Why you need to be planning your holiday season now (Yes, really!)

It’s August… you are likely enjoying the sunny weather, sipping a cool drink, and enjoying a brief respite from the last few months. The holiday retail season couldn’t be further from your mind. After all, who wants to think about Black Friday till October, right?

You may not usually think about the retail season during the summer, but what if we told you that there are only 146 days between August 1st and Christmas Day? Still not feeling the urgency? There are less than 70 days to Thanksgiving.

Get ahead of the chain

By the time you read this, there will be less than two months to Thanksgiving. Once you enter the run-up to Thanksgiving, you know as well as we do that you will be run ragged. Sure, you might be able to plan for Thanksgiving closer to the time, but can you really find time to deal with Thanksgiving, Halloween, Black Friday, and Christmas one after another?

It’s time to plan

Now is the time for you to sit down and plan. Trust us, you are making your life far easier and your retail season much more likely to be a success.

Think about…

• Which events your business needs to mark between September and December.
• How will you mark these occasions? Are you running promos or just raising awareness?
• The targets you want to hit. No marketing initiative is successful unless you start with a goal. Do you want more online customers, more sign-ups, more repeat customers, more in-store traffic?
• How will you track your progress? Targets are essential, but without processes in place they can be hard to track.
• What platforms and techniques will you use to draw attention to your business? Will you use Facebook, Google Ads, podcasts, blogs, webinars?

Your digital marketing timeline

Successful campaigns take time – time to plan, time to create cohesive, effective assets, and time to build momentum before the big day. Let’s use Thanksgiving as an example.

If there are 70 days to Thanksgiving, you will want to be running your campaign a couple of weeks ahead of time at a minimum. So that puts us at 56 days out.

If you are outsourcing your asset creation, that will likely take another two weeks, putting us at 42 days out. If you are creating in-house, you will need to juggle other responsibilities too, so let’s add a week.

Now you have either 42 days or 35 days of wiggle room. But we can’t jump straight into creation.

You will want a further two weeks to plan, set targets, and set up monitoring systems.

Boom. Just like that, even if you are on the ball, there are just 28 days (or 21 if you keep things in-house) of wiggle room between now and Thanksgiving.

Those days are already earmarked

We have 28 days yet to allocate, but, as we said at the top of this article, Thanksgiving is not the only upcoming retail milestone. Most Canadian small businesses mark Halloween, Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday, and Christmas to some degree.

Once the retail season gets into full swing, you will be caught up in inventory, gift-wrapping, staff rotas and all manner of other essential day-to-day tasks.

Now is your window to plan your epic digital marketing campaign for the upcoming retail season. Get ahead of the game to up your success and efficiency while reducing the stress on your to-dos.

If you do one thing…

If you haven’t started thinking about the holiday retail season, it’s time to move the needle. One step can start the ball rolling, so let’s do this! Take some time to jot down what you want to achieve. Once you have this key piece of information, the strategizing can begin.

Need a hand?

Full of ideas but no time or skills to make it happen? Or maybe you are staring at a blank page? Whatever the situation, we are happy to collaborate with you to make the 2022 holiday season a success for your business. Click here to book a call and end the year with a bang!

Cyber PR Army Solutions Inc.. Understand where you want to be, and we’ll help you get there.

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