The holidays are crazy, right?

Everyone’s rushing around, doing a million things. All the while, you have to figure out how to grab their attention and start planning for next year.

There’s so much going on that you might not have time to plan out your holiday marketing strategy, but that’s okay!

There are plenty of ways to make even your last-minute holiday marketing ideas feel expertly crafted. Below I’ll show you five of them.

1. Turn clichés into classics.

During the holidays, most people are in the holiday spirit, which gives you a lot of leeway. You can use any holiday theme or tagline for your marketing, and people will often eat it up.

Our company Text Request did this our first holiday season. We took the 25 days of Christmas and paired it with our logo. One of my favorites is below, and you can view the rest here.

Each day, we decorated our logo with something holiday themed and shared it all over social media. Our followers (and even complete strangers) loved them!

The idea took maybe two minutes to come up with, and each logo took a short amount of time to create. But it gave us this ongoing campaign that most people thought required a lot of time and effort.

More importantly, it got a lot of people engaging with us and talking about us.

There’s a bottomless well of recurring holiday themes. Take one of these clichés, and play around with how your business can use it.

2. Create a campaign using your best-selling product or service.

If you’ve got a best-selling product or service, then you already know what your target audience wants. This knowledge makes your job easy.

All you have to do is get that same product or service in front of more people. You’ve got two good options.

Option 1

You can pull an email campaign together to promote your product or service. If you already have a list of subscribers, Constant Contact makes email campaigns painless (even enjoyable) if you need help.

Each Educational Outfitters store, for example, sends out promotional emails for the products selling best at their location to get higher returns in the percentage thousands.

Option 2

You can create a Facebook ad for your best-selling product or service, and target other people you think are likely to buy (like followers, or people who match certain demographics).

This approach works great, because you’re able to bring two knowns together – a product that people love, and your target audience. Plus, it only takes a few minutes to create a Facebook ad.

3. Partner with influencers.

Influencers work fast, which is great for last-minute holiday marketing ideas.

An influencer is someone who has a lot of followers on social media (100K+) and whose posts get a lot of engagement. Then there are micro-influencers, who get a lot of engagement from a smaller number of followers (say, 1K-100K).

For a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, these people will share your message or your products with all of their followers about as quickly as you can get your product or message in their hands.

When someone else speaks well of you, you instantly gain more credibility. And what’s powerful is that this all looks and feels organic to the end consumer.

If you’re in a pinch for your holiday marketing, just have an influencer do it for you!

Case studies from small, local boutiques all the way up to titans like Hulu abound, each getting exponentially more views, shares, and even sales than they could have got on their own.

4. Use eye-catching imagery.

The brain can process images in about 1/20 of a second, which makes them a great way to get your message across quickly. Plus, they’re easy to create.

You can find great photos for free on sites like Burst, and you can turn these photos — or other graphics — into eye-catching content using tools like Canva.

Remember, good content doesn’t have to take a lot of time to create.

For instance, let’s say you’re a residential cleaning company. It’s pretty easy to create a professional looking infographic full of holiday cleaning tips, or standalone images like this one from Hefty using the tools above.

Then you just need to share your content on social media, in your email campaigns, or wherever is appropriate.

5. Give away something for free.

Freebies are great for lead generation and upselling all year, but people are more likely to bite around the holidays.

The best part? It’s so easy to give things away for free! Here are a couple of options.

You could use a free e-book as a “lead magnet.” Tools like Beacon make it easy to turn a blog post into an e-book. Then use a pop-up form that prompts people to download your e-book in exchange for their email address.

You can even make the offer holiday-themed if you’re feeling festive.

Another option is to give away a free (smaller) product if customers also buy something else. You can call this an upsell if you want, but customers view it as getting a gift.

Maybe you offer a free candle if someone buys a gift basket, or a free gutter cleaning if someone puts a new roof on their house. The options are nearly endless and take very little time.

Wrapping Up

The holidays are a great time for earning new business — even if you don’t have a lot of time to plan out your holiday marketing strategy.

Just use any of the five last-minute strategies above, and people will think you spent days or weeks toiling over your campaigns!

Do you do something different for your holiday marketing ideas? Let me know in the comments below!

The post How to Make Your Last-Minute Holiday Marketing Ideas Feel Expertly Crafted appeared first on Constant Contact Blogs.