Merry Christmas Marketing! Why September is a good time to start planning
** Update September 2021: This post refers to Merry Christmas Marketing, the course I offered in 2020. The course has been relaunched in 2021 and looks a bit different. Full details here.**
Is your Christmas marketing ready for the traditional Golden Quarter? 2020 is a year like no other, but if one thing is sure it is that people - your people - are getting ready for the festive season.
I know, I love Christmas, but I don’t go around wishing it could be Christmas every day. There’s a time and a place for everything, and when it comes to Christmas, that time is after Halloween.
However, there’s no denying that planning and shopping for Christmas happens much earlier than that. Yearly trends show that October is when Christmas shopping starts in earnest (for the record, October is next week!).
And even though we’re in the strangest of years, early indicators show that this year is no different … if anything, people have started shopping even sooner.
Christmas shopping trends in 2020
John Lewis launched their Christmas shop in August (sacrilege), and immediately gave proof that if you build a Christmas shop, people will come. Searches for Christmas-related things on their site were over three times higher this August compared to the previous year.
Whether people are keen to stock up in case the mince pie shelves are as empty as the toilet paper shelves were in March, or whether they want to make sure this is a super organised Christmas full of indulgence, the reality is that people’s thoughts have turned festive.
And that means that if you want to make the most of Christmas 2020, then you need to get your marketing plans sorted.
Christmas marketing planning
The time for thinking about Christmas marketing campaigns is now. Not when things get busier, not when you have started selling Christmas presents, not when people start asking about your Christmas offers.
Because if you wait until then, you will not have the headspace to think about creative Christmas marketing which cuts through the noise and truly speaks to the hearts of your ideal customers.
So even though it is a sunny day in September, grab the opportunity by the antlers and plan your marketing now. That means being clear about what you want to say, who you want to say it to, and what they want to hear from you. It means creating content in advance - because when things get busy, even with the best intentions it’s marketing that drops to the bottom of the list of priorities. And it means making the time and committing to it, so your output is consistent and consistently good.
Something the Goodness Marketing elves have been working on
Over the past few weeks, I have been putting together something to help small businesses plan and create Christmas marketing that will cut through the noise and actually have a positive effect on their sales.
The course has a video workshop, several worksheets to support the topics we cover, a checklist to help with planning, 55 marketing ideas and a Facebook community.
Merry Christmas Marketing is part workshop, part self-guided study, part planner, part idea depository and part community - all designed to give you tools, help and advice to make it simpler to do good Christmas marketing.
I wanted to create this resource to put small businesses in a good position to end the year on a high, with good results achieved through good marketing which felt like a joy to create.
It’s also a chance to build a community of people - through the dedicated private Facebook group - who get it. It can be so lonely to navigate running your own business, and I know how powerful it is to learn from others and to just get a second opinion on anything from a headline or product name to a choice of photo. Or sometimes, to just share a problem with others in a similar situation.
My hope is that we will see a lot of real, original marketing from small businesses this Christmas, and I hope Merry Christmas Marketing can offer some inspiration towards that!