Today on the Demand Gen Pod, Episode 2, Ryan discusses the importance of holiday marketing campaigns, highlighting their ability to boost sales and revenue, increase visibility and brand
awareness, foster customer loyalty and engagement, capitalize on seasonal
spending habits, and gain a competitive advantage. He provides examples of
successful holiday campaigns by Coca Cola and Apple. Ryan emphasizes the need
for clear objectives, audience targeting, segmentation, creative storytelling,
consistency in messaging and branding across different channels, measuring
goals and metrics (such as sales ROI or website traffic), planning early and
executing seamlessly, testing and optimizing campaigns on the fly based on
data analysis. He also suggests engaging with customers authentically through
various means like dynamic content or social media. Additionally, he offers
specific recommendations for retail (discounts/promotions), nonprofits
(heartfelt stories of giving), technology sectors (innovative gift solutions).
Overall, Ryan encourages listeners to build their own effective holiday
marketing campaigns.
Summary notes from Episode 2:
Ryan is hosting the demand gen pod and discussing holiday marketing. Holiday
campaigns are important for visibility, brand awareness, customer loyalty, and
capitalizing on seasonal spending habits. Creating a sense of urgency in
subject lines and content can increase conversions. Coca Cola and Apple have
had successful holiday campaigns. Key elements of a holiday campaign include
clear objectives, audience targeting, segmentation, and emotionally resonant
storytelling. Consistency in messaging and branding across all channels is
crucial. Measuring goals and metrics is important for analyzing campaign
results. Flexibility, adaptability, and empathy in messaging can help overcome
economic hurdles. KPIs to consider include sales ROI, website traffic, social
engagement, email click-through rates, and conversion rates. Plan early, test
and optimize, and engage with customers authentically.
Full Transcript:
00:01
What is going on? Welcome to the demand gen pod. My name is Ryan. Today we’re talking about holiday marketing, so let’s do it. Now, before I forget, don’t forget to click and subscribe if you were watching us on YouTube. Yes, you totally can do that. See my gorgeous mug. But if not and you’re listening to the audio version, subscribe to your audio podcast. Wherever you do that, I really appreciate it. All right, we’re diving in. Holiday marketing. I just want to chat a little bit about holiday campaigns, how to think about them, and some good examples of really successful ones from the past. But why does it matter so much? Why are holiday campaigns so important? Well, people are looking to spend money holiday campaigns, inevitably, and this doesn’t even necessarily matter which industry you’re in. Certainly it’s going to adjust the results a little bit, depending.
00:57
But we’ve seen doing this with SaaS products, we’ve seen doing it with brick and mortar stores, but boosting sales and revenue will almost always happen with a holiday campaign. It’s really great for visibility and brand awareness. It fosters customer loyalty and engagement. Most people, most people love the holidays and it brings out that spending spirit and the family spirit. It also allows you to capitalize on those seasonal spending habits, which is super important. And even more so, you get that slight competitive advantage in the market, certainly over any competitors who are not doing holiday sales. And again, even if you’re in the SaaS industry, even if you’re in the health industry, you can absolutely do holiday sales or holiday kind of opportunities and different things. The impact can be pretty substantial, right? I mean, you’ve got increased spending, increased gifting, you’ve got emotional purchasing decisions that come along in the holidays, the expectation of discounts and promotions from people so they’re walking and expecting some sort of promotion.
01:55
I know that brands that I follow, if I’m looking for a pair of shoes or whatever, I might hold off until the holiday season if I can, because that way I’m more likely to go ahead and buy because I think that there’s going to be some sort of promotion. But there’s definitely also a sense of urgency with holiday shopping, too. And we’ve talked about that on the pod before, where when you provide a sense of urgency inside your subject lines, for example, your content, it can really make a difference for people and their willingness to move forward and purchase because they’re seeing some degree of urgency and they’re feeling that urgency and that makes them act. What are some examples of successful holiday campaigns? This was kind of fun to go back and check out, but the first one that comes to mind is Coca Cola’s.
02:43
Holidays are coming and it has this beautiful sense of nostalgia and association with the holiday season. And even when it’s freezing cold outside, I still think of those cute polar bears and it’s absolutely gone on and on. And another really good one I think is Apple. They did a Share Your Gifts campaign, which was really focused on storytelling, and I thought that one was really cool as well. So a couple of things to keep in mind when you’re building out your holiday campaign and the elements that you should be focused on clear objectives and audience targeting. Segmentation, segmentation is always so important. But if we’re really clear on who we want to target, why we’re targeting them, even if we have multiple campaigns that are broken out across different segments, absolutely fine. All the better. Smaller segments, tighter segments, tighter campaigns, better results, guaranteed every single time.
03:42
Creative and emotionally resonant storytelling. And I think that this is particularly important because, again, it comes back to this seasonal urge to be with family and friends and there’s a bit of emotion that comes in for most people in the holidays. We get time off of work and all of those things make a difference, and capitalizing on some of those emotions can be really powerful. Another thing we talk about all the time is consistency in your messaging and your branding. So again, if you’re creating this omnichannel experience, which I hope you are, I hope that email marketing is not the only thing that you’re doing, although I certainly hope that you’re doing that. But in addition to that, your Paid, your social, organic text ads, wherever you’re doing it, keep it consistent. Keep the landing pages that you’re driving people to consistent, keep that imagery consistent, keep the text that you’re using and the emotions that you’re using, keep all of those consistent across all the different mediums that you’re using, whether it be Instagram or just Google text ads that are popping up just from search results.
04:49
When you’re keeping that consistent, it is far more likely to resonate with someone when they’re seeing it in multiple places. And all of that should follow through to things like email, where your subject lines, your content, your CTAs, and the links that they’re going to are all consistent with that paid advertising alongside it as well. And then finally, let’s talk about measuring goals and metrics. So it’s always important, I like to think of when I’m building campaigns, I like to think of starting at the bottom and working our way back up to the top. So I don’t really think about the people who we want to put in it. Maybe that’s an early conversation of saying, hey, we want to do a top of the funnel campaign. Okay, fine. End of the discussion on the segmentation for the moment. Next step is let’s start at the very bottom and let’s just talk about what we want out of this campaign and if we know what the finish line looks like, then we can figure out how to get there.
05:43
But sometimes if you start at the top and you work your way down, that finish line starts to shift a little bit, and it may not necessarily be the output that you actually wanted from the beginning. So it’s a really healthy approach to start at that bottom. What I mean. Bottom. I mean, like, let’s just think about the funnel or something. You start at the bottom of the funnel at that closed one sold opportunity. That’s what you want. Okay, so let’s take one step back up what is going to make those folks convert, and as we get back up, who is most likely to engage with that content to then make them convert. So you kind of start at the bottom and work your way up. A couple things to keep in mind, though, is a crowded market. And one of the things that I think is really interesting about Amazon and things like Prime Day and all the sales that happen that they do is that they’ve changed the market.
06:35
Black Friday another really good example, actually, probably even a better one, they’ve changed the market on how they approach, on how businesses in general approach things like Black Friday, which is why now we’re seeing Black Friday ads on November 1. Because one of the things that companies are doing to try to get over that crowded market and differentiate themselves is simply just get there first and get there early. So you have all these early Black Friday sales thinking that if we can convert somebody earlier, they’re less likely to spend money somewhere else and they’ll spend money with us. I think that’s a really interesting trend that I’m curious on how that’s going to tweak and be tweaked over the next five or seven years or whatever. Because I’m noticing pretty anecdotal, but I’m noticing that I’m starting to pick out and we have tools to help us pick out good deals, especially with, like, on Amazon, right?
07:26
So Amazon will sometimes jack up prices just before a sale, and then so you’ll see that the price was higher than the original price, and then they discount it, and they show you that discount. I think Gap can sometimes be a little I’m not sure, but a few other clothing companies, they’ll do this too. Joseph a bank, I think, got sued for it. So that’s one thing that I’ve noticed over the years. I also know, like, Black Friday TVs that go on sale, they have a different version of TVs, which are not as good as their non Black Friday counterpart. And those are the ones they give up for sale. So I’m curious how the trend shifts where we’re looking at things that we can go and buy and then deciding, do I actually want to buy this now, or should I just wait until maybe after Christmas or a less popular sale time, but still where strong sales happen.
08:24
And then the other thing that I think that we need to keep in mind are that we are I don’t know, seemingly constantly on the brink of economic failure. So there are some uncertain times, and companies are thinking about that too, just as much as people are. So whether you’re B to B or B to C somewhat doesn’t matter in this. Just keep in mind that flexibility and adaptability and strategies and virtual experiences and empathy in your messaging can go a long way to help people get over some of the humps of having to go and spend money or deciding to go and spend money, whether they have to or not. Next, KPIs so we also want to be analyzing our results, right? So what do the results of our campaign mean? And again, these are the conversations you should be having early in the beginning.
09:08
So talking about those KPIs and working your way up to deciding how to actually achieve them. Things like sales ROI, maybe it’s website traffic or social engagement, maybe you’re looking at email, click through rates, maybe you’re looking at conversion rates. And make sure that those align with your higher and larger business goals and make sure that those holiday goals tie into your overall business objectives. I mean, that’s the entire point, right? If we’re trying to improve the bottom line and we’re trying to make those sales and conversions, then we want to make sure that all the campaigns that we’re running align to those goals. So whatever those goals may be for you. So a little bit of a recap, some recommendations. Plan early and execute seamlessly. Test, always going to mention testing, test and optimize as you go. Totally okay to do that on the fly as long as you trust your data and then engage with your customers authentically.
10:03
So you can do that in lots of different ways. You can do that leveraging dynamic content. You can do it on social. However it makes sense for you and your brand. Make sure that you are covering kind of all of those corners, all those corners that you’ve got. And while I’m thinking about it, don’t forget to subscribe if you have the opportunity. I really do appreciate it. And finally, a few different things for specific industries and sectors. Okay? So for retail specifically, focus on your discounts and your promotions. For nonprofits, you can focus on the feeling, the heartfelt stories of giving that you’ve had. You’ll see those pop up all the time. Especially the NFL is particularly good at this, where they have all you meet the families and they’ve all helped out other communities and stuff. They do that a lot during the holidays.
10:54
And then tech for the Tech innovative gift solutions. So whether it is a discount, whether it’s an early bird discount to special customers, those are all different approaches that you can take for B, two B or Tech or SaaS. Thank you for joining me today. Again, again, trying to keep these under 1015 minutes. I hope that you’ve learned something. I hope that you’re going to go build out your awesome holiday campaign. When you get to the office and I want to hear all about it, you can reach me at hello@demandgenpod.com, my name is Ryan subscribe if you can. Thank you. Have a great day.