THE BEST 10 MARKETING IDEAS FOR CHRISTMAS IN 2024

The best 10 marketing ideas for Christmas in 2024. The top 10 Christmas marketing ideas in 2024. The best tips for successfully running Christmas marketing campaigns in 2024.

It’s brought to you by Mau, a senior digital marketing specialist at eDigital.

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THE BEST 10 MARKETING IDEAS FOR CHRISTMAS IN 2024

Thousands of marketers working in some of the top fastest-growing industries are looking for effective ways to boost sales during the Christmas season.

Whether your customer service was not that great last Christmas or your brand is yet to meet your marketing objectives, executing the best marketing ideas for Christmas is a great way to boost your sales and increase brand preference and trust which ultimately builds brand equity.

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HOW CONSUMERS DISCOVER PRODUCTS FOR THE CHRISTMAS GIFTING SEASON

The Christmas gifting season requires a few changes in the way you promote, sell and deliver your brand to the hands of your most valuable customer segment.

Christmas marketing campaigns should consider the following factors:

• Online Christmas deals are convenient. Online Christmas sales are outperforming physical Christmas sales as people prefer buying online to avoid transport time, transport costs and queues.
• Most of the “Product Discovery” phase starts now on social media and YouTube channels.  People are discovering new products through the people they follow on social media. YouTube channels such as MaviGadget often discuss machinery, technology, and innovations. By watching videos and photos on social media, people are also finding new ways of enjoying new brands. Someone watching an unboxing video on YouTube may also watch how that product is used differently by another influencer or creator, then visit a review website and finally search on Google to find a Christmas sale for that product.

• Better, fun and/or more customer reviews. People are using “trust” clues before exchanging their hard-earned money for your Christmas deal. In this context, a carefully planned customer reviews strategy has become a “must-have” feature that will help you increase your Christmas Sales targets. Extend your customer reviews to product pages, category pages, Facebook business accounts and Google My Business profiles.

• User-generated content has become an important element of how people shop during Christmas. Whatever the execution i.e. embedding videos from Youtube or inspiration galleries pulled from Instagram on product pages; using UGC has become the rule, not just a “nice-to-have”. People are becoming used to trusting only other people’s opinions about the Christmas gifts they are curious about.
• Product pick-up options. Apart from buying online, buy online pick up in-store (BOPIS) and curbside pick up has become one of the preferred ways consumers want to get Christmas deals.
• Optimise delivery costs by promoting bigger basket sizes. You can group similar or complementary products in a way that makes sense for the buyer but also optimise your delivery costs and increase average online purchase values (AOPV).
• Fast delivery. In sectors in which Christmas deals are quite similar, you can promote a faster delivery than your competitors. Look at Sephora or Amazon Prime in NYC offering one-hour delivery.
• Track competitors. Ensure your Christmas offer is the best deal in the market because price comparisons take a minute or two, especially when everyone knows the big players tend to always have the best deals: Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, etc. If your competitors are publicly listed companies, you can look at their shareholder reports to see how online sales are performing vs in-store sales. If available, look at their December sales data to give you an idea of the market share you can grab with a great Christmas Sales campaign.
• Look at market trends. Tracking market trends will allow you to ensure the products offered are still hot. If only a few are buying your Christmas sale, you know your Christmas offering is not that hot or the product is not essential (it is not a “must-have”) on your customers’ minds during Christmas.
• Loyalty is up for grabs. People are especially not loyal to brands that do not get the basics right: opening hours, inventory levels, customer service phone numbers, curbside pick-up, etc. These brands will find it hard not only to hit their Christmas Sales targets but also to retain their customers. This is especially important for low-consideration products or services.

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What is your Christmas hero product or service?

Promoting a generic Christmas campaign may bring you calls or foot traffic, however, it will not be as effective as promoting a specific product for a niche market.

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OFFER A CHRISTMAS EXPERIENCE

More marketers are now realising offering unique, valuable “experience” environments where customers can learn and enjoy their products, find out more about their quality and understand their supply chains and pricing, will lead to customers welcoming the money-value exchange.

Do you remember when Nespresso opened its first concept store in Paris in 2000?

Ahead of time, they knew the value of creating a service system that brings a unique experience to their customers, not necessarily offering an in-store physical product transaction.

Twenty years later, many brands are still trying to figure out how to design a truly remarkable brand experience.

I am saying this because the better the brand experience is, the less you need to rely on Christmas sales, deals or discounts.

When you offer a truly unique brand experience environment to your customers (not just stores), you have more chances of earning trust from your customers.

As a result, your brand will rely less on discounted Xmas campaigns.

The Canada Goose store in Toronto is another great example of a brand that wants to move in this direction.

THE BEST 10 MARKETING CAMPAIGN IDEAS FOR CHRISTMAS IN 2024

The research was done by some of our best virtual assistants.

Below are some ideas and tips when planning, developing, launching and measuring a marketing campaign for Christmas in 2024.

10. Plan your Christmas marketing campaign the right way

• Campaign Objective. Is your Christmas marketing campaign about offering something exclusive, premium or cheap? You do not necessarily need to discount if you are already happy with your sales. On the contrary, if you need to move stock or need to improve your cash flow to get money to buy inventory for January, you may need to run a Christmas discounted offer.
• Campaign name. Once you have defined your objective for the Christmas gifting season, then you will be able to brainstorm some potential names. Make sure the name can easily be remembered so people can type it in Google and find all the relevant information.
• Partners. Involve important partners in your Christmas marketing campaign. This may include getting influencers to promote your Christmas offer via unboxing videos or shopping haul videos. If your business is located in a shopping mall, get centre management to promote your Christmas offer on their website, e-newsletter and social media channels.
• Campaign dates. Launch your Christmas marketing campaign on the 1st of December unless you want customers to pay in advance. Airlines, hotels, holiday, travel, tourism and education providers generally promote their Christmas offers around October and November, so you will have to have your materials ready by September.
• Hero offer. Promote only one BIG offer if possible. The more offers you promote, the more distraction you are creating and the fewer chances people will remember your offer.
• Target. You have the option of cherry-picking the target audience most receptive to respond to your Christmas offer. You may not want everyone to be aware of your Christmas offer.
• Channels.  Same as picking a niche target audience for your Christmas offer, you can pick specific channels. You may decide to – for example – promote your Christmas offer only through catalogues.
• Past insights. Check with your sales manager which marketing campaigns worked last Christmas and replicate if market or customer needs have not changed.
• Enhance value perception. Offer more than just competitive pricing; consider factors like product exclusivity, shipping convenience, product quantity, and extended guarantees that consumers value.

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9. Design eye-catching marketing materials

Yeah, during December, your team is busy wrapping up the year or is away on holiday. If you are planning to run video ads for TV or YouTube, the video production will need to start a few months before December.

• Creatives. Produce unique creative visuals for the Christmas marketing campaign. This way customers can easily distinguish each campaign you run.
• Colours. Just because green and red are the most popular “Christmas” colours, that does not mean you should use them. Ensure your messages use your brand colours. If not sure, contact us. We can design eye-catching visuals for your Christmas marketing campaign.

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8. Launch your Christmas campaign for success

• Campaign activation. You may want to include running a physical or virtual event to fully push your Christmas offer, including demonstrations, celebrity appearances, etc.

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7. Offer relevant content for Christmas

• Content strategy and scheduling. Create content that helps people with the most common Christmas activities: holidays, gifting, eating healthy, cooking, etc. As most people are on holiday in the last two weeks of December, promote your long piece type of content. Some content ideas people will find useful during Christmas include:

6. Run effective Christmas ads at the right place and time

• Message frequency and reach. If you are not choosing a specific audience and/or channel, then your Christmas marketing campaign will need to be promoted with extra frequency and reach. On the contrary, if you are about to sell out, you can reduce your marketing spending. You will need to check this daily during your Christmas campaign period.
• Ad creative. The following are our best tips for Christmas ad creative:
  • Make your Christmas offer an essential part of a successful Christmas experience. Connect your marketing message to other top essentials during Christmas: buying gifts for family and friends, maintaining self-care needs (free time, bath/pampering products, haircare, fragrances, cosmetics, skincare), eating Christmas-related food and drinks and buying items for personal health(vitamins, supplements) and safety (hand sanitisers, protective gear for work, DIY or sports).
  • Balance savings with indulgence. Your ad creative should let consumers know they can satisfy both their need for economical spending and the occasional desire for luxury.

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5. Make it easy for people to find and buy your Christmas offer

• Google Maps update. Update your Google My Business profile with your Christmas opening hours (if applicable) and attributes added.
• Christmas Gift Cards. Promote your gift card as a unique and essential gift for Christmas. Make sure the design and personalisation of your gift card is something customers will be proud of gifting to a loved one. Below is an example from Adidas that offer physical, digital and bulk Christmas gift cards.

• Christmas bundles. You can offer value-packed Xmas bundles by grouping your best-selling items together with a holiday twist. It’s a win-win: customers get more for their money and you sell more.
• Promo codes. Make sure your promo codes are unique for your Christmas marketing campaign, this way it is easier to track and measure your campaign results. A “XMASSALE” promo code is probably not enough. A “XMASSALE24” promo code is much better. And even better you could create promo codes that also track the referring channel in which you need to track and pay commissions (affiliate marketing).  For example: “XMASSALE24eDigital” will mean the Xmas sale was referred to by eDigital. Finally, make sure you test your promo codes, ensuring the correct discount is applied to the online transaction.
• SEO. Ensure a marketing campaign for Christmas appears when people type your brand or product name in Google. Ensure you use juicy keywords such as “Sale, offers, deals, promo code, discount. etc”. Examples of popular search term combinations for Christmas Sale campaigns are: “[your brand name] Christmas sale [year]” or “[your hero product name] Christmas sale [year]“
• Returns. Christmas gifting season generally brings a lot of compulsive buying behaviour. After a few days or weeks, buyers may change their minds and want to return the product. Ensure your Christmas marketing campaign has clear T&Cs to reduce product returns.
• Gift Guides. Gift guides are a popular way to make it easy for your customers to buy this Christmas. You can also get your influencers to create a “Gift Guide” about your brand as in the example below. You can offer gift guides for her, for him, by style, by colour, by size, etc.

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4. Find free places to promote your Christmas campaign

• Run a pop-up banner across all pages on your website promoting your Christmas offer.
• Facebook event. You could create an event on Facebook for your Christmas campaign. This way, people who want to get your Christmas offer can get notified when there are any updates or changes.
• Email marketing. Send a drip e-mail sequence to remind people about your Christmas offer or sale. You can use an early, middle and end-of-the-month email sequence.

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3. Create urgency for your Christmas offer

If you are offering a highly discounted product for Christmas, create urgency by sending weekly updates on inventory levels. You can also offer a Christmas giveaway with a limited time to receive or pick up the giveaway.

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2. End your Christmas campaign

Ensure all Christmas promotional material is taken off on the 25th of December and update prices in your system if needed. Find insights on your data once your Christmas marketing campaign ends. Present your hypothesis to your team and test some different executions in the next Christmas period.

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1. Measure what is important

Generally, Christmas marketing campaigns are about taking advantage of the December gifting period to move stock quickly and allow room and cash flow to bring the latest and new products for January.

In this context, the most important metric is sales.

This means all your Christmas marketing campaign executions should be measured against the actual sales they bring.

Sales should be then the most important measure of the success or failure of your Christmas campaign.

If you work for a non-profit or charity, “Donations” will be your most important measure of success.

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Conclusion

Yes, you can become better at promoting Christmas marketing campaigns with some of the above tips and other tactics. But ultimately, what you should aim for – as a top marketer – is to spearhead your organisation into an experience-centric organisation.  This is a radical approach everyone in a business should buy into and a transformation your customers will love you for.

Experience-centric organisations do not sell products that demand Christmas discounts.

They offer unique and remarkable experiences that happen to use one or a few products.

They have designed and shared the most unique Christmas experience with only the most valuable customers who deserve it.

Successful Christmas marketing campaigns have these in common:

• Christmas campaigns are planned far in advance
• Performance, data and insights of past Christmas campaigns should help marketers define a hypothesis but also leave room for new insights as potential changes in the market and/or new customer needs.
• A constant customer feedback loop system to know how to polish and improve Christmas campaigns over time.

eDigital can help you conceptualise, plan, develop, run and optimise successful Christmas marketing campaigns that generate leads and sales for your brand.

Our digital marketing services include:

• Strategic planning for social media and other digital marketing channels.
• Online advertising management and optimisation: Google Ads Search, Display, Re-marketing and social media advertising.
• Marketing training: social media training and digital marketing training.
• SEO strategy and execution. Including content development:articles, stories, eye-catching and SEO-optimised visuals.
• Celebrity and influencer marketing campaign strategy.
• Brand development. Logo creation, brand personality development and design of marketing materials.
• Consumer contests/competitions/giveaways.
• Email marketing. Dip sequence design and deployment.
• Conversion rate optimisation. It is also called “path to purchase” optimisation.

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THE BEST 10 MARKETING IDEAS FOR CHRISTMAS IN 2024

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