Holiday Marketing Tips for Small Businesses (with creative inspiration and checklists)

Are you harnessing the power of holiday marketing for your small business? The holiday season is a prime time to connect with your audience, show gratitude, and make a final push to meet sales or analytics targets. 

What we love best about holiday marketing (...or any marketing, really) is that you can customize it based on your needs, budget, and capacity.

To help you get started, we’re sharing five marketing activities you should do around the holidays, inspiration and ideas for each one, and a quick checklist to help you organize core holiday marketing tasks. Read on to discover actionable holiday marketing tips for small business!

(Remember, you don’t need to follow every suggestion below from start to finish. Pick and choose the ones that work for your business and customize them for your brand).  

Get Festive with Your Branding

Most of the year, we’d remind you to be consistent with your branding. However, we’ll often make exceptions for holidays and observances (like Christmas) or causes you support (such as Pride Month).  

Consider whether your company wants to include festive branding elements in its assets throughout December. Here are some ideas and inspirations to add seasonal elements to your logo and brand elements:

• Create a new version of your logo in holiday colours or with small holiday elements (like snowflakes)

• Add a Santa or winter hat to your mascot in your graphics

• Update your social media profile banners with your holiday offers or messages

• Add your new holiday elements to your email signatures

Don’t be afraid to include more seasonal colour pallets (in addition to your regular brand colours) for your social media graphics and other seasonal promotional materials. 

Your Action Items

• Update your logo, social media graphics, and email signatures with holiday elements

• Create a “Holiday Style Guide” to include the exceptions to your typical branding and how/where to use them

• Add holiday-themed colours and on-brand seasonal graphics to your graphics style guide for the holiday season

Create Holiday-Themed Content

While tracking analytics for our client’s websites, we typically notice increased holiday traffic. To get your fair share of this increased traffic, create new, engaging seasonal content. 

This holiday-themed content may include:

• “Happy Holidays” content: Write, design, and preschedule a social media post, newsletter mailout, and other communications to wish your customers and followers a happy holiday season. Use this communication to thank them for their support and patronage over the years.

• Seasonally themed content series: Look for opportunities to create seasonally themed content. Think of 12 days of Christmas style, where you give away or highlight one product or educational tidbit every day for 12 days in December. “Holiday Survival Guides” or “Holiday Gift Guides” are other popular series ideas you can customize for your business. 

• Powerful storytelling: The holidays create excellent opportunities for sharing stories. These stories connect with your audience on a personal level, fostering a deeper connection and emphasizing your brand values and “why.”

Your Holiday Action Items

• Write, design, and preschedule your content marketing holiday wishes to your followers and customers. 

• Schedule a series of daily or weekly social media posts in a content series (or as one post in a carousel of images)

• Brainstorm stories you can tell about you, your brand, or your customers that relate to the holidays or holiday messaging.

Increase Engagement with Holiday Promotions

During the holiday season, everyone is looking for gift ideas and deals. Promote holiday deals and promotions to harness these visitors' high intent to purchase. 

Here are some ways to encourage engagement and sales with holiday promotions: 

• Create a seasonal package: Consider creating “stocking stuffer” deals, free gifts with purchase offers, or other discounts and promote them using seasonal hooks and messaging.

• Create a quick action offer: Create a holiday promotion that encourages quick action. Plan a promotion that is easy for someone to say yes to. These typically offer a free product, digital resource, or a sale so low that your customers don’t have to ponder the purchase too long. One-day and limited time flash sales also work well this time of year. 

• Encourage user-generated content:  The holidays are a season of sharing. Encourage your followers to use a branded holiday hashtag in their posts about your business, or for them to share photos of your products or events so you can reshare them on your channels. 

Your Action Items

• Create a holiday-themed package or promotion

• Promote a quick-action promotion

• Plan one way to encourage user-generated content sharing and tagging.

Don’t Forget Your Existing Customers

What’s your plan to nurture your existing customers over the holiday season? Plan a campaign that thanks these customers for their loyalty. Use your customer contact database or email list to communicate with important customers over the holidays. 

Here are some online (and offline) ways to show appreciation for your existing customers:

• Holiday emails: Segment your contact list and send current customers a customized holiday message. Express your gratitude to your customers and consider sharing how their loyalty has impacted your company (such as increasing your annual giving budget to better support worthy causes). 

• Offer holiday loyalty discount: Show your genuine appreciation by offering your VIP customers a loyalty discount, early bird special or preview of things to come, or other thank-you gift. 

Your Action Items

• Segment your mailing list to create a list for current and past customers

• Schedule an email with a holiday loyalty message and offer. 

Plan for a Strong Start in the New Year

The end of the year is a time of reflection and planning for the new year. Many use November and December for end-of-year business preparation.

Here are some holiday marketing activities you can work on right now:

• Survey your customers: Distribute a short survey to gather feedback on your customers’ experiences, products, and offerings. Make the survey as brief as possible to increase the chances of your followers completing it, giving you a larger sample to analyze. 

• Tease your plans for the coming year: As you “finalize” plans for 2025, begin teasing them on your social media to build excitement. You can be vague if you don’t have the details finalized. 

Your Action Items

• Decide the top 2-3 things you want to learn from your customers

• Distribute a customer feedback survey

• Begin teasing your business plans for the coming year to build excitement, curiosity, and momentum. 

Holiday marketing tips for small business - start your holiday marketing now!

The holiday season is an excellent opportunity that inspires content, offerings, and campaigns to help you end the year strong. A thoughtful and purposeful holiday marketing program will support your customer nurturing programs by attracting new customers and showing your appreciation to current ones. 

There is still time to create your holiday marketing strategy. We’re offering a special "Holiday Marketing Strategy Session” at STGP to help you prioritize your year-end business goals and create a holiday marketing plan that works for you. 

Book your Holiday Marketing Strategy Session with Kim today.