The new year is just around the corner, which means it’s time to turn your attention toward your 2024 marketing and content goals. One of the best ways to organize your holiday campaigns throughout the year is with a holiday marketing calendar.
Well-known holidays like Christmas, Thanksgiving, Independence Day, and Halloween dominate the holiday marketing landscape with specific themes and immediately recognizable imagery. These holidays should be on every marketer’s radar, but if you only focus your efforts on the obvious dates, you’ll leave plenty of golden opportunities on the table.
Before implementing your campaigns, it will help to first outline your year in as much detail as possible. Whether you plan the whole year ahead of time or attack things one month or quarter at a time is up to you, but it’s essential to have a clear direction and all team members on the same page. By working at least a few months ahead, you’ll have goals on your calendar ready to achieve while leaving some room for adjustments down the road.
Another thing to consider before diving into the specifics of your holiday marketing calendar is to know what kind of content you want to deliver. Whether your company feels most comfortable with email marketing, content marketing, social media, editorial (i.e. blogs) or a little bit of everything, understanding your strengths will help you develop the best long-term plan. No matter what your preferred vehicle is, you’ll likely be focusing on one or more of these holiday campaign strategies:
Everyone is familiar with the big holidays, and you shouldn’t ignore them. Customers will be expecting to hear from you during the traditional holiday season, but what about the rest of the year? We’ve compiled a short list of other holidays that often fly under the radar, each of which you can easily add your own marketing twist to:
This list doesn’t even scratch the surface. There are plenty of resources online where you can search for niche holidays, or you can even type “[specific date] holiday” into Google and you’ll find something worth celebrating.
You’ll also want to consider campaign strategies that revolve around a season, rather than a specific date. This of course can be implemented with the winter, spring, summer and fall in mind – each season is easy to revolve around a specific theme – but you can also extend this idea to things like the back-to-school season. Education is the #1 market in the promotional products industry, so reaching out to back-to-school buyers during the summer months is a must.
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