Deck the halls and ‘tis the season, Christmas is almost upon us! How’s the Christmas shopping going? Are you an early bird or are you the person raiding the shelves on Christmas Eve? Either way, Christmas is about spending time with loved ones and eating lots of food (That diet can wait until January). But when it comes to Christmas Social Media Campaigns, it pays to be prepared.
We’ve all gone out to the shops during the Autumn months and thought to ourselves how outrageous it is that the shops are covered in tinsel, fairy lights, mistletoe and goodwill. One supermarket just down the road from the Little Media HQ has had the Christmas decorations up and festive stock out since mid-September! There’s even one radio station in the UK has been playing Christmas Songs since August! Now that is outrageous!
But the truth is, for many businesses, particularly smaller ones, 20-30% of their annual business comes during the festive period. So, getting your Christmas campaign picture-perfect is crucial for companies of all sizes. With social distancing rules still applying in many parts of the world and many people being reluctant to shop in person, digital campaigns are going to be even more critical than ever this Christmas.
Here are our 5 secrets to a successful social media Christmas campaign:
1) Create that warm and fuzzy Christmassy feeling
Whether it’s films, music or advertising, the media has shown us for generations just how important Christmas is for spending time with loved ones and connecting with our families. Messages of unity and hope are commonplace during the festive period. And perhaps now more than ever, consumers will be looking for an escape from their everyday lives to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas. Try giving your social media campaign a warm and fuzzy tone to really lift people’s Christmas spirit!
Air Canada took the warm and fuzzy approach with its #ACGiftofHome campaign in 2014. They used the emotion of returning home for Christmas after a long time away to appeal to those distant relatives who dream of returning home for the holidays. The campaign gave free tickets for a bunch of overseas Canadians so they could spend Christmas with their families and encouraged people to tell their own stories of returning home for Christmas using the hashtag #ACGiftofHome. This generated a tonne of user-generated stories using the hashtag building the brands engagement on social media.
2) Add a touch of Christmas to your branding
As a general rule, it’s vital to be strict when it comes to branding consistency on social media. Keeping consistency of your colour scheme and typefaces are essential, so your consumers can instantly recognise your brand. However, during the holidays, that rule is there to be broken! Adding a little touch of Christmas to your online branding is a really fun way to engage your audience. Social media users react positively to clever tweaks to your branding to celebrate the Christmas period. It could be something relatively simple, adding a Santa hat to your profile pic, creating a Christmas pun out of your brand slogan. Or taking something synonymous with your brand and sprinkling some Christmas magic over it. Like what Starbucks did just last Christmas!
Perhaps the most recognisable brand asset of Starbucks is their famous coffee cups. To celebrate Christmas and get people excited for the release of their Christmas edition coffee cups they teased the designs on their social media. Eventually showcasing all the festive designs in their Twitter header photo. This gave its customers an even greater incentive to visit Starbucks. To collect all the limited-edition cups, they had seen on their social media pages.
Why not give your social media header photos a Christmas tweak?
3) Create a Bespoke Gift Guide
If your business sells products that could be given as a Christmas gift, it’s a handy idea to create a gift guide that includes all of your products. Your social media followers will be desperate for inspiration as they actively look for presents to buy loved ones. If you have a wide range of products, you could even make separate gift guides for men, women, children and even pets! What’s good about putting your gift guide on social media is that it makes it sharable. If one of your existing customers sees something they think might be a good idea for a friend of theirs, they will tag and share it with them.
Zara’s gift guide from 2017 showcased some of their most popular gifts for that year, giving the customer a little flavour of the gift offerings, they had available. The comment section if full of people tagging their friends and relatives in, hinting at gift ideas for them.
On Facebook and Instagram, you can even tag the products that you have listed in your gift guide to make it even easier for your customer to find their chosen item on your website.
4) Get the Team Involved
This one is for LinkedIn but could be great across all platforms. Your audience is a fan of your brand and will likely be interested in the story and the team behind that brand. This is true all year round not just Christmas time, but the holiday season is such a fantastic side to let your hair down and have fun on social media, so why not include the whole team.
This could be something straightforward, such as taking photographs around the office of the team celebrating Christmas Jumper Day or something as quirky as Elf Yourself! If you don’t know (which by this point you really should!) Elf Yourself is a yearly tradition where you can submit photographs of your team and insert them into an elf animated video. It’s been going on since 2006! But still, get’s some laughs on social media all these years later. The latest edition of Elf Yourself begins on November 1st.
5) Christmas Offer/Competition
What’s the one thing that everybody does around this time of year? Buy things. Much more than they do any other time of year. So why not try to take advantage of the buying season by introducing a seasonal offer that will attract more people to your social media and more people to buy your products.
Or if you are feeling incredibly generous this Christmas, you could run a Christmas giveaway! After all, it is better to give than to receive, right? When used correctly, they’re a perfect way of sparking engagement from your audience and are a sure-fire way of widening your reach this Christmas!
This contest from The Body Shop last year, utilised hashtags really effectively to increase word of mouth about the competition and therefore The Body Shop itself.
Whatever you choose to do with your Christmas campaign this year, remember to stay safe and have a great time!
