Today I’m delighted to present a guest post from Richard Protheroe at Veeqo, one of the top rated inventory tools for Shopify.

We are well into the holiday season, but it’s not too late to make that last big push with your marketing efforts. Therefore we’ve pulled together 5 of the best holiday marketing ideas that you can copy today! Of course some of the examples below will have a much larger budget, but the ideas can still be used.

Check out this post on how you can shoot your own videos, just by using a camera and a tripod. Alternatively you can use websites like Upwork or try your local university or college for students. They are likely to do this for free as well and can use it as a project of theirs.

The Short and Sweet Approach…

It can be very tempting to go for the funny approach, as positive emotions are something that you want your brand to be associated with. We recently wrote about how it can be one of the five practices to solidify your brand’s recognition.

However, it’s important that you have a goal in mind and think of the possible negative effects of your idea. This sort of content though is particularly powerful on social media, which we touch on further down.

What Irn Bru have done well here is identified their target market, which is likely to be millennial’s. They’ve also tapped into people’s emotions, by using the present off your Grandmother situation. The possible negative effect is that they may alienate an older viewer, but is that their target anyway? Think about this when using the ‘funny approach’.

Use this to..

  1. Promote a particularly festive themed gift
  2. Make a short and snappy video
  3. Humanise your brand

The Cultural Reference…

What Burberry do very well is they play massively on their British heritage. From the music they use and the people that represent them in their videos.

However what was particularly good about their latest festive video was that they used the “15 years of Billy Elliot” to leverage it. The Dance Drama Film about the miners strike in North East England during the 80’s is an iconic moment in British history, which works well with their brand.

Is there something local to you that is of cultural significance. Are there any anniversaries or birthdays of Celebrities local to you? This sort of campaign is a great way of using leverage from more influential people, which in turn will get your company out there.

Influencer marketing like this has been big in 2015 and only continues to grow. Getting others to promote your brand is important as companies are now seen to be providing valuable content. No surprise then that word-of-mouth marketing has a 37 percent higher retention rate than paid advertising.

Use this to…

  1. Get leverage from influencers
  2. Strengthen your image locally or nationally
  3. Create word of mouth hype

The Personal Approach…

If you are reading this and you have a Facebook account you must surely be aware of OfficeMax’s ‘Elf Yourself’ campaign.

This campaign personalized the user’s experience and allowed them to insert their face onto a dancing elf. These videos still crop up every year, so it’s hard to think that this is now over a decade older!

The campaign personalized the experience for the user and armed them with some very shareable content. In just over 2 months it generate 193 million visits to the site! ‘Elf Yourself’ then went on to app form and is still generate money for the company to this day!

Is there some sort of animation or gif you can offer? Could you link this to your business. Think outside the box and you might land that big idea!

Use this to…

  1. Generate social buzz
  2. Monetise your marketing gimmick
  3. Personalize user experience

The Countdown Approach…

A simple but very effective marketing idea is to do an ‘Advent Calendar’ or ‘Christmas Countdown’ email campaign.

Econsultancy displayed some very innovative countdowns from brands, but at this time it’s fine just to keep it basic. Use your CRM system to personalize and filter product types to your customers. A scatter gun approach is not the way to go here!

What Samsung did well in this campaign is they highlighted the main product at the top, but also used the second half of the email to email related products.

Use this to…

  1. Increase email open rate
  2. Get rid of slow selling items
  3. Inform customers of your opening/shipping times

The Social Approach…

If there is a place to open up and humanise your business then it’s on social media. It’s where you can strip the corporate side of your company and engage with the people who matter.

As Ilya Pozin recently wrote for Forbes, your potential customers are “looking for social media accounts that are smart and funny”. Whist at the same time you should look to be “good conversationalists”.

In Starbucks example they personified the Pumpkin Spiced Latte, which led to hilarious social interactions. Let’s say you sell Skin Cream, you could set up a specific humanized Twitter account for it and use social monitoring on a site like hubspot and interact with people talking about it.

People will be eager to RT and favorite something like this as it would be unexpected. The Pumpkin Spiced Latte was covered everywhere, even in a full length interview with The Daily Dot.

Use this to…

  1. Enter social conversations
  2. Humanise your brand
  3. Draw attention back to your main Twitter account and site

Richard Protheroe is a content marketing executive at Veeqo, who make sellers lives easier by managing their inventory over multiple channels.

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