579: 3 Strategies For Running Ads & Successful Marketing Through The Holidays

As the holiday season approaches, many business owners start to wonder how they can keep their marketing and ads running successfully during this time. In this episode, I’ll be sharing three strategies that will help you navigate the holiday season with ease and maintain a strong marketing presence. 

These strategies are based on my experience in the marketing industry and have proven to be incredibly effective in keeping the momentum going and generating sales, even during the busiest time of the year.

So, if you’re ready to make the most out of the holiday season and ensure that your marketing doesn’t take a hit, listen now to discover these game-changing strategies.

Key Points: 

• Don’t Stop Your Marketing:

• Slowing down or pausing your marketing can lead to a decline in sales.
• Leads and audience growth during the holiday season impact your success in the coming months.
• Stopping sales for two months is not a healthy decision for any business.

• Utilize Seasonal Messaging and Strategies:

• Identify the unique frustrations, desires, and needs of your audience during the holidays.
• Adjust your marketing content and angles to address these holiday-related challenges.
• Consider offering holiday-specific guides, workshops, or promotions to cater to your audience’s needs.

• Gear Up for January:

• Leverage the energy and mindset shift that comes with the new year.
• Plan live launches, promotions, or events that align with your audience’s goals and desires for the new year.
• Focus on nurturing and supporting your existing audience while adding new leads to your list.

• Serve and Connect with Your Existing Audience:

• Don’t forget to engage and support your existing audience during the holiday season.
• Develop content that resonates with their holiday experiences and offers value.
• Use this time as an opportunity to deepen your connection with them and invite them to participate in your holiday-related events or promotions.

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody, welcome back to the podcast. We are almost to Thanksgiving, and the holidays, isn’t that so crazy? I guess if you’re not in the US, obviously, you may or may not celebrate Thanksgiving. I know my Canadian team members already had their Thanksgiving. Regardless, we are coming up on the holiday season, and I, as usual, cannot believe how fast this year has gone by but I’m always excited for the holidays, especially with my kids. It’s always so magical and fun with kids. So I thought today’s episode, I could focus on strategies for running ads and maintaining successful marketing through the holiday season.

The holidays are one of those times where I think people hesitate: should I slow things down? What do I do? How do I keep my numbers up? How do I kind of offset this fact that people might slow down their buying or might be distracted by travel and that concern? And the reality is that, as business owners, we can’t really afford to just stop our business for several months. So I think it’s really important to be very intentional with your strategy as a business and not just lean into that fear of I’m just gonna pause everything until the new year, or I’m gonna slow things way down because I don’t think they’re gonna work, or because I don’t think my audience is going to have as much time for XYZ. I have been through many mini-holiday seasons in the marketing industry. It’s always a very busy time and also a lot of opportunity. Surprisingly, December is one of our biggest months in our business historically. It frequently happens that way, and so there is a ton of opportunity during the holiday season. People are buying more; people are prepping for the new year; they are excited, and actually, people are making more buying decisions than you think in the holiday season.

There’s a lot of people who face the fact like, “Oh, it’s the end of the year. I haven’t done this yet. I haven’t achieved this yet. I want to make sure I set myself up for the new year.” And then, of course, for product-based businesses, there is gifts and holiday buying season. So usually, if you’re a business owner, it is a very busy time, and the last thing you want to do is kind of slow things down. So I’m going to talk through 3 strategies for running your ads for keeping your marketing successful through this season. The first is don’t stop your marketing, and here is why there’s actually several reasons. It’s similar to the summer where there’s sometimes a pull to slow down or stop marketing or wait until January. And I am absolutely not just saying this because I am a marketing industry expert and agency; I also do not stop my marketing. We ramp up our marketing in the holiday season because of how much opportunity there is. And the next two I’m going to talk about how to leverage that opportunity. But you don’t want to stop your marketing number one because if you slow down your marketing, you’re going to slow down your sales. If you stop your lead generation and you stop growing your audience or you slow it way down, a natural effect of that is going to be the impact on your sales. Number 2, we often forget the leads and the audience that we add into our business this month. Like, let’s say the month of November, makes an impact in the months to come.

So if you want to have a really successful January and February in your business, you have to actively market in November and December because you’re not going to get all of those leads and all of that success in January and February if you do nothing in November and December. And so number one, stopping your ads, slowing your ads down in the holiday season is going to have a big impact on the beginning of next year for you. Number 2, there is no business that would be a smart and healthy decision to actually stop sales for two months. Like, that’s not healthy for a business. We need consistent sales. We need to create that consistency and we really can’t afford to slow things way down. So it’s not about stopping your marketing. It’s about being more intentional with it so that your marketing still produces results, which might mean you have to shift and change something. So if something starts not working or you’re anticipating that what you’re doing is not going to work in the holiday season, then instead of going to pausing or stopping or slowing it down, shift gears and ask yourself, what do I need to change to make sure my marketing is still successful? Do I need to change my content schedule? Do I need to change the topics I’m talking about? Do I need to adjust my live launch calendar? Do I need to adjust my funnel, the strategy itself because it’s not going to work as well for people who don’t have as much time through the holidays? So instead of going to the pausing or the stopping, ask yourself what I need to adjust? What do I need to refine to still be successful? But at the bottom line, make sure that you are setting yourself up that for the rest of this year, you will see growth in your audience and in your leads.

Because that will impact not only your sales over the next few months but also your sales going into next year. And the last thing you want is to start next year off in a really lack of momentum place because you didn’t stay consistent in November and December. So that is the main reason why not to stop your ads in your marketing. The other big thing is people always say, you know, is our ad costs gonna go way up because of more promotions? And yes, that may be true, and that may happen right over the core like holiday times like Black Friday or right over Christmas. But every single year what I see is, for the most part, ad costs don’t go up that much if at all for most of our clients, sometimes a little spike. But then you weigh the other option of not running ads at all and not getting leads and not growing their audience, and that’s worse. And I always use this example of a really big client when I first started out, and I was still running ads for clients. 

Like this was in the beginning of my business. It was one of the biggest clients that I got at that time, and they had a pretty large marketing budget. And I remember we were like, okay, well, previously, the year before, she was like, oh, we always shut our ads off all of December. And I was like, well, how do you know that they wouldn’t keep converting if you’ve only shut them off? And she’s like, oh, that’s a good point. Okay, we will keep running the ads as long as the cost per lead stays good. And if it goes up, we’ll just turn it off. We’ll restart in January. And they were just used to, like, all of December, we just shut our ads off, and they didn’t question it. They just did it. So that year, because they were working with me, I was like, well, let’s let the data actually tell us if that’s what we should do because I don’t think that’s a good idea, and we kept the ads on, and all of December, they continued to get leads, and the cost didn’t go up. It stayed the same. And this was in a pretty large budget, and that doesn’t mean that’s why it was successful. That’s a really great indication that, regardless of the budget. 

This is a possibility, and we implemented some of the strategies I’m going to talk about as number 2 on this list. But all that to say don’t make the off the cuff decision to shut off ads, to pause ads without using data and without trying to combat the higher costs if that does happen to you. So that client every single year now keeps their ads on all of December, and what do you think those leads end up doing? They end up buying from them. And they buy from them in the months to come, and it made a massive difference not just in the leads that they brought in in the month of December but also in their business growth because they added probably like a thousand or two thousand leads in the month of December that they wouldn’t have added otherwise.

That’s number one. That’s the first strategy. Hopefully, I’ve given you enough trust and intel into why you don’t want to pause or stop your marketing. Number 2, this is a strategy that you can use to make sure your marketing is still successful and to shift your marketing to keep costs down and to keep sales up. And that’s using seasonal holiday messaging and seasonal strategies. So if you haven’t paused and thought about the rest of the year and what your audience and what your leads may be going through that is different than normal, do they have any frustrations, desires, needs, problems that are stronger now than they normally are or they come up during the holiday season? It’s a newer issue, or maybe it’s for prepping for January and thinking about how could we leverage that in our marketing to keep cost down or maybe to lower cost or to increase sales. So this might look like a—it could be as simple as you saying, oh, during the holiday season, my ideal customer struggles with eating healthy even more. Okay, so I’m going to take my existing ads, and I’m going to use that as an angle. I’m going to write a version of ad copy that speaks to that problem. And then now my existing funnel that I’ve been running is relevant to what my audience is going through right now. You could also take this a step further and say, okay, my ideal customer is struggling with this problem of being able to eat healthy during the holidays. 

So I’m going to create them a new guide. I’m going to create them a PDF that helps them with recipes or with a plan. Or maybe you say, okay, my ideal customer is trying to solve this problem or has this desire like, for example, they want to plan their next year and set their goals. Okay, I’m going to put together a specific workshop in December where I can teach that and then funnel those people into my offer. So, thinking about during the holidays, what does my ideal customer need more of, have more problems with, feel more frustrated about? Or maybe it’s a desire that they have a stronger sense of, such as planning for the new year or setting their goals or setting their marketing budget—identify those things and then look at how you can leverage them in your strategy. And it can be as small as a messaging angle that you use; it can be a piece of content that you record for your social media; or it could be as big as a live launch that you plan or an additional funnel that you create, and so this is highly effective, and that client that we kept the cost per lead the same and a lot of our clients, you know, in order to keep costs down. 

We leverage holiday messaging and angles and strategies to stay relevant and more connected to their ideal customer during this time because if we are looking at how we can serve and connect to our ideal customer more by connecting to what they are experiencing now. Marketing is just going to work better and also don’t you see how during the holidays. There’s actually opportunity I bet for most of your businesses for 90% of you I could come up with an angle that’s relevant to the holidays or to something that your ideal customer needs now more than ever more than the rest of the year so use those opportunities in your business to create more leads to create more sales. That’s the second piece and now you know when this episode comes out is a great time to start thinking about that.

Because you’re still far enough ahead that you could plan a live launch in December, and you could put something together in a new funnel and new experience that will help you generate those sales before the new year ends. You also can leverage this with or before the new year starts. You also can leverage this with your sales messaging. Maybe there’s a specific angle that you should use to get people to sign up for your offer. And, for example, for us, it’s like you hire us in December, hire us now because you need to start generating leads, and you need to get everything in place and your strategy in place. So you’re hitting the ground running in January so that you’re not just starting in January but you already have everything in place, and you’re already generating leads, and you already have ads live. So there might be something that you can use to actually promote your offer that’s more relevant during the holidays. 

And then, of course, if you’re a product-based business. There’s holiday sales. There’s gifts that you can position your offer as a gift for somebody I’ve had clients do different specials that are relevant to gifts for their customers. Whether that’s like offering wrapping it or a personalized message or something and then if you have like a shipping cutoff date with your physical products or you know you have to order by this date. That’s a reason to promote to your audience to your email list and to push like make sure you buy buy this date. And it’s reminding them hey this is a gift that you can buy for your family for your friends. So that’s the second strategy That’s highly highly successful and requires you to think a little bit ahead ahead of time and be intentional and then the third strategy for successfully. Navigating the holidays in your marketing is using this time to gear up for January because January for most businesses also has a ton of opportunity.

There is a different energy going into a new year that most people experience which means. They have fresh frustrations or fresh. A lot of times desire because they have goals. They want to hit the ground running as a like new version of themselves. Whatever you think about? you know, New Year’s resolutions. That’s not really what it’s about most people experience a shift going into a new year it is a time for reflection and stepping into a different version of themselves. Maybe they want to stop doing something or start doing something that’s an opportunity for you to serve so there might be an amazing opportunity and to do a live launch in January where you can leverage the new year maybe it’s a fitness challenge because you’re in that space. Maybe it is a life reset three-part series thinking about your ideal customer and what they really want. And need in the new year but more so want and how you might be able to potentially help them if you plan on doing something like that.

 How can you lead up to that in November and December? How many leads are you gonna add to your list? How much do you want to go to your audience? Are you going to start teasing that this thing is coming or teasing that this is the time to do this, and here’s what they can do now? And then in January, you have this amazing event coming, or keep your eyes open and so. Also, taking the time to sit and think ahead—what you want your January and even February to look like—and seeing what you can do now to set yourself up for success for that, which probably, for most of you guys, looks like adding more leads onto your list. It looks like adding to your audience, putting out strategic content, starting to tease what you’re doing as it gets closer. The more intentional you can be with that, then likely the more successful.

That event or that sale or that promo is going to end up being in January. So, you know, that’s just a reason why you don’t want to stop marketing in November and December because if you do that, there’s no way you can go into January with, like, a live launch or a promotion or a push to your offer because you just went silent for two months, and you didn’t grow your audience. You didn’t grow your list. You didn’t nurture them. And finally, I’ll kind of add this as a bonus—make sure not only to focus on adding new people to your audience and your list but also nurturing and supporting the people in your audience and in your list and making sure that you’re connecting with them around the holidays.

This could look like specific social media content. It could look like nurturing, you know, like newsletter-type emails that you send out because what this can do is create a connection with your existing audience that then draws them in and maybe draws them to your offer. So. Also, don’t stay silent to your existing audience in your social media and your email list during this time, and make sure to serve them, make sure to create a connection with them. This could also be something that you do—a promotion or a sale or a live launch that you invite all of them to and use that as a reason to connect with them, all right? So, those are my 3 strategies for running ads and successful marketing through the holidays. Again, I can’t emphasize enough how much opportunity there is during this time, and there’s an opportunity because there are ways you get to serve and connect with your audience and your ideal customers that don’t exist the rest of the year. So use this as an opportunity to pause and see what comes to you in ways that you can leverage this time from a very authentic and a place of serving and connecting with your audience. So, all right, you guys, I will talk to you on Thursday.