105 digital pros share their top Christmas marketing tips

One of the easiest things to do to really make a difference as a company is to sincerely review your industry and your competitors. Make a video or blog post titled “Top 10 X” in my industry, and review the 10 alternative or industry-related products people might consider before buying yours.

Stop acting like your competition doesn’t exist and instead embrace them and honestly review the differences between you and them. Be sure not to include yourself on your own top 10 list, as that’s not how you build trust. Instead, just use a simple disclaimer line at the top of the article or beginning of the video that says “Since we’ve been in this industry for X years, we’ve really grown to understand our competition and the market. Aside from our products/services, which we obviously believe to be the best in the industry, here are the top 10 alternatives that you may consider instead, and various reasons why you would choose them instead of us. We know we aren’t for everyone and that you have a choice when shopping around.

In the B2B world, Christmas signals the end of the fiscal year for many businesses. This is the time when expenses and budgets are re-evaluated, objectives are reset, and strategies are re-configured. In other words, it is the perfect time for a B2B business to be top of mind.

While utilising Christmas themes can work for certain businesses, overall, we haven’t had much success with leaning into the Christmas angle. Instead, we’ve found that talking about end-of-year problems, considerations, and challenges is the best way to go. How do you get buy-in from management on your proposed changes for the new year? How can you finish the year strong? How can you identify the problems that limited your growth in the past year? These are the challenges every decision-maker wrestles with during the season leading up to Christmas, and it’s what we like to be talking about leading up to the new year.

To stand out during the flood of holiday marketing, try combining tactics that are less common with the majority of marketers. For example, everyone shares a link to their latest piece on social media. So instead of just posting a link, make a short video of yourself introducing it, and post that on social media. Few marketers will spend the time to make a personal video invitation to visit their site, but it really doesn’t take that long.

Additionally, while everyone is posting things at the usual, high traffic times of day, try posting things off hours. The social streams aren’t nearly as busy after dinner, but a lot of people are still online. Post in the evening or even late at night. Your audience will be slowing down at that time and they may be more likely to engage.

Be different in a combination of ways. Go bigger with the format (video), and use counter-competitive timing (late evenings). You’ll be far more likely to get some holiday love!

Utilising a spokesperson is one of the most credible ways of leveraging your brand. A spokesperson works on multiple levels to build your brand in the eyes of clients, competitors, and consumers.

As a broadcast PR specialist, we know first-hand how pivotal a spokesperson can be — they really can make or break a campaign. We worked with Microsoft, who combined one of their experts with futurologist Steve Tooze, which meant they could talk about a range of topics, including where they believed technology would go in the next ten years. They had undertaken a study into ten hypothetical jobs that do not currently exist, but may do in the technological landscape of the future. This could not have been spoken about effectively without these spokespeople, who lent their credibility, expertise, and authority to the topic, which meant the media were far more interested in the story than they would have been otherwise. Their message was heard by 52.6 million people thanks to the power of the spokespeople involved, making it one of our most successful campaigns to date.

By doing a radio campaign, you can also generate content for your website or social media: sound or video clips can be produced and hosted through audioboom, which can in turn be used on your social media to increase interest. You can potentially generate as much content as you want from a spokesperson, you can take quotes and create images with your branding, spokesperson, and message on, to really maximise the effectiveness of your investment. Photos of your spokespeople can be posted on Twitter and Instagram, and further increase your traction from interaction from their followers. Just linking your brand to the spokesperson can be beneficial on its own, and can create a link in the mind of your target audience between you and them.

Create a 12 Days Of Christmas series of blog posts, social media updates and/or email blasts, starting Christmas Day. Each day, share increasingly helpful, little-known tips to help your best prospects and customers do what they need to do.

Many find the lead up to Christmas Day exhausting, and the days following a bit of a let-down. Capture and sustain their interest with a promise to solve one of their most pressing problems using a series of incremental, interconnected tips that peak on the 12th day with a final eye-opener and cheat sheet that brings everything together. All of your content should also be easy to link to, bookmark, and share.

My #1 tip is to think beyond this Christmas because, if you haven’t already started planning, you’re probably too late to compete. To really hit a home run, you need to think about how you’ll win every Christmas, not just this year.

One of the best strategies for winning on seasonal and recurring events is to build a valuable content and campaign hub that grows and attracts traffic over time, each year, and even out of season. People make terrible mistakes by waiting until November to launch their Christmas content, then deleting the content in January. They list products, launch pages, develop interactive Christmas cards and games, and run other activities that generate links and coverage, only to remove them in the future and lose all that value. Don’t do this – plan from the beginning to make evergreen resources.

If you plan ahead, you can think about how previous years’ campaigns might be updated or archived, and use canonical URL tags to pass value from these pages back ‘up’ to the current Christmas page. When you’ve got that kind of structure in place, you can start to think about how old Christmas content might remain relevant and useful, beyond just archiving them. For example, you could provide an overview of the top-selling products from the year in question, which could be a genuinely useful resource that attracts coverage and traffic all year round, forever. This kind of thinking can apply to all seasonal and recurring campaigns, and it’s a much more effective way of competing, compared to fighting with your competitors every year using limited resources and with ridiculous sales targets.

Standing out online is tough, but I use one simple, but powerful trick to beat the competition these days: striking visuals.

Now, creating your own visuals may seem way too hard or above your skill level. But, do you want to know a secret? It can take just 20–30 minutes to create stunning visuals.

Using tools like Canva, you can take templates created by graphic artists and simply tweak them to suit your goals. You should aim to have a branded colour scheme with consistent fonts, and the layout will come from Canva.

When you’re looking for striking images to use, you could pay hundreds of dollars to the likes of Shutterstock. But I prefer the free route (and you do too, I’m sure). There are dozens of free photo sites out there, and the great news is that many of them don’t even require attribution.

You can trawl the likes of Pexels or Pixabay, but I recently found a tool that helps you check them all a bit faster. Just enter your search and then click on each link/site to open them with that search prefilled. This way you can check for your chosen topic on all sites in far less time. Once you have your image, you can just upload it to Canva and you should be good to go.

Oh, and one last thing: don’t forget to optimise your images if you upload them to your website. Because Canva images tend to be on the larger side (they’re huge), they need a lot of compressing to get them to a realistic website size.

Set yourself apart with visuals. This image from CoSchedule certainly caught my eye when it landed in my inbox last year.

No text — just the image, and pure mystery. From what I remember, this was the way they built tension before releasing a new feature. But, I liked it so much that I used the image to announce the release of my new content repurposing pilot course, Content Boomerang. It went very well, and that image earned better click-throughs than any other email I sent.

With Christmas approaching, it is going to be even harder for people to stand out online. The solution is to be (as Seth Godin puts it) The Purple Cow. So, what is the Purple Cow? In simple terms, it is about being remarkable, and standing out from the crowd. Every year the supermarkets and department stores do this, and it works. They craft dramatic and emotionally charged adverts that are more like stories. Last year we saw the Buster the Boxer video that John Lewis put together. Millions watched the video online and on TV, and yes it got the nation talking as our hearts melted. But, while this video costs an estimated £7 Million to make, it was not the high production costs that made it a success — it was the story!

John Lewis said: “This is the story of a little girl called Bridget who loves to bounce. When her mum and dad buy her a trampoline for Christmas, they soon discover that she isn’t the only one with a passion for jumping.” But there is a lot more going on with this video, which we can learn from and apply to our own marketing. Firstly, while it is easy to say this was a story about bouncing, it is a story about Christmas. We have a Dad putting up a trampoline (in the freezing cold) for his daughter. Anyone that has put a trampoline up will instantly know what the Dad is going through! Then, we’re inspired by the magic of Christmas.

This was not the usual Santa Claus magic we see in most adverts, but a far ‘closer to home’ magic of animals coming together for a ‘bouncing’ party. And, we have the happiness of the little girl and Buster the Boxer as we see him bounce on the trampoline. The advert brought the magic of Christmas into our homes, and the audience loved it.

So, how can you use similar tactics? By creating more ‘story’ content this Christmas. Using animation, blog posts, memes, or even ‘mash-up’ videos, you can create a range of content that will get people sharing.

A good tool to use is the STEPPS viral formula created by Professor Jonah Berger. The formula features in his bestselling book ‘Contagious: How to build word of mouth in the digital age’. STEPPS stands for Social currency, Triggers, Emotion, Public, Practical Value, and Stories. If we take the Buster the Boxer advert and look how it fits into the STEPPS framework we can see that people would share the video online because it was great and made people smile (social currency), it was also emotional and had a great story.

You might not have a £7 million budget this Christmas but, if you maximise every social media post, blog article, or video you create to capture the magic of Christmas, tell a story, and give people something to share, you will do well. So, my number 1 tip is simple: try to capture the magic of Christmas in all of your content!

In my opinion, Instagram videos give brands the ability to extend their reach, appeal to a larger audience, and build relationships online with customers at scale. But, before jumping into Instagram, you need to have a strategy in place.

A good content strategy on Instagram starts with understanding the audience and what they’re interested in. Once you know those two things, it’s time to get creative and test what grabs their attention and gets engagement. The next step is to review the data, gain insights, and tweak your Instagram strategy to optimise it even further.

With any significant annual event like Christmas, it’s really important to plan marketing campaigns and activity as early as possible. I know that sounds fairly obvious, but many publishers will be well into their Christmas planning already.

We use tools like Gorkana to help us be aware of specific publisher deadlines and lead times, which can be really useful in knowing how and when to pitch to journalists and influencers. So many brands and agencies try to leverage Christmas for content campaigns, that a huge amount of noise is inevitably generated. This makes it hard to get content or campaigns noticed, due to the sheer competition! This increased competition is unfortunately not always reflected in quality and originality, with a deluge of low quality and lazy content pieces released to try and tap into the Christmas hype.

My advice would be to avoid the unoriginal angles that have been done to death, and try to think creatively and originally – try and avoid getting to December 5th and panic thinking “what are we doing for Christmas content?!”.

This forward planning should also be used to plan content and campaigns in a strategic way, over a number of significant milestones. By this I mean you should think of Christmas as part of a wider festive period that includes Black Friday, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Eve. It’s an easy example, but John Lewis always do this well with their eagerly anticipated Christmas advert, which is released in early November every year. The premiere is always teased very cleverly in the lead up, with much speculation about the content and what song will be used.

I believe that one of the reasons the John Lewis adverts are always so popular is because they always draw on emotion. There is a lot of content out there (Christmas related and otherwise) that could be described as ‘cool’ or ‘interesting’, but less content is successful in making people feel. Content with an emotional hook is what, for me, stands out from the crowd — especially at Christmas. And, from experience, this kind of content is generally more successful as it often compels users, journalists, or bloggers to write about or share it.

I once received some good advice on creating emotional content: “Don’t make people angry, make them furious. Don’t make people chuckle, make them belly laugh uncontrollably. Don’t make people sad, make them absolutely depressed.” In any emotional capacity, this will help a content piece or campaign to cut through the noise and really stand out to influencers. Rather than focusing on Christmas trees, presents, and turkey, I would focus on emotional themes such as family, sharing, love, giving, generosity, thoughtfulness, and friendship.

Standing out online during the holiday season can be difficult. The blogging world is so quiet the last two weeks of the year, people joke that the blogosphere is asleep. However, there are a number of things content creators can do to still get online attention.

First, it is important to keep blogging. I would recommend creating both evergreen content and content that relates to the holiday season. If you create evergreen content like I do, people may not pay attention. On the other hand, they may have time off during the holidays and might have more time to read your writing than ever.

Also, your work gets sent to Google and other search engines. After the holidays, people searching for your terms will be able to find and read your content. The people who will have the easiest time standing out between now and the end of the year are DIY bloggers. Articles explaining how to make Christmas recipes and crafts will be in great demand over the next few months. Posts about how to throw a great New Year’s party will be widely read as well. If people want to stand out in the short term, these are the kind of posts they should produce. If content creators want to stand out in the long-term, they should keep creating evergreen content and have the ability to see the long-term rewards through the SERPs and organic traffic.

It’s definitely getting harder to stand out. The Wild West days of internet marketing are over, and consumers have gotten pretty used to being marketed to. So, I would say that the best thing you can do to stand out is create entertaining content. There are two videos that come to mind when I think about this – one was about a tired mum using a photo album printing service , and another involved pool floats. Both ads were so amusing that I actually shared them with my friends on Facebook, and remember them well enough to mention them here off the top of my head. Doing this isn’t easy, but standing out never is.

You need to really understand your product, and you need to be genuine, but probably a little irreverent. In the second example, the ad was commissioned — that is, the company got a comedian to write and produce the video. So, you don’t necessarily need to be doing it yourself. If you can come up with a funny and entertaining ad for your product that pokes fun at the crazy consumer-fest that Christmas tends to become, I’d probably be happy to share it.

But, that’s just my personal perspective – the perspective that really matters is your customers’. What sort of personalities do your customers have? What sort of humour do they appreciate? The important thing is to avoid obsessing about “selling your product”, and look for how your product might be entertaining in a real-world scenario. Protip: you shouldn’t have to invent these from scratch. Chances are, your product team or support staff already have some funny stories, so tap into those!

Don’t let your Christmas advertising be bland and predictable. Have some personality. Have some fun. Make it something that you would personally share with your friends because you thought it was cool.

Create feel-good content that people want to share – something related to your products or industry. Emotional videos, like WestJet’s Christmas Miracle, are likely to get a positive reaction (views & shares).

But, your content doesn’t have to be as elaborate or expensive as WestJet’s video — just something that fits your resources and audience.

One great way to stand out during the Christmas season is by running a fun or emotional infographic that’s relevant to your industry, as well as interesting to a wider audience. This is very important for two reasons.

For one, media publications love infographics and so do their audiences — the number of shares infographics get are significantly higher than the average article. Just remember that, in order to get on their radar using your infographic, it must cover a topic that a lot of people care about in order to drive clicks for the media sites that will be republishing it.

Secondly, you will get a lot of referral traffic, backlinks, and a very high reach, which drives awareness. Couple this with some of your marketing budget to promote it and you should be good. There is plenty of time to do this in the months before Christmas if you start planning it as soon as possible!

Be helpful. No matter the industry, offer your audience helpful tips and actionable advice they can actually use. For example, when I was writing for home owners, I created posts that offered holiday decorating and party tips that people could use in their own homes. When writing for sales and marketing teams, I created posts that argued why these teams shouldn’t let up during the holiday season. And, don’t be afraid to get into the spirit! Have some fun with your holiday marketing efforts and let your personality shine through.