Holiday Marketing Calendar with Tips

[CCarter]

Last year Thanksgiving Day reached 18.3% YOY (year over year) growth ($2.87 billion online revenue). (Sauce: Sales Report: 2018 Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday)

Black Friday + Cyber Monday combined = $11.62 billion in online revenue.

To put it mildly, there is money to be had during the holidays. Here is a quick calendar of days you can take advantage of to create promotions, sales items, or content around.

Date	Holiday
Nov 28th	Thanksgiving
Nov 29th	Black Friday
Nov 30th	Small Business Saturday
Dec 2nd	Cyber Monday
Dec 9th	Green Monday
Dec 14th	Free Shipping Day
Dec 22nd-30th	Hanukkah
Dec 24th	Christmas Eve
Dec 25th	Christmas Day
Dec 26th	Boxing Day
Dec 26th - Jan 1st	Kwanzaa
Dec 31st	New Year's Eve
Jan 1st	New Years Day

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Some ideas and tips to help:

1. Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales can start 1-2 weeks before the date. Make sure if you are doing AD buys or paid marketing to have your campaigns setup by Nov 22nd. (Facebook Ad manager does tend have a reputation to go down days before Black Friday - happens every year).

2. A lot of consumers buy for themselves - take advantage of this.

3. You have to standout from the crowd - cause it will be crowded! Remember Amazon's stunt from that one year they bought all ADs across everything flooding their name and brand, and leaving the small guys out.

4. Use the power of your email list! Use your social profiles as well. People will always be in shopping mode when they are online, so if they see a promotion that intrigues them, especially if they signed up for your newsletter list or follow you on social - they will be more inclined to buy.

5. You can create a "Holiday Gift Guide" ideas for products/services within your niche/industry. This is perfect for websites which are affiliate in nature, since you can link to different offers around the internet and make much moola.

6. You can try an "hourly online deal" scenario, where every hour a different deal is available for your business. You can even print out or send out what each hour will be to give consumers enough time to plan to buy.

If you've got some ideas, tips, or even questions let us know!

 

[JamaicanMoose]

Good share.

To add to point #1 - based on my historical Amazon Associates data, today/tomorrow will mark the uptick in sales volume.

If you're in this space and haven't prepared for the holidays, I suggest you put a pot of coffee on and pull an all-nighter.

One super simply easy thing to do is add a line to your intro / post title saying this is updated for Holiday / Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Christmas / whatever 2019. Additionally, bury a sentence including these terms at the end of your post. You'll see in your GSC that you'll have a lot of click-through for queries involving these terms. No clue if adding this line helps rank for [search phrase] + holiday term, but it's worth the shot. Worst case it adds trust to the buyer.

 

[Poplanu]

What about slapping these ribbons on the site? I guess I'd have to be a custom widget + some code in functions.php calling it out. Or do y'all do this already?

 

[Poplanu]

One super simply easy thing to do is add a line to your intro / post title saying this is updated for Holiday / Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Christmas / whatever 2019. Additionally, bury a sentence including these terms at the end of your post. You'll see in your GSC that you'll have a lot of click-through for queries involving these terms. No clue if adding this line helps rank for [search phrase] + holiday term, but it's worth the shot. Worst case it adds trust to the buyer.

I'm gonna go ahead with this - I'll try to modify my posts template and echo the Black Friday intro box in with PHP. Maybe there'll be no all-nighter necessary this way And then update the line for XMAS/holidays afterward.