Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. Believe it or not, this episode I’m going to be talking about your Christmas and holiday marketing. I know it’s a little bit early. It feels quite early to me anyway. In past years it was quite acceptable to wait a little bit longer before you start rolling out any kind of Christmas or holiday marketing campaigns or offers or promotions. Oftentimes even in e-commerce you’d really get moving on that sort of marketing around the Black Friday period, and then head on into getting up to Christmas and New Year’s. Obviously, many of us would be rolling some sort of gift-related marketing out before the Black Friday period, but not as early as we really need to be doing it this year.
Catherine Langman:
So 2021, we’re 18 months into this crazy pandemic situation. I think many of us, hopefully all of us, learned a really valuable lesson last year in 2020. Things really went crazy in e-commerce in this fourth quarter of the year. I think we’ve all learned the hard way that COVID has changed the way that we need to run our Christmas or holiday marketing. For starters, delivery times just were really blown out last year. And that’s an issue that has continued to off and on throughout this year. I know that all of the postal system and the couriers, they mostly work really, really hard to do a great job there, but the increase in volume of online retail has just put them under the pump in a crazy, crazy way. And that is going to be very true this year.
Catherine Langman:
And so, obviously, delivery times are a really big reason why we need to be getting moving earlier, but also things like product availability and being able to get stock in. We really need to be on the forefront here. We can’t be trying to get stock delivered into our warehouses close to Christmas and then expect to have time to sell it and deliver it to customers. So that’s another thing that’s really impacted, well, just our sales and marketing generally, but certainly at the really higher sales season of quarter four of the year. But then, of course, customer buying patterns are very different as well.
Catherine Langman:
When you think about it, the kind of Christmas and holiday season that we’re all going to experience this year is very different from what we might’ve looked forward to in the past. I recall even last year, Christmas 2020, I think it was a different Christmas for many people around Australia and around the world, of course, thanks to COVID. But there were some changes that happened right at the last minute that really did prevent a lot of people from being able to go out to socialize, to go to Christmas parties, to go and visit family. We couldn’t easily get out and about. Many of us were under restrictions and not really free to move about and celebrate and enjoy the festivities like we would really love to.
Catherine Langman:
The same is probably going to happen this year. Of course, we don’t know for sure, but I think we need to be prepared that it will be another year where many of us, we’re having Christmas at home. We may not be able to spend it with all of our loved ones. So what can we do as business owners to help support our customers through this kind of an experience?
Catherine Langman:
So we really do need to take all of that into account in the way that we are… This is not just about sales and marketing, right? This is definitely about being able to help our customers to have the best possible Christmas and holiday season as they can because we are all going through some pretty tough times. I think it’s pretty important as business owners to be able to do what we can to support our customers through that. As an online business, we are fortunate to be in the kind of business that can keep operating. I think it can play a really crucial role in being able to connect with our customers and help them to connect with their loved ones as well. So let’s go through how can we operate ourselves, how can we roll this out in our business? How can we try and do a really good job of this ourselves so that we can… Obviously, you want to make some money for yourself, but you also want to try and be a little bit organized and prepared so that this isn’t going to be a tremendously stressful time in your business.
Catherine Langman:
If I think back to past years, the timeframe that we would really have run our Christmas marketing campaigns, like I said before, we definitely were able to start much later in the year. We were able to pivot from Black Friday to Cyber Monday into some real festive-y, Christmas-y themed promotions. Maybe it was a 12-days of Christmas type thing. It was possible to do all of that, and the postage cutoff times were very close to the actual day of Christmas. That’s just not possible anymore. So now we really need to flip that on its head. We need to be rolling out our Christmas and gift-giving-related marketing much earlier. So really we need to be going out from September with our gifting campaigns, and then really kind of finish off with a bang on Christmas… sorry, on Black Friday. You may still be in a position where you can get away with sending orders after that, but I don’t think that many of us will be able to guarantee delivery before Christmas if we are still really pushing out the Christmas stuff in December.
Catherine Langman:
So the message very much needs to be, “Buy now, wrap later.” I think you’re going to start seeing this kind of a message being rolled out from the Amazons and the eBays and the big guns, all the way down to the smallest of startups. If we’re all cohesive in sharing that message, then hopefully even the most last-minute shoppers out there will start to get themselves into gear and get onto it now. I’m laughing because that is me. I’m always the last-minute shopper, not because I am not somebody who likes to give gifts to my loved ones, I do. I just have always felt like, “I can get onto Christmas after the last birthday is over in the family.” My second son’s birthday’s at the end of November, and you get to the end of November, and then it’s like, “Holy cow, I don’t actually have a whole lot of time to get organized now.” So yeah, I do end up being in that poor old sod who’s trudging through the mall at the day before Christmas. Hopefully not this year. It’s a pretty awful thing to be trying to rush all of that kind of stuff.
Catherine Langman:
Anyhow. So we really need to be going out from September. It’s very much on our doorstep now. So how can we get organized? How can you go about creating a Christmas or a holiday marketing campaign that’s really going to stand out especially when we do have to start so far in advance of the event itself? Now you’ll hear, I’m trying to use language like Christmas and holiday marketing. I’m aware that not everybody celebrates Christmas per se. Please don’t take offense at me using that word. There are other religious celebrations around that time, but there’s also just holiday times that many of us do enjoy at that time of the year, or we just like to get together with our families and give a gift. So I’m trying to hit all of these different events in one campaign or one strategy here. So bear with me.
Catherine Langman:
So how do we do a really good job of this when we are starting so far in advance? The thing that I really like to do with these sorts of campaigns, or any kind of promotional campaigns really, is not to start with the tactics. I don’t like to start with, “Right, I’m going to run some Facebook ads. I’m going to send some emails.” I don’t like to start there. I like to start with, what theme are you going to use to really anchor your whole campaign? When I’m talking about a theme, I’m talking about you might have a tagline or a headline that you really use to anchor the whole promotional campaign, but also visual themes. So if I give a couple of examples, in my last business, the modern cloth nappy brand, I always created a custom limited edition fabric print that was a festive looking. I remember one year I did a candy cane print, so red and white diagonal stripes. And another year, I did a gingerbread-themed fabric print, which was super cute.
Catherine Langman:
And then I was able to do a photo shoot just to get a couple of shots that were really themed around that, whether it was the candy cane. It was super cute. We had this little, very cute toddler and a bright candy red leather couch, fake leather of course, and then we had some candy canes hanging from the ceiling. I can’t remember what other styling went into it, but that was really cute. And then the gingerbread-themed one, I still have the image from that campaign, it’s very cute. This kid, little toddler wearing the nappy. The photo shoot had these awesome, decorated gingerbread house, and the kid was playing with it and then smashing it and then eating it. We had this amazing series of photos that went with it. And so that was the visual theme to go with the campaign there.
Catherine Langman:
But another example is our recent client, istillcallaustraliahome.com, 2020 Christmas campaign. They had a tagline, “I still believe in Santa.” It was perfectly conceived for the time that we were in. So in their business, they typically were sending gifts overseas and also around Australia, but largely sending gifts overseas. It was at a time where all of a sudden, no one could go and visit their loved ones overseas. There’s a heartache that goes with that, of course. And so this campaign was really… And it was beautifully done. She had a whole story that went along with that and a little animation that she had illustrated herself and had animated to bring some movement into it, and really telling that story, I still believe in Santa and how can you bring the magic of Christmas to your loved ones overseas and send your love to them through giving them a gift.
Catherine Langman:
That theme of the headline, the tagline, and also the illustrated visuals that she could then use across all of her business, from the website, through emails and ads, and everything just really tied it all together. So that’s what I mean by starting with a theme to anchor your whole campaign. I can’t tell you how effective it is at really getting cut-through with your marketing compared to, for example, if you’re just showing the products, which might be fabulous products for gifts, but if they really just presented in the same way that any other products are presented and that maybe all of your competitors are presenting them in the same way, whether they’re the same products or just similar gifting products, it is so hard to stand out. It’s not going to be as effective at really inspiring your audience to think, “Oh, that would be the perfect gift for so-and-so,” or actually really getting people to actually notice that it is a Christmas gift idea. So it’s so important and so effective if you can come up with this sort of a theme to anchor your whole campaign.
Catherine Langman:
The next thing that you really need to be doing is working out what products or bundles or offers that you will be promoting and selling through this gifting marketing campaign. And part of this is about, of course, planning and sourcing all of those products so that you have the inventory to sell, but it’s also really thinking through what would your audience want to buy and give as a gift this year. I don’t know about you, guys, but for me as a mother and sister, daughter, auntie, there’s quite a few people in my family that I like to be able to give a gift to at that time of the year, but I don’t always know what they want or what would be a good idea to buy them. Thinking about my little nieces right now, I mean, I’m not too bad at coming up with gifts for them now because my own daughter is just a few years older. So I’ve sort of been through that age bracket with them.
Catherine Langman:
But it’s not always easy to choose something that you know they would like. It’s easy enough to choose something you know you would like yourself, but it’s not always easy to choose something that other people would really love. And so it can be very helpful if you can provide those ideas and present them in easy to buy manners, bundles, that sort of thing and even having a filter on your website that can help people to choose, okay, gifts for children, two-year-old kids or five-year-old kids. I’m loathed to say gifts for little boys or gifts for little girls but, unfortunately, it is a highly googled term. There are a lot of people that like to try and search in that way, but gifts for mom, gifts for dad, all of that kind of stuff, even filters like that on your website can be very helpful at this time of the year. But as our bundles, gift packs, those sorts of things that make things really easy for your customers to take up.
Catherine Langman:
So then once you’ve worked out what you are going to sell in terms of products or bundles or gift packs or offers, also have a think here in terms of offers and incentives. You might not need to go out with incentives right now other than potentially adding in some free gift-wrapping or gift cards or whatever, but you might wish to reserve using the more heavy-handed marketing tactics like incentives for the Black Friday, Cyber Monday event a little later on. That’s up to you, but plan this stuff out in advance if you possibly can.
Catherine Langman:
Then you want to move on to creating the visual assets that you will need to use through the campaign. This is the festive-looking graphics or animated gifs or videos that are in line with your theme or taking a photo or doing a new little photo shoot to illustrate this theme as I was talking about the example from my last business there. Again, I just can’t emphasize enough how effective your campaign will be if you can have these visual assets along the lines of that theme. It really makes you stand out from the crowd.
Catherine Langman:
So creating those is definitely the next step. And then from there, you need to start thinking about content. We just can’t do digital marketing, online marketing without content. It’s not just about having an image or a video, it’s the storytelling part of it. What stories can you share to help your customers imagine their Christmas this year? It is a bloody tough time for so many people right now, but there are ways that we can help and inspire and entertain and all of this kind of stuff. Like I said earlier, I personally don’t believe that this is just about sales-generating activities. I really do believe that this is about building these relationships with your customers and with your audience and providing some support and some entertainment. How can you engage with them in a way that will lift them up and help them through this time? So, creating various different types of content, it is very much going to relate to… It needs to be relevant to what you sell and what your audience comes to you for.
Catherine Langman:
So it might be as simple as providing really comprehensive gift guides for your ideal customers, but also you can create other sorts of content too like maybe a series of recipes for festive meals that you can easily make at home or perhaps some activities that are festive-themed that might keep the kids entertained at home this Christmas. Or it might be how to write a letter to Santa, or it might be something else that is just as equally inspiring or entertaining or helpful to your audience this year. I remember I Still Call Australia Home last year with their I still believe in Santa campaign. They had this wonderful, wonderful story that really told that story. I’m sure she would have it on her Facebook page if you look her up and scroll back to this time last year and see the beautiful story that she rolled out. It was evocative and it was absolutely beautiful.
Catherine Langman:
Not that you have to take that angle, obviously you do need to do something that is relevant to what you sell and what your, like I said before, what your customers come to you for. You don’t want there to be a disconnect, I guess, is what I’m trying to get at here. But yeah, content is very, very helpful. If we come down to the pure commercial side of content marketing, creating content like that, that is just designed to entertain or engage or inspire or educate or just be interesting or helpful in some way shape, or form, that kind of content is not designed to sell, right? But it is designed to help attract and build an engaged audience and to develop a relationship with them, I suppose. And it’s also really helpful at warming them up and getting them to the point where all of the digital platforms that we use in our marketing can also easily identify who your customers are because they’re engaging with you. There are these signals coming back from your audience to, say, your Facebook Ad account for instance, or your audience is clearly going from social media to your website to interact and engage and spend time on your website.
Catherine Langman:
All of that kind of engagement actually really positively helps the actual sales-generating marketing that you will then roll out. Hopefully, that makes sense. So there is use in doing this, not just because you want to be a good citizen at this time of the year. Hopefully, that provides some kind of inspiration and insight into why you want to spend time creating good quality content.
Catherine Langman:
So then can you work into your promotion some sort of festive activity? Like I mentioned before, I used to have a lot of fun doing things like 12 days of Christmas-style promotions or advent calendar-style promotion. Advent calendar style promotion, that’s where you would essentially have almost like a visual of an advent calendar. This is how I created it anyway. I had a special page on my website that was the advent calendar. All of the graphics were designed for a window on each day. And then every day, a new window would be open and there would be a new product or a new offer that people could buy just for that day. That’s a fair bit of work to put in, but you might decide it’s a little bit too early in the year to run an advent calendar style promotion now. Totally fine. But if you can find some way to turn this into a bit of an interactive event, that’s fun. So many of us are stuck at home right now. How can we have a little bit of fun with this as well?
Catherine Langman:
I’m not saying you have to do this, but if you can, have a bit of fun and turn it into a little bit of an interactive event. That’s going to be pretty engaging way to run your marketing. Now, throughout this whole thing, you are going to need to be repeating the message of buy now wrap later. We all need to just be reminding all of our customers, all of our audience that same message that we can not rely on deliveries getting to us at the last minute. If you want to be buying gifts to give your loved ones this year, you need to be proactive and get onto it early and not be a last-minute shopper because you’ll end up disappointed. It’s not really us as the online store owners who are the ones delivering, this is the message coming from all of the postal and courier networks around the world, really, saying just the sheer volume of parcels that they will need to deliver in the fourth quarter of this year will be astronomical. So to avoid disappointment, we need to get on and shop early. And so, as brand owners, business owners, we need to be consistent in sharing that by now wrap later message.
Catherine Langman:
So then from all of this planning, then you want to start writing out some of your content for your emails and for your blogs and few social media, and start scheduling it out. Obviously, you want to be creating these visual assets that you need to illustrate your promotional theme. You want to be getting all of that stuff set up on your website. So do you have a gifting section of your online store? You definitely want to make sure that the homepage and any kind of Christmas category in your shop all has that same visual treatment using those graphics that you’ve hopefully created by this point in the strategy around that promotional thing that I keep talking about. So get all the wheels in motion there and schedule as much as you can.
Catherine Langman:
And then, of course, you do want to be working on driving traffic to your store throughout this. So you will want to be working on your ads. I can’t really emphasize enough that you’re going to want to get onto this fairly early as well. I’m absolutely recommending that you put some of your ad budget behind the engaging content that I was just talking about before. It should go without saying that in the fourth quarter of the year, we can all expect ad costs to go up simply because there are so many more people that do get on and spend money on ads at that time of the year or increase their spend remarkably. And, really, it makes sense because you’re going to make more money, so you’re going to spend more money on your ads to get your bigger share of that pie.
Catherine Langman:
But if you want to try and keep your cost per acquisition down as much as possible, you do really want to spend some money on that engagement-type content. So, all of that inspiring, entertaining, helpful type content that I was talking about before, put some budget behind that, and that will really, really help. Again, that’s just about really giving Facebook the signals that it needs. Facebook needs to see who is your audience, who wants to actually engage with you, who wants to visit your website from your content? As much as you can, really do that work on the platform and give your audience a great user experience on the platform, the better placed Facebook will be to know who to show ads to when it comes time to actually drive them to your website and get sales happening.
Catherine Langman:
Hopefully, that makes sense. That’s in a little bit of a nutshell there. But you do want to also make sure that you’re trying to use some video content in your ads. Video content consumption just generally speaking has really gone up this year… well, over the past 12 months. It will increase even more over the next quarter. So, please try and bear that in mind. I know it’s not the easiest content necessarily to make, but it is a social platform. You don’t need to have the slick television production quality for video content when you’re using it in your social media ads, okay? So you can do this on your phone. Yeah, you probably want to get a ring light and a desk stand so that you can at least have well-lit-looking videos, but you do not need to employ a expensive video production team to do this kind of stuff for you at all.
Catherine Langman:
So hopefully that helps there. But the other thing too, with your ads, in this year, I really would be expecting that it will follow similar trends to past years, last year and before, where the volume of people placing ads on the platform at this time of the year, fourth quarter, will go up enormously from the previous months in the year. And for you to actually succeed and have profitable ads, you do need to be getting in now. You don’t want to wait until you’re halfway through your Christmas campaign, or you don’t want to wait until Black Friday before you actually start running ads because you will end up with really expensive costs and probably not the kind of profitable results that you’re looking for. So, that’s just, I guess, a heads up. This is what you got to expect.
Catherine Langman:
So if you get yourself organized, get all of these ideas and creative pieces of content ready, and you can get rolling out at least some of that engagement style content and put some budget behind it now, or very soon, you’ll be in a much, much, much better position to actually get some profitable sales-driving, traffic-driving ads happening as well and standing out from the competition and getting your ads placed in front of the right people rather than being ignored, if that makes sense.
Catherine Langman:
All right, so to round things off, then you do want to be prepared to finish off the Christmas campaign with the Black Friday to Cyber Monday promotion. So this is definitely the time of year where it’s a huge sale event. You would be really putting out some good offers during that period of time and driving some massive traffic and sales through that four-day period. Really to have fantastic success with your Black Friday promotion, there’s a couple of things that you need to have happening. Well, I mean, obviously you got to have some product to sell and a really good offer. So that goes without saying. But number one, you really need to be working out that engaged audience on social media in advance. You can do that in a couple of ways. Obviously, what we’ve been talking about there with sharing that engaging content and putting budget behind it, that’s going to be really helpful. You can also start building that audience using perhaps a social media competition or giveaway where you can really start getting in front of new people on social media. I’m not going to go into the whole step-by-step about how to run that sort of a social media giveaway. I’ll give you a link in the show notes to our past episode that you can listen to with that.
Catherine Langman:
Well, the second part that’s fantastic about a social media giveaway: if you do it in the right way, you’re building your audience on social media so that you’ve got a much, much, much bigger catchment of an engaged audience on social media that you can then place ads in front of for Black Friday. The other thing that you can do really well with a giveaway, if you do it in the right way, is building your email list so you have a bigger list to send emails to when the time comes. And so you want to be doing that as well. Obviously, through the whole Christmas/holiday season marketing campaign, you will be sending emails regularly, and you will absolutely be using your email list very proactively over that Black Friday to Cyber Monday promotion as well.
Catherine Langman:
I have a fabulous four-day fast cash email sequence that I love to use for that sort of a promotion. And that can work exceptionally well at driving some fantastic sales revenue in that short period of time. So if you would like to have a little bit more help with preparing that sort of a promotional campaign, I actually have a Black Friday bundle. It’s a short course basically. It’s a 50% Off My Black Friday bundle. So basically it’s training videos, step-by-step how to pull together that really effective Black Friday sale event, how you can build that engaged audience with the right marketing so that you’re building up your social media engagement audiences as well as building your email list so that you have people primed for the pump ready to buy, how to write that four-day fast cash email sequence.
Catherine Langman:
Honestly, this is a sequence that absolutely converts like crazy. It is also a strategy that you can reuse anytime you need to generate sales fast. So it doesn’t just have to be for Black Friday. And then, of course, setting up a Facebook ad campaign to promote that sort of a Black Friday sale event. So that’s all included in this Black Friday training bundle, and that’ll be 50% off for listeners of this show. I will include the link to grab it as well in the show notes. So head back to our podcast to find the link to grab your copy and get the wheels in motion so that you can have a really fantastic promotion this year.
Catherine Langman:
But last but not least, if you are looking for some help with rolling out your Christmas promotion or running your Facebook ads to really drive massive traffic and sales over the next few months, and you’d like a little bit of help with that, please do hit up our team. We typically get really, really, really busy in the fourth quarter of the year. So if you’re thinking about it, maybe book in a call to have a chat about it as soon as you can so that you don’t miss out. So if you want to do that, just head to productpreneurmarketing.com/let’s-talk. Again, I’ll pop that link in the show notes as well if you are interested.
Catherine Langman:
That’s what I have for you this week. I hope you have enjoyed the episode, and I look forward to being with you on the show again next week. Bye for now.