The holiday season is almost upon us, which means that you need to start thinking about social media holiday preparation!
As we near the end of the year, we are fast approaching some of the busiest periods for online shopping. As a small business or e-commerce brand, you have an enoromous opportunity to use social media marketing to increase conversions and boost your revenue before 2023 wraps up. Effective holiday marketing efforts can help you make the most of social media platforms and drive more sales than ever.
For many content creators and local business owners, curating an impactful holiday social media marketing strategy can feel daunting. Never fear! We’re offering our top 5 tips to help you craft excellent seasonal posts that inspire clicks and sales from your ideal customers.
1. Be Simple But Engaging
The first step is simplicity! During the busy holiday season, many online shoppers are frantically searching for the right gifts and the best deals. Your job is to make shopping easy for target audiences, taking the stress out of the festive shopping season.
Your holiday social media strategy doesn’t have to be complicated, but it must be engaging. To turn your followers into paying customers, your social media content needs to showcase your products in curated ways that speak to your ideal customers.
That could mean:
• Using Instagram Carousels to design curated gift guides, showcasing a collection of related products grouped by a customer’s interests or even price points (e.g. five gift ideas under $50).
• Harness clickable product tags to make your content shoppable and help your audience go from gift discovery to purchase in just a few taps (perfect for last-minute gifting!).
• Leveraging lifestyle imagery or user-generated content in your festive content calendar, tapping into powerful social proof and showcasing your products in use by real-life customers.
Hot tip: Don’t make users guess about key product or holiday promotion information. Instead, clearly communicate product prices, sales offers and discount codes in your text overlays and captions to inspire swift, informed decision-making from your followers.
2. Make the Most of Influencer Marketing
View this post on Instagram
You don’t have to create your content all on your own! The holiday season is the perfect time to maximize influencer opportunities.
Now is the time to reach out to influencers aligned with your target audience and work together to share your holiday promotions with their followers. And here’s why: 31% of social media users discover new products through influencers, with 43% of Gen Z consumers looking to influencers as their preferred product discovery channel.
There are endless ways to harness influencer marketing to boost the social media success of your holiday campaigns, including:
• Creating an Instagram Collab post with an influencer to build social proof for your products and boost the reach of your holiday promotions.
• Partnering with influencers to produce relatable user-generated content style videos (such as Reels and TikTok) that you can repurpose and leverage across your organic and paid ads on social media during the holidays.
• Offering unique discount codes to specific influencers (valid only during the holiday promotion season) to incentivize their followers to take action and make a sale. The best bit? You’ll be able to track the analytics of how many users redeemed these offers, allowing you to make informed decisions about which influencers to partner with again in the future.
3. Review and Refine Based On Recent Campaign Results
A social media strategy is always critical, especially during the holiday season. It’s time to look beyond the holiday spirit and ensure your holiday marketing campaign is driven by data and insights.
On social media, you have a number of ways to review and assess the performance of your organic social media marketing and social media ads. When planning your holiday content, you need to dive into your analytics to see what is and isn’t resonating with your social media audience.
That means looking at key performance insights, such as:
• Which content formats generated the highest engagement rate in your last holiday campaign, and why?
• What social media platform led to the highest number of conversions during your last sales period?
• What creative messaging or assets have led to the highest engagement rate in your last sales period?
By digging into the data, you can make informed decisions about what channels, content themes and formats to prioritize in your holiday themed content this year.
Did you know that you can gain access to in-depth performance and audience analytics directly within your Plann workspace? Score advanced analytics for all your social media channels and set your next holiday social media posts up for success.
4. Share Interactive Posts
Interactivity can be a great tool in driving extra engagement on holiday content! When it comes to holiday social media posts, adding an interactive element (such as a clickable sticker or product tag) can inspire tangible action from your audience and send all the right signals to the social media algorithms, too.
Our advice? Leverage the interactive stickers available on your favorite social media platforms to inspire action and boost engagement on your holiday social media marketing.
In tangible terms, this means:
• Running polls on Instagram Stories to ask your audience to vote for their favorite product colorway.
• Adding a call to action to your next Reel or TikTok video that drives your audience to leave a comment about their favorite holiday tradition.
• Using the quiz sticker on Reels to test your audience’s knowledge about one of your best selling products or your business.
The more high-value engagements your posts receive, the more likely social media algorithms are to prioritize your content in their feeds, too.
5. Plann Ahead For the Holidays
Last but certainly not least, it’s important to plan your holiday social media content ahead of time. This can help take the stress out of keeping up when the season gets busy, and it can also help you align more closely with your predetermined strategy approach.
A strong social media marketing plan across a range of social media sites will save you time, take the guesswork out of content creation and get you back to doing what you do best during the busy holiday season.
Our tip? Batch create your holiday social posts ASAP to avoid a last minute rush to get your content sorted during peak season. Use a visual planner and content creation suite that allows you to create engage, on-brand content in advance to keep your social media presence active and thriving during the busiest time of the year.
The more consistently you show up on social media during the holiday season, the more likely you’ll be to remain top of mind with shoppers (which is ideal for securing last minute holiday purchases!).
Unsure of where to begin when it comes to planning your holiday marketing campaigns and managing your holiday social media content calendar? Plann’s intuitive scheduling and content creation tools can help you take control of your content in no time! Get started today with a FREE 7-day trial and take the stress out of your holiday social media marketing.
