Organic Social Media Strategies for the Holidays

Two characters that mean a great deal to brands: Q4. The holiday season is a time to make big money. Online shopping is taking a big piece of this pie, reaching record-breaking numbers last year. As reported by CNBC, online shopping racked in $108.2 billion last holiday season. Your brand, or your team on behalf of a client, needs all hands on deck. Alongside paid media and paid social strategies, you will need organic social to drive excitement and awareness to your loyal customers and frequent engagers. This blog will outline ways to leverage organic social before and during the holiday season.

Pre-Holiday Discounts

Now is the time to launch creative campaigns that boost your brand’s awareness. Here’s an idea: create a ground-breaking campaign with every entrant receiving a discount code. That way, when November and December roll around, they have a reason to buy a gift from you. Moreover, have the ask be some sort of awareness play. For instance, a photo campaign to broaden your reach to like-minded users, a “tag your friend” giveaway, etc.

Be Merry

If your brand needs to stand out, get in the spirit of the holiday and give back. Here’s an idea: create a hashtag campaign the ties to giving a donation to a non-profit (ex. Toys For Tots, research, etc.). Take Starbucks for instance, they created their #GiveGood campaign last year in which users post their artistic version of their Starbucks Holiday cup. Starbucks agrees to share their favorite submissions on their social pages to give these artists or average joes a moment in the spotlight. Now for a smaller brand, there will need to be some incentive behind it. And with the holiday being a giving season, why not boost your brand’s philanthropic side while boosting your awareness.

Giveaways

Giveaways yield increases in reach. There, we said it. Secret’s out.

Question: Do you have some killer Black Friday/ Cyber Monday emails in the pipeline? You do? Perfect. Why not create a giveaway with the ask requiring an email sign up. Better yet, why not give away one of your new product that just launched or will be launching. Not only will this bring more awareness to the new product, but also potentially snowball online reviews and create word of mouth marketing. And with the email sign up, you’ll add to your email list in hopes of capturing that conversion with your deals, bells, & whistles.

Boosted Budget Allocation

Make a point to boost to cold audiences through the pre-season in order to build your retargeting pool for your paid social ads when the holiday season is just about to hit. Tip: start your holiday ads before everyone else so that the algorithm can learn on your ad before the competition is fierce.

Holiday Discounts

This should go without saying, but your social media account should outline everything to come throughout the holiday season. If there is a Cyber Monday deal, please post about it and make the experience as easy and exciting as possible for your customer. Keep the content extremely creative so that your audience sees your post throughout all of the noise within their NewsFeed. Take a look at how beautifully vocal SPANX was last holiday season:

Wrapping Up

Overall, your organic social marketing plan for the holiday season should really focus on creating the most brand awareness possible so that your brand is top of mind during the gifting season. Build your retargeting pools, email lists, and audience. Create campaigns that will increase your reach and engagement so that you can go into the season your absolute strongest and keep those campaigns as unique and creative as possible in order to stand out.