Taking Your Holiday Marketing to the Next Level

Content marketing is powerful, but combine it with the holiday season, and it gets amped up to a whole different level.

Think of it like your holiday eggnog.

It’s fine on its own, but once you add a little rum and a sprinkle of nutmeg or cinnamon, it becomes Christmas in a glass.

This season, do the same with your content marketing as we close out the year.

Why? Because holiday marketing can have huge impacts for your business:

• Over the last 10 years, the holiday shopping season has experienced an average annual sales increase of 2.5 percent.
• The average shopper purchased about 14 gifts total during the 2016 holidays.
• On average, 20 percent of retailers’ total sales for the year comes from the holiday shopping season.
• The biggest days for retail and eCommerce sales in 2016 were December 22 and 23.

Do you want a piece of the pie (or fruitcake)? If you do, it’s time to start hustling like Santa’s elves and make your content marketing merry.

Spike it with cheer and take it to the highest peak it can reach during this Christmas season. Here’s how.

Shine Up Your Content Marketing for the Holidays with 6 Easy Ideas

To make your content marketing holiday-themed, try one of these fun ideas.

1. Create Holiday-Themed Blog Posts

This time of year, the blogging opportunities are ripe for the picking. Holiday-themed posts are extremely shareable during the Christmas season, as people are searching for ideas for holiday celebrating, traveling, cooking, and gifting.

Everybody wants to know how to have the most perfect holiday season ever. Post a guide or two themed around this topic to give the people what they’re looking for.

Examples:

• Create a gift guide for a certain type of person (teens, co-workers, teachers, bosses, dads, bookworms, grandmas – you name it). Throw in a few of your products (but only if they’re relevant). A great example is this series of gift guides from The Kitchn:

• Create a blog with tips for holiday survival (because it’s not all jingle bells and joy to the world). Tweak it to suit your industry. For instance, a retailer selling beauty products could compile the top beauty essentials you need to survive holiday parties. A physician’s practice could address first aid 101 for common holiday mishaps (like burning your hand on a pan of freshly-baked sugar cookies).

2. Pretend You’re Santa

Have fun with your holiday content marketing and pretend you’re Old Saint Nick. Giveaways and mini contests draw people to you like magnets, and can quickly boost your engagement rates and followers on social media.

If you don’t know how to run a giveaway, check out this guide from Social Media Examiner on how to run an Instagram contest. Another good guide: this post on how to create a successful social media giveaway from Inc.

3. Spruce Up Your Social Media Profiles

One of the easiest ways to spread the holiday cheer is not singing loud for all to hear (sorry, Buddy the Elf), but rather sprucing up your social media profiles.

Whether you take a quick selfie in a Santa hat or get a designer on board to add that iconic cap to your logo, it quickly ramps up your festive appeal.

Don’t forget to update your Facebook cover photo, your Twitter header, and any other images that take up big real estate on your social accounts.

It’s kind of like decorating your storefront or office for the season, except online. Don’t hold back!

(Hint: If you’re low on budget, TwelveSkip has some free templates you can use to make sure your Facebook header is the perfect size. You can also select and customize templates in Canva.)

4. Send Merry Wishes

The holiday season is sentimental and nostalgic at its core.

Tap into the emotional side of the holidays and create/share content that speaks to the heart.

One simple way to do it is to post a virtual holiday card on social media. It can be a photo of your staff with a simple text overlay, a personal photo, or some other fun visual. Let your creativity fly – just remember to wish everyone a warm “happy holidays.”

Bonus: This is a great trust-builder and can help you create meaningful connections with your audience.

Look at how TopRank Marketing did a fun ugly Christmas sweater photo:

5. Give Back

Team up with your favorite charity and do a blog or social media post where you challenge your followers to help donate. For example, say you’ll donate X amount of money to X charity if the post gets X amount of likes, shares, or comments.

6. Do a Retrospective

It’s the end of the year as well as the holidays, which means it’s the perfect time to revisit your archive. Do a retrospective blog post that revisits your top 10 pieces from the past 12 months.

To make it more fun (i.e. perfect for tying into the New Year), start with number ten and count backward to the best post. You can base this on your own engagement stats or just choose your personal favorites.

Not to mention, this is a great way to give some content that’s stuffed farther back in your archives extra air time.

Engage in Spirited Content Marketing This Holiday Season

There are lots of easy ways to make your marketing shine a little bit brighter during this festive time of year.

‘Tis the season to spiff up your content, delight your readers, and cash in on the potential that the holidays offer for increased engagement, leads, conversions, and sales.

Julia McCoy is the founder of Express Writers, a serial content marketer, and bestselling author. A dedicated self-starter since an early age, by age 13, she’d written a 200-page book and taught herself Internet marketing. At 19, Julia dropped out of college and a nursing degree to follow her passion, teach herself online writing, and start her agency. Within two years, Express Writers grew by 400 percent, and today, Julia’s agency serves more than 5,000 clients. Julia is a bestselling author, the creator of The Practical Content Strategy Certification Course, host of the Write Podcast and Twitter Chat #ContentWritingChat. She just published her second bestseller, Practical Content Strategy & Marketing, November 2017.

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