By fneedle@hubspot.com (Flori Needle)

All right, so most of us haven’t even picked out our Halloween costumes yet.

However, for marketers everywhere, it’s just about that time where we need to start sipping the proverbial eggnog and thinking about our holiday marketing strategies — but where do we even begin?

Confused about where to start with your holiday marketing strategy on social media? In this post, hear directly from HubSpot’s social team about the best social media holiday marketing practices and how they best prepare for the holiday season.

Social Media Holiday Marketing Best Practices

1. Prioritize high-value content.

Kelly Hendrickson, Senior Manager on the Social Media team at HubSpot, says, “When it comes to brands posting on social media around the holidays, the question we should always be asking is “Is this of value to my audience?’”

As audiences are likely viewing a lot of content from a lot of different businesses hoping to drive sales during the holidays, the content that you create needs to be as high-value as possible, like social media posts that are offer-centric or emails that call attention to sales or discounts you’re currently running.

Annabelle Nyst, Senior Content Strategist, gives this tip as well, as consumer behavior online can change during the holiday season “Social media usage can wane during holiday periods because people are spending time with their loved ones IRL.” This means that, in order to have the greatest effect on your audiences when they are online, your content needs to shine.

To create this high-value content, set goals specific to your holiday marketing needs, and create a content marketing strategy that will help you execute and succeed. Hendrickson adds, ‘The holidays are a time where CPMs are high, and attention spans are low. For content to cut through, it has to be more valuable than ever.”

2. Have social media support at the ready.

Consumers send retailers more messages on social media during the holiday months than during non-holiday seasons. SproutSocial projects that retailers can expect to receive, on average, 18% more social messages per month during the 2021 holiday season (as shown in the image below).

Image Source

Given this, ensure that service and marketing teams are aligned and ready to respond to messages on social media during the holidays.

3. Be inclusive.

It’s incredibly important to be inclusive during the holiday season.

Your audiences are dispersed throughout the globe and celebrate different occasions at different times, or not at all. Being aware of this is crucial, and using this awareness when creating your ads is also vital. Kelsi Yamada, Marketing Manager, says, “We also are as inclusive as possible and don’t mention some holidays directly as not everyone in our global audience celebrates them.”

In practice, this could look like social media posts that aren’t holiday-specific but emphasize the feelings that can arise from …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron