Don’t you just automatically roll your eyes every time you walk into a store in October full of Christmas decorations?
Hello, Halloween is amazing. Capitalize THAT. I’m not ready for Christmas.
It’s super annoying to a customer to be forced to think about Christmas so early.
But as a brand, the holiday season is a pretty big deal and it takes a LOT of prep to make sure it’s a successful one.
A lot is riding on this holiday season — so don’t F it up.
But before you start rolling out your Christmas-themed logo or your holiday-related content, how can you really prepare your brand NOW to capitalize on the holiday boom?
How Your Brand Can Prepare for the Holidays Now
1) Focus on building your email subscribers
Everything you do NOW should have the end result of gaining an email subscriber. These will be your future-best-customers if you nurture them correctly! Work hard on building up a really meaty list now so that you have a nice well-rounded group of people who are already used to hearing from you once your big push rolls around. It’s much easier to capture the sale during the holidays when they already know, like, and trust you. With all the messages from your competitors trying to take these customers to their content instead of yours, the holiday season is a numbers game and the bigger the list, the better opportunity you have at reaching your goals.
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2) Figure out the ebbs and flows of your holiday market.
Use this pre-holiday time to figure out what are the most important days of this season for YOUR brand. Every business has different timelines. An e-commerce boutique will heavily rely on Black Friday, but their season will be over 6-7 days before Christmas. A blogger will need to know what days readership comes to a dead halt, such as the actual holidays & weekends when people are busy with holiday activities. Don’t get fatigued by trying to just throw as much content out there as possible. There IS a correct time to post and a correct time to shut up. Think this through NOW (and would you look at that? These days just became YOUR personal holiday shopping days!)
3) Test your market now.
Now is the time to test, test, test. This could mean a simple survey, asking what they like and don’t like about your site. If you’re up for running Facebook ads, you have a real opportunity to tweak what works without competing against those huge holiday budgets. Think of this as a practice round; learn what your audience will go crazy over so you’re not wondering why they’re not responding to your amazing deals come game-time.
4) Plan out your time sensitive content.
The holiday season is a whirlwind and all other brands are vomiting their best deals & content into the depths of the Internet as well. It will definitely confuse you if you are not organized. Not to mention, you’re a busy human this time of year, just like everyone else. In December, you simply will not get to every idea you had in October because life will get in the way. But it’s too crucial to your business that you don’t flake this time of year. Spend some dedicated time now to outline your holiday content so that you’re guaranteed to execute it. This means photo shoots, blog posts, sales, giveaways — you know you’re full of amazing ideas, if only you had months to execute them! Oh wait…
Have you started preparing your brand for the holidays yet? Let me know about your business in the comments!
What is the secret to taking your business to the next level? Finding your community.