels (social media accounts, e-newsletters, website) can benefit from a Christmas themed makeover. This engages with customers and shows you have a seasonal marketing strategy in place.

What will work for my business?
Just because it’s Christmas we don’t all need to plan and produce a high budget television commercial as the likes of retail giants such as M&S, Amazon and John Lewis do every year.

Here are just some smaller scale ideas for different kinds of businesses:

• Create a social media hashtag so that your followers do the leg-work. This could be anything from specific #ChristmasList or #MyChristmasLook hashtags to something much broader like #Thankfulness or #GoodWill

• Create SEO rich blogs with Christmas related advice, tips, facts or news
• Reward your best customers. A limited offer to inspire loyalty and express gratitude
• Run a competition. Whether via a newsletter sign-up or social media retweets, a Christmas inspired competition can earn you more followers and data capture
• Add complimentary warm drinks and mince pies to your outlets to encourage walk-ins

If you’re looking for help with seasonal marketing strategies or any of our other services, contact us via hello@redmarlin.co.uk or 01926 832395 and a member of our team will call you.