It’s October! You know what that means - people are already thinking about the gift-giving season!

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Maybe you’re a traditionalist that refuses to put up Christmas decorations until after Thanksgiving, but plenty of your customers are already checking their naughty and nice lists!

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Start planning your holiday content strategy as soon as possible. When you sow the seeds early, your social media community will come to you first with their holiday shopping needs.

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In this article, I’ll discuss some unique strategies to help you create more sales during this holiday season!

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Setting Yourself Up for More Holiday Sales

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There is HUGE growth potential for your business this time of year, and the best way to take advantage of it is to plan!

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If you are someone who hasn’t invested in social media to connect with future and past customers- that’s okay! It's the best time to start devoting to this section of your business.

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Why? Because people are in the connecting spirit. You’ll receive more positive affirmation from your outreaches than at any other time of the year.

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The only time in the next three months when this isn’t the case is about ten days before Christmas. After that, customers are unresponsive to any extra online interaction.

Imagine someone new trying to come into your life ten days before one of the year’s biggest holidays. You’d probably ignore them, right? You have limited energy as it is, and you want to be enjoying it with the people you already know and love. So when planning your content and customer outreach strategy, concentrate on nurturing the relationships you already have as you get closer to the end of the year.

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That’s just one of the examples of how being aware of your customer’s buying, and attention patterns will help you hone in on where you should concentrate your time for each portion of the holiday season!

The needs of your customers change drastically within weeks at a time. That’s why waiting to organize your business closer to the holidays will be too late. Instead, you must be ahead of the trends to take advantage of them.

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As a general rule - when starting to figure out your holiday business strategy - you need to be aware of what I like to call “transition seasons.” It isn’t enough to be mindful of the big holidays because their lead-up is just as crucial for your strategy as the holiday itself.

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Transition seasons are the time between holidays or weeks leading up to a season shift, where your customers are likely less reachable. Depending on the transitional season - your customers will either be in planning or consolidating mode. When customers are in planning mode, you can use that to your advantage to book more parties. When customers are in consolidating mode, like when they are slowing down to spend time with family, that’s when you should concentrate on nurturing the customer relationships you already have.

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During the rest of the year, January through September, transition seasons are more spread out and generally do not affect how potential customers will interact with your business. But because we’re in the season of feasts - transition seasons come up quickly!

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Here’s a calendar breakdown of this year’s transition seasons:

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Now that you know about transition seasons and how to take advantage of them, you’ll want to create a content schedule that reflects it.

At first, this process can feel overwhelming, especially if you have multiple places where you are reaching your customers, such as your VIP Group, your Business Page, and your personal Facebook profile.

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So how do you create a cohesive holiday schedule when you feel pulled in multiple directions? First, you write it out in manageable chunks in one place so you can see the big picture.

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I don’t know about you, but my brain works best when I brainstorm first with pen and paper. So I get out of the notebook and make a page for each month I’m scheduling content. Then I split the page between my VIP Group and Business Page.

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From there, on a separate sticky note, I add the guest & host specials, sales, and dates customers need to know to buy their products to get them in time for each holiday.

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Example:

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This way - as you plan out what posts need to be scheduled for what days, you have all the information you need in one place!

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If you’re having trouble figuring out what kind of content should be posted on your Business Page Vs. VIP Group, here’s an article on deciding what content should go in which category.

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The content you post for your personal profile doesn’t need to be as planned. Just make sure you are taking pictures of all the fun things happening in your life.

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Are you doing a Friendsgiving or Thanksgiving at your house for the first time? Talk about what you learned about hosting and what you’re grateful for! Don’t just ask your audience what their plans are for the holidays. Share yours.

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The holidays are an intense time for nostalgia, connection, and compassion. Your audience is craving stories from your life to get to know you!

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Creating and Finding Holiday Content

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Now that you know how you will organize your content for the holiday season in one place, you’ll want to figure out the theme of your content. Essentially - the holiday edition of “How will you and your products solve a specific pain point for your customers.”

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Are you going to provide gift ideas for everyone on their list? Will you help your audience stay on track with their health goals through all the holiday eating? Are you going to provide products and tips on how to manage holiday stress?

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Make sure it’s something that can be tied into your company’s products AND that you are genuinely excited to talk about.

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You don’t need big flashy sales to get sales and bookings. Instead, you want to create a desire for them based on the merit of how they will provide value to your customers.

Having a theme will help get that message across to your customers and provide consistency they will appreciate during this hectic time!

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Once you have a theme, you’ll want to break down how you will implement it throughout your business for the next two and a ½ months.

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The three places to focus on are:

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1. Your customer outreaches

2. Your Party Template

3. Your scheduled content for your Business Page & VIP Group

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Example:

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Your holiday content strategy easily comes together when you have a focus!

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If you already have a holiday template from last year that you are planning on using with a few updates, then use that as your guide for what your theme is going to be. You don’t have to recreate the wheel to get the desired results.

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Schedule all your organized content through PostMyParty! You'll be thanking yourself all season!

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Use the Featured/Pinned Post And Linktree URLs To Create More Purchases

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Your new and past customers will not want to hunt for the information they need to buy your products. They already have too much going on, so make it as easy as possible!

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There are two great ways to ensure the information you need to communicate to your customers is easily accessible - Featured posts and Linktree links!

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Featured Posts are posts you pin to the top of any group or business page. When a post is featured, it remains on the top and will be the first thing your members see when they check into your community.  

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Linktree is a bio landing page that connects your social media, website, events, and additional information into one place. This means you can post one link that connects to all the links associated with you instead of having a long list of URLs for your customers to sort through. Place them in your Facebook profile “About Me,” and you’ll never miss a potential lead again. It’s a valuable tool when you have a lot of vital information to give your customers, such as a holiday gift guide and order-by-dates.

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Having that information in a place, they don’t have to scroll to find will eliminate obstacles for your customer to purchase your products. If they have to scroll through posts to get that information, it’s likely to be forgotten.

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Ideally, you want to add this information to all your profiles on Nov 1st!

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Your corporate office may already have a gift guide available for you, but if not, it’s easy to create your own!

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Pick ten products you think will make fantastic gifts this year. If you need help figuring out which ones to choose, research what is trending. Read through other gift guides online. Seeing what other companies think might catch customers’ attention is helpful.

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Then create a Google Doc. Add the products you’ve picked with a picture and a description of why this product makes a perfect gift!

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You can also add a section that includes stocking stuffers! Smaller items in the $10 and under range and explaining how your customers can use them for secret Santas, teacher gifts, and goodie bags will help you get sales throughout the season.

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When you finish creating the gift guide document, add the link you copied from the Share button on Google into your Featured Posts and your Linktree! Now your customers can find this helpful information from anywhere!

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One Way to Show Your Holiday Spirit Without Being Weird

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The holiday season brings out the generous spirit in us all. And your audience will be incredibly generous to you if they see that you are in the giving mood too!

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A great way to showcase your generosity without spending anything or bragging about the volunteer work you do - because that isn't a great look - is to incorporate sharing your peers' content into your scheduled holiday posts. Even if it's a fellow team member and not a potential customer, being a cheerleader and sharing one of their posts and gushing over how awesome they are - will do great things for building your online community.

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If you think about it - wouldn't you want to work with the person you kept seeing cheering everyone else on? You'd assume that person would make you feel special too!

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After reading this article, I hope you feel ready to tackle your business' holiday schedule!

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