How can you tackle your Christmas marketing without burning out?

Introduction to Christmas Marketing

Catherine Erdly: How can you tackle your Christmas marketing without burning out? 

So we have arrived at episode four of the six episode series, all about getting ready for Christmas. And today we’re going to be talking about getting your marketing ready. 

Hi, I’m Catherine Eardley. I’m the founder of the Resilient Retail Club, which is my membership group and mastermind for product businesses.

You can find out more at resilientretailclub. com. I’m also the host of episode number 208 of the resilient retail game plan, where we are diving in to Christmas once again. 

So, so far we have tackled your overall Christmas strategy. We’ve talked to coach Mike Cole about how to approach a big time of year like this without burning out.

We have talked about getting your product strategy ready and also talked to Joanne Griffin about how to create products that we just know your customers are going to love. And today we’re going to talk about how to get yourself prepared with your marketing. 

Welcome to the Resilient Retail Game Plan, a podcast for anyone wanting to start, grow or scale a profitable creative product business with me, Catherine Erdly. The Resilient Retail Game Plan is a podcast dedicated to one thing, breaking down the concepts and tools that I’ve gathered from 20 years in the retail industry.

and showing you how you can use them in your business. This is the real nuts and bolts of running a successful product business, broken down in an easy, accessible way. This is not a podcast about learning how to make your business look good. It’s the tools and techniques that will make you and your business feel good.

Confidently plan, launch and manage your products and feel in control of your sales numbers and cashflow to help you build a resilient retail business.

Importance of a Christmas Marketing Plan

Catherine Erdly: There’s a few points that I want to touch on when it comes to your Christmas marketing.

The first one is, it’s really worthwhile getting yourself almost like a template planned for Christmas for that 13 week time period from the beginning of October to the end of December. And the reason for that is that although there is a lot of different things going on at Christmas and there’s a lot happening, effectively, it’s pretty much the same every year.

So if you can get yourself a template mapped out for Christmas marketing, then each year, all you have to do is update the list of emails that you need, social media posts, the kind of imagery that you’re going to need. And you almost slot in this year’s products and this year’s messaging into a framework that already exists, as opposed to creating it from scratch every single year or for feeling like you are.

Creating a Week-by-Week Marketing Plan

Catherine Erdly: So I’m a big believer and we did this inside the resilient retail club during our five day challenge to get ready for Christmas. Big believer in setting out a week by week plan for your Christmas marketing. 

The other point that I want to make about Christmas marketing is that we use the word. Word Christmas selling or Christmas sales as a big overarching term to talk about this time of year.

Using the Christmas Timeline to Determine Your Customer’s Buying Decisions

Catherine Erdly: But actually what we’re talking about is lots and lots of different purchasing decisions that happen throughout this time period because it can feel quite overwhelming to have to keep talking about Christmas week in week out. Whereas actually if you break it down and look at all the different reasons that people buy, it can help you get a better cadence or a better flow to your marketing.

So for example, people at certain times are going to be more concerned about Christmas parties. So Christmas party apparel, gifts for the hosts, they may be thinking about their jewelry for Christmas parties. They equally will have time to then thinking about the stocking stuffers ready for Christmas day. They may be thinking about the entertainment, their Christmas table for the day itself, the decoration, the tree, the sending the cards, all of those different things. 

So it’s well worth mapping out all of the different reasons that people buy from you and then slotting it into an overall marketing plan that looks at a week by week flow for your messaging.

And basically once you’ve done it once you can rinse and repeat it in future years. So take the time to go through and make a plan by week looking at what products you want to talk about, where and what your messaging is going to be. 

Choosing Christmas Promotional Activities and Offers

Catherine Erdly: And then also make your decision as to whether or not you want to have any kind of promotional activity.

So a promotion in my book is anything that can help you start a new conversation with your ideal customer. It could be, for example, something that is a gift with purchase or a free shipping offer. It could equally be something that is a discount. It could be a discount of certain lines. It could be a discount of the entire website.

If that’s something that you do for the entire business, if that’s something that you maybe do once or twice a year, I’m not a big fan of blanket discounts, but they do have their place. And for some people it’s the right time to do it is at Christmas when people are out shopping anyway.

The key thing is is you want to look at that 13 week flow and make a decision about what offers you’re going to have when and making sure that you’ve got a nice mix of different ones and that you’re not overcrowding it. And the messaging isn’t going to get too busy and you’re going to end up with a couple of weeks where you’ve got nothing to talk about. And then one or two weeks where you’re talking about the show that you’re doing and the offer and the new product launch all at once. So it’s well worth mapping it out. So you’ve got a bit of breathing space and you can make sure that your marketing is logical and then create a plan.

Planning and Preparing Marketing Assets

Catherine Erdly: Make sure that you don’t try and reinvent the wheel as well. If you already have some really great emails that you sent out last year, don’t feel like you have to send completely new ones this year. You want to pull them out, look at the ones that did well and then update them with this year’s information.

Nobody is going to get an email from you in mid December and say hang on a minute. I’m, pretty sure last mid December they sent me a very similar one, but the pictures were different and just customers minds don’t work like that. They would have to see something so many times to even recognize or even notice that it’s similar.

So make sure that you are not being a busy fool and you are not over complicating this. 

You’ve got your plan, you’ve got your flow. Now that you’ve got your flow, you can work out what assets you’re going to need, what social media posts you’re going to need. You start thinking about how you’re going to get the content for those social media posts.

Do you need to send product out to content creators, for example, to help make some of this? Or do you have to book a day where you’re going to be making some of this content yourself? What imagery do you need? Do you need to book a photographer’s, for example?

So make sure you have got that planned out and make sure that you plan out your plan, that your offers well ahead of time.

So you’re not making knee jerk reactions. You’re not suddenly going, Oh, do you know what? Everybody else is offering something. I think I should really pull something together. This is something that you’ve already made a decision about. You’ve mapped it out. And this is the thing you can pre do a lot of this stuff.

There’s no reason at all why you can’t sit down in September and write out your email texts for your Christmas emails. Now I know some people if you buy products from other people and they haven’t necessarily always released their Christmas range yet or maybe they’re late doing so or maybe you don’t have imagery or products then maybe some of that stuff may have to wait till last minute.

But the thing is is that the more that you do up front then the easier it is to slot in these last minute tasks. If you’ve done the heavy lifting of the planning, of the planning out the posts, of the planning out the social posts. Of getting those all booked in and if you have been able to make those decisions well in advance and get a lot of that stuff ready Then as I said, you won’t feel as stressed and you’ll look more likely to be able to deliver consistent marketing throughout the christmas time period rather than get to the point where you’re just too busy to do it or fluctuating between wanting to drive more sales so you need to do more marketing and then not having time and seesawing backwards and forwards.

What we’re just trying to do is get everything ready. And as I said, there is absolutely no reason why you can’t sit here in the summer months and think ahead to the winter and decide what your messaging, what your assets are going to be, and start creating those things for the Christmas time period. You want it to be like a well oiled machine. 

Balancing Structure and Spontaneity

Catherine Erdly: Now, one of the questions that I often get asked is, well, does that make it really boring and rigid? If I’ve got all of this stuff mapped out ahead of time, I just don’t work like that. I like to be spontaneous. I totally get it. And I think often we see with social media, that content is often fresher and more exciting when it is something that is done on the spur of the moment.

However, I do also believe in having a framework of having things that are mapped out that are ready, that are done. So that that’s almost like the backbone of your marketing strategy. You know what you’re going to be doing, you know, what messages you’re going to be sharing, you know, what you’re working towards and all the rest of it, but then the kind of the cherry on top, if you like, will come from the spur of the moment decisions that you’ll have at the very end when you think, Oh, actually, I’ve seen a really great trend that would work for my product, or I’m going to use this audio. I’m going to use that, or all of those different things.

And so therefore, what I believe that you should be doing is having that combination, having a framework built around your marketing so that you’ve got the kind of real key posts, you know, you’re passing on that important information. You’ve got it all planned through, but then you will have time and effort and energy to pop something on stories that you weren’t planning on, or to take advantage of that trend to do something a bit different to liven it up.

So I think the two things are not mutually exclusive. I think you don’t have to have every single last post planned out and refuse to add anything in like a lot of big retailers do. I certainly have seen it where it was like, okay, no, sorry. We’ve done the Christmas campaign. Now you can’t change anything, even though we wanted to react to trade or react to bestsellers.

That is not ideal, but then equally so it’s also not ideal to go into this time period without a really clear idea of what you’re going to be talking about week on week and without pre preparing some of it so that you’re not left scrambling at the last minute. So you want to find that nice middle ground, that nice balance so that you’ve got that creative freedom, but then equally so you’ve got that structure in your back pocket and all of those, all of those assets and everything prepared, ready to go.

Preview of Next Episode

Catherine Erdly: Next week, we’re going to be joined by Alice Loveday from Loveday Social, who’s an amazing expert in stop motion and also shares lots of other fun tips about how to make your content fun. So tune in next week. She’s going to share that sweet spot about how you have yourself planned out, ready to go, but equally how you can have fun and inject some personality into your small business Christmas content. So I will see you next week.

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