Sprinkle Some Holiday Magic On Your Marketing!

For many, the holidays are the most wonderful times of the year; but for businesses, they’re also the busiest. This year especially, amidst the pandemic and its entailing restrictions, businesses must find new marketing strategies to properly encourage engagement in their goods and services. Marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all, so we’re here to help –– to bring that holiday magic to your business! 

We’ve invited Content Marketing Practitioner Mike Allton (@mike_allton), Live Video Strategist Stephanie Liu (@heystephanie) and The Digital Gal Amanda Robinson (@thedigitalgal) to help YOU with your business’s marketing during the holidays!

Missed the Twitter Chat? Here’s a quick recap:

Q1. Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday may be over but there’s still plenty of time left in the holiday season. How are you promoting your goods / services for the remainder of the holidays? What last minute holiday marketing tips are the most helpful? 

Mike: It's tough because my best channel is email and this time of year, every brand is leaning hard into their email subscribers. I know you feel me on this... how many emails did you get on Cyber Monday alone? The volume of emails doesn't stop or dissuade me though. It motivates me to spend that much more time writing and craft messages of value. It's also why I doubled-down on a weekly email newsletter months ago. Small businesses today, in particular, can get personal and get local with their emails and make them instantly relatable to their target audience. Talk about how you're celebrating the holidays in your neighborhood. Give a shout out to other local businesses.

Stephanie: Most of our clients embraced the power of livestreaming this year. We’ve created custom audiences of our loyal viewers and are using remarketing to promote goods/services. We’ve also been experimenting with live shopping! FB just rolled out Live Shopping in the US and Thailand last month so we’re having fun building out their commerce shop.

Amanda: Facebook’s system is flooded with ads. Ad costs are higher, ad approvals take longer. Plan ahead and get ads scheduled 48hrs ahead of when they need to be ‘live’.

Q2. A lot has changed since last year. With so much of your audience's / client's life changing, how have you changed your marketing overall? How has your holiday marketing changed from last year due to the pandemic? 

Mike: I mentioned my newsletter... I had never committed to a regular newsletter but decided this summer to start and it's been great. The feedback that I get is phenomenal! And thanks to motivation from @heystephanie, I am going to be turning my newsletter into a web series and podcast to reach entirely new audiences with my content in very new ways. 

Stephanie: Our clients have shifted to calendar marketing. When promoting an event, we use @Eventable to get audiences to block out their calendar. It's also been helpful for promoting our livestream #LightsCameraLive and #DigitalConfetti! 

Amanda: People are Zoom’ed out. Free webinars aren’t as attractive. Time to kick content creativity into overdrive! Less is more. Attention spans are thin. Focus on delivering value succinctly.

Q3. Marketing isn’t a one-size-fits-all! How do you think effective marketing strategies differ for a small business vs a large one? What are your best tips for each? 

Mike: Interestingly, I think the most effective strategies remain the same, they just scale up for larger businesses. Because it's really all about relationships. Unless you're B2C and commoditized, you need relationships. The fun part is that, the smaller your business, the easier it is to build relationships! If you're running a small team, people KNOW who you are! And they respect your time & attention. So give it to them.

Stephanie: Larger businesses can usually invest in brand awareness campaigns and remarket to audiences that are engaged with their content. For SMBs, we usually leverage influencers and create lookalike audiences of existing customers. 

Amanda: Small biz: don’t compare yourself to or try to keep up with larger businesses. Set your own goals, own baseline, celebrate small wins. Grow your digital footprint before trying to grow conversions. 

Q4. If Santa could create a social media / marketing tool just for you, what would you ask for and what would the tool do? 

Mike: I love @Agorapulse so that's where I'd start, and add in a dash of Pinterest along with a pinch of landing pages and email marketing to bake a delicious batch of marketing cookies.

Stephanie: I would love it if there was a way to copy and paste ad copy into an xls and bulk import that into a web-based design platform that can automatically create images in different sizes AND videos. 

Amanda: I would ask for a matrix style download into my brain of all of the Facebook changes & updates in real time. It’s like drinking water from a firehose with all of the changes lately! 

Q5. It’s all about location, location, location! What is your platform of preference? What are your best tips for marketing success on that platform? Which of your social platforms do you notice the most engagement on during the holidays? 

Mike: My preferred platform is actually Messenger, as that's where my most important relationships flourish. But I tell most businesses their most important platform is whichever one they're willing to spend the most time on. Whether it's Twitter or TikTok, Instagram or iTunes, as long as you're focused on creating engaging content and relevant experiences for your audience, you can achieve success. 

Stephanie: The best platform this year for growing B2B relationships has definitely been LinkedIn. So many new and rewarding connections that are paving the way for strategic growth in 2021. As for the platform that's been driving the most engagement, I'd still say that it's livestreaming + Stories. Viewers want to be present and feel like they're a part of the community and get BTS content.

Amanda: I live, eat, breathe & sleep Facebook Ads! Make FB Ads work by 1) Using Ads Manager; 2) Doing audience research; 3) Matching budget to strategy; & 4) Reviewing results & optimizing going forward. 

To stay updated for more content like our Twitter Chats, follow @WinnieSun! Have a question for Winnie? Use the #AskWinnie to get your questions answered!