Every holiday season represents a valuable opportunity for your business. More than just another opportunity to sell products, however, these occasions are great times to consider your brand narrative and let it shine in the best possible light. Constructing memorable holiday communications to share with your audience is a delicate process; however, if handled well, you can expect to reap the rewards.
In these increasingly cynical times, memorable holiday communications can be crafted by appealing to emotions and the public-minded feelings that do arise during the holiday season. It is important to capture the right ideas while being true to your brand.
This is easier said than done, so let’s look at some specific tips for how to make memorable holiday communications this holiday season.
1. Keep The Experience Economy In Mind – Personalize your Gifts and Messages
These days, consumers are less interested in your products themselves and are far more free citation generator concerned with the overall experience that purchasing and using your products and services will provide them with. When it comes to the holidays, making sure to take the experience economy into account is essential for creating memorable holiday communications.
For example, personalizing your holiday communications is a great way to nurture potential leads with current and potential customers. Contemporary audiences identify more strongly with a brand when a small gift or a message is directly tailored to them. Known as lead nurturing, this process develops relationships with customers at every stage of the sale and through every step of their journey. This focused approach to marketing and communication listens to the needs of clients and provides the information and answers they are seeking.
You can even solicit customer participation to add to the experience during the holidays. For example, starting a photography competition for the best picture of a local holiday landmark and the like is a great way of attracting interest in your business and engaging with your audience.
2. Go Viral
Marketing communications around the holidays are so numerous that consumers are essentially surrounded by noise at all times. Making sure that you stand out in some way is important for getting drowned out by other competing businesses.
If there was ever a good time to go viral, it is around the holiday season. While there are no guaranteed ways of making a communication go viral, there are some things you can do to increase your odds. For example, creating an effective social media hashtag that relates to both the holiday season and your brand has great viral potential. It is a simple means of getting your message through to your audience; however, it needs to be carefully considered and timed. In some circumstances, humor will work and, in others, it is better to go with a more somber emotional appeal. With a little research and a bit of luck, you will be able to pull it off.
Kohl’s parody of Friday for Black Friday is a great example of a marketing campaign that got a lot of viral attention. Although almost any store with a Black Friday sale could have used the song, Kohl’s was the first song to utilize the songs viral nature. Kohl’s did a great job of identifying their target market and knowing that they would appreciate the parody. Please keep in mind, you do not need to be a big brand to create memorable and even viral communications if you focus on pleasing your customers and apply some ingenuity
Partner With A Charity
People think more about giving around the holidays than they do at any other time of year. This makes it beneficial from a public relations standpoint but also a humanitarian one to partner with a charity, especially around the holidays, to promote a cause. Customers will appreciate the social consciousness of your brand. Increasingly, these types of considerations are given a much larger weight than in the past.
These things can always backfire, however, so be sure to understand and actually identify with the charitable organization that you are partnering with. Failing to do your homework might leave you in worse shape than if you had done nothing.
4. Incorporate Some Humor
Virtually everyone loves to laugh. Humor is an essential part of marketing communications at all times of the year; however, during the holidays, your customers might be a bit busier and more stressed than usual. Targeting the right humorous message to your audience in the right way during the holidays is one of the best ways to make a lasting impression.
While it is important to be tasteful, good humor in marketing often pushes the boundaries and goes against the grain just enough to make an impact. Humor is always subjective, of course, but make sure that you know what you are doing if you experiment in this area
If you want to tap into this idea of relieving the stress of your customers even more, you also need to consider other ways to make the experience of doing business with your brand easier during the holidays.
5.Take A Serious Tone
Evoking emotions in your holiday communications is a great way to make them memorable. If humor is not your forte, then going for a more serious and evocative approach is a good idea.
The holidays are a time of nostalgia and reflection. Your customers will likely be contemplating previous holiday seasons and memories from those times. Tapping into these emotional channels is a good place to find inspiration for communications that will resonate with your audience.
If you take this route, your messages must be as authentic as possible. While you naturally need to ensure that your brand is highlighted, avoid being too self-promoting or contrived. Your audience will see right through this and it will damage your brand.
One brand that we are all familiar with that does this very well is Macy’s. Every holiday season Macy’s continues to share heart-warming videos that focus on subjects that are close to the hearts of the modern day family. In 2018, their commercial “The Wonder Of Giving” tells the story of an astronaut mother who is separated from her family on earth and it was a huge hit with audiences all over the world.
Share Memorable Communications This Holiday Season
With a little thought and some creativity, you will be able to implement one or more of these ideas to create some highly memorable holiday communications for your business. You can even explore some of the creative ideas that some well-known brands have brought to the table in previous years. Balancing your brand narrative with meaningful words while avoiding too much sentimentality is a tricky task, but the best marketers will be up for the challenge.
Get in touch with our team of marketing experts at Mikesell Digital today and let us help you ensure that your communications are both effective and memorable this holiday season.
