The holiday season is a time of joy and celebration, but it can also bring about a whirlwind of events and activities, which sometimes can be… a bit chaotic. It can be far too easy for overwhelm to trickle in and keep you from achieving your holiday goals.
Whether creating an action plan for the end-of-year holidays or any holiday in-between, having a strategic content plan is your key to a stress-free and prosperous holiday season.
But what’s first?
Define Your Holiday Goals
Before diving into the creative process, defining your holiday goals is crucial. What does success mean for you during this festive season? Are you looking to:
- Increase sales?
- Boost customer engagement?
- Build brand awareness?
Clear objectives will help be the driving force to determine the kind of offer that’ll bring you to your goal.
Determine Your Offer
Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to consider what you’ll offer your audience. Remember: Your offer should align with your objectives.
- If you aim to increase customer engagement, you could offer a workshop or online challenge to excite your audience about your offers.
- For those looking to drive seasonal sales, Black Friday can be the perfect opportunity to introduce bundles or enticing discounts.
- Looking to build brand awareness? Consider revamping your website to create a fresh online presence.
Crafting Your Holiday Content Strategy
There are 3 main factors when it comes to creating your content strategy…
- Content channel
- Cadence
- Value type
Choosing the right content channels
With your goals and offer in mind, you need to determine which content channels will be the most effective in generating the traction you need to achieve your goal.
You have a variety of options to choose from:
- Blog posts
- Email marketing
- Social media platforms
- Videos
- Podcasts
Once you decide which channels to use, you must create a content cadence.
Tailor your content through cadence
No matter your chosen channel, you must determine how often you’ll post or create content for this channel.
Do you want to have a weekly blog? Biweekly email? 3 social posts a week?
Use value to achieve goal
What should you say once you’ve got your cadenced and content channel?
Your posts can provide value through 3 main factors:
- Education
- Inspiration
- Interactive and relatable
Educational content isn’t the only valuable content you can use. Inspirational and relatable content are just as essential to deepen your audience’s relationship with your brand. It’s important to have a mixture of all forms of value content.
Want to see all of this in action?
A Mock Holiday Content Strategy
Let’s say your niche is podcast development, and your audience is business owners. You have a connected audience, but you want to introduce a new offer, so you need to increase customer engagement to market your new offer in the upcoming year.
Let’s break it all down.
Objective: Increase customer engagement
Offer: Free 3-day challenge on how a podcast can grow your business
Content channel: Email marketing and podcast
Cadence: Send 2 weekly emails and begin to invite people to challenge via podcast
Value: Educate on how a podcast can grow your business, tell the story about how you started the podcast, and use social proof to inspire others to take action.
Here’s another example:
You’re in the e-commerce space and want to increase seasonal sales of your wellness supplements.
Objective: Increase seasonal sales
Offer: Black Friday sales event + bundles of products
Content channel: Social media + email marketing
Cadence: 3x a week social posts to Instagram and TikTok and a weekly email leading up to Black Friday
Value: Educate on the supplements and their uses, why you created these formulas, and how these supplements will help them achieve their own goals
Now that you’ve seen a couple of these in action, I must emphasize that neither of these niches leveraged every single channel or social platform. This brings me to an essential part of the holiday season….
Avoiding Burnout During the Holiday Rush
The holiday season is notorious for inducing stress due to the pressure of managing numerous content channels and social strategies simultaneously, but here’s a piece of advice: prioritize one thing at a time and focus on metrics that matter most for your unique goals.
You don’t need to be on every social media platform or utilizing podcasts, blogs, email, social media, and video.
Use what works for you and what feels sustainable. At the end of the day, you want to use this style of content planning for future promotions and holidays, so it should be something you can manage and have fun with. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it? Remember to embrace the joy and creativity that comes with the holiday season.
About The Author
Rachel Gogos is a multi-passionate entrepreneur with a strong desire to help people by creating strong personal brands and businesses. She’s personally launched dozens of books, e-products, and services; and hundreds of products and services with her clients. She started her career at the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where she helped create the look and feel for the organization’s first website.
Today, in her current role running brandiD, Rachel channels over 15 years of marketing and communications experience into each and every website for brandiD’s clients.
And check out her book, Build Your Brand: The Distinctive Guide to Soul-Based Marketing. It will help you uncover your personal brand.