Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays are coming up fast. With millions of people looking forward to scoring major sales, it’s important to have your ecommerce marketing strategy locked in. We created this helpful holiday marketing checklist to help you prepare for the biggest shopping season of the year.
Even if you don’t have a plan for Black Friday or Cyber Monday yet, this list will help you prioritize tasks so you can make the most of these upcoming opportunities.
But before we get started, what is a fractional CMO?
A fractional CMO is an experienced marketing professional who works with companies on a part-time basis. They provide the strategic value of a full-time CMO, but at a fraction of the cost. This type of service is best for small and medium-sized businesses who need expert marketing guidance but do not have the budget for a full-time Chief Marketing Officer.
Now, let’s get into the holiday marketing checklist every ecommerce business should have completed before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season.
Your Holiday Marketing Checklist
1. Define Your Marketing Objectives
- Establish Clear Goals
- Outline key objectives for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday campaigns.
- Examples: increasing sales; boosting brand awareness; expanding customer base.
- Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Identify measurable metrics to track the success of each campaign, (like total sales, website traffic, number of inquiries, etc.)
- Your KPIs should align with your business goals, so if your goal is to boost brand awareness, you’ll want to track metrics such as website traffic, ad impressions, and social media engagement.
2. Conduct Market Research
If you’re a little late to the holiday planning process, you don’t have to conduct an extensive in-depth analysis—but even a brief overview of the market will help guide your strategy.
- Analyze Consumer Behaviour
- For example, if you discover that 76% of shoppers are compelled to click based on great product images, you may want to prioritize the visual appeal and quality of your social media posts and paid ads.
- Evaluate Competitor Strategies
- Seeing what the competition is up to will make it easier for you to spot opportunities for differentiation, and adapt your strategy based on what is—and isn’t—working for your competitors.
- For example, if your competitor uploads a funny skit on Instagram that generates significantly more views and comments than the rest of their content, you might want to think about how you can also leverage humour and social media trends to boost your engagement. Just make sure you add your own twist to it; otherwise, it will just look like you are copying other people’s content.
3. Develop a Campaign Strategy
- Develop a Campaign Messaging Strategy
- Craft targeted messages and offers for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season. Emphasize that these offers are only available for a limited time and create a sense of urgency.
- Make sure your offer is clearly articulated and easy to understand for your target audience. No need to get fancy with the wording here; during this time period, people are only interested in how good your discount is.
- For example: “50% off! Cyber Monday Flash Sale!” (You won’t be winning any awards for creativity, but it gets the message across effectively).
- Think about creating themed landing pages specifically for these sales. This can also make it easier to track your campaign’s success.
- Decide which channels you will be running the campaigns on:
- Organic and paid social media
- Paid search or display ads (think about targeting)
- Email marketing (consider segmenting your audiences)
- Plan Your Budget & Allocate Resources
- Spend your money wisely by efficiently allocating your marketing budget to the most effective channels, and make sure you track your campaign’s success so that you can see what worked and optimize your marketing efforts for future promotions.
- Timelines and Project Management
- Ideally, you’ll want to create a content calendar to schedule your posts so that you have a clear timeline. Prepare your content ahead of time to allow for multiple rounds of feedback before going live.
4. Optimize Your Website and Content
- Review Your Website and Content for Errors and Opportunities
- Written content should be optimized for relevant keywords to maximize visibility, and any broken links or slow pages should be fixed to prepare for peak shopping times.
- Use data from previous years to identify peak traffic times on your website; make sure to plan around these to ensure your site can handle the load.
5. Set Up Monitoring and Analytics
- Ensure You’re Set Up To Track Performance
- Implement systems such as UTMs to track campaign performance in real-time, and make data-driven adjustments to optimize results.
6. Post-Event Analysis and Future Planning
- Review Campaign Performance
- Congratulations! The campaign is over. Now it’s time to assess its performance and how you want to optimize your content for future marketing strategies. Use the KPIs you set for yourself in Step 1 to produce a report that can help you identify strong and weak points in your campaign.
Any business that wants to stay current and keep up with the competition should have an effective marketing plan for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holidays. Using this holiday marketing checklist, you can set yourself up for success—just don’t leave it to the last minute!
To quickly recap the main points we covered, here are the key steps you want to follow when creating your seasonal marketing plan:
- Define Your Marketing Objectives
- Conduct Market Research
- Develop A Campaign Strategy and Content
- Optimize Your Website
- Set Up Monitoring and Analytics
- Post-Campaign Analysis
For the best results, try not to rush through any of these steps, and make sure you plan a couple of months ahead to avoid unnecessary stress and tight deadlines.
These steps can be done by one person, but will definitely be done better by a team of experienced marketing professionals. If you don’t have a marketing team (or you are the marketing team), consider hiring a fractional CMO or fractional marketing team to help guide you through each step and take the heavy lifting off your shoulders.
Got any questions about creating and implementing an effective seasonal marketing strategy? Book a free consult with us today. We can help you define a strategy and create all the content needed for your campaign so that you can focus on what you do best.