Do's & Don'ts For Your Creative Strategy This Festive Season

Maximize your brand's impact this festive season with our essential guide to the do's and don'ts of creative strategy, ensuring your holiday marketing is joyful, inclusive, and effective.

1. Do invest in social media

Just like decorating your Christmas tree at home, it's also important to decorate your social media channels to show that your brand is well aware that the holidays are in full swing.

You can do this by:

• Creating a holiday-themed header for your website & a themed version of your cover photo and logo on social platforms
• Developing special holiday organic posts, either with well-wishes, countdowns to your upcoming festive sales, and content on how this holiday fits with your brand. For example, if you are a coffee brand, there is a lot of room for ideas surrounding the cold and coming together of the family during this time
• And, increasing your budget for social ads. There will definitely be stiff competition during the holidays, so you’ll need to increase your cost-per-click bids during this season.

Don’t make every post on owned channels a sales post or holiday post

One sure way to lose both your authenticity and your followers by boring them to death is to constantly push sales or over-post about the holidays.

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2. Do stay consistent

Some of you may feel the need to change your tagline, colors, or look and feel every year. Or maybe even think you need to “mix it up” with each new campaign you run — in order to “Keep things fresh.”

But when you do this, you are simply dulling your brand's ability to have an identity. If you know what your brand stands for, you shouldn’t have any problems picking the right voice for your copy, the right colors, and fonts, the right imagery.

And once those decisions have been made, there isn’t any reason that you shouldn’t stick with that for not only this festive season, but for many to come as well.

Don’t forget your call to action

Don't ever miss a CTA, they are critical. Every piece of content that connects back to your business needs to have one,. If it is missing, you do run the risk of customers not knowing exactly what they're supposed to do next.

So, be sure to make your chosen CTA visible, specific and relevant. It should be front and centre, not buried within the design.

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3. Do consider using gamification to boost e-commerce sales

Many eCommerce gamification examples out there have actively improved sales and conversions, as it adds an element of surprise and anticipation while shopping.

My favourite examples of gamification strategy are:

• Spin the wheel or Scratch card to unlock discount - There's nothing like the anticipation and mystery of having to find out whether you are saving 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% or even 50% from your purchase
• Running a giveaway - you can never go wrong with a giveaway, and if you run it across all your major social media platforms, it becomes better for your business.
• Referrals rewards - Which is essentially, rewarding the consumer for inviting new shoppers to the store. In the last few years this strategy has become very fashionable. Simply because customers don't have to spend more to obtain an advantage, this is really easy and appealing for the majority of shoppers, which explains why it works so well for almost any type of product and company.

Don’t overlook your website and e-commerce storefront

Since you’ll be directing people to your website for more information or purchase, it’s vital that it’s easy to navigate and complete a purchase.

Bonus

Don’t consider doing it yourself

Yes, we want you to embrace your business and most times do your own marketing sounds like a good idea, but keep in mind that the festive season is a jungle, and everyone needs to stand out. Sometimes that means hiring a pro to get those customers.

Keep R17 Ventures in mind for the upcoming festive season, we would be happy to help - Book your free consultation today!