How to Cut Through Social Media Noise at Christmas
Social media is a wild place to be at the best of times, but it is especially tough out there during the festive season. With the majority of businesses (large and small) doubling or even tripling their ad spend around this time of year, it can be hard to know where to begin with cutting through the clutter of Christmas content in order for your brand to be seen. And that’s without even considering the insanity of the past 12 months...
Undoubtedly, this year's Christmas will be very different to any Christmas we have ever experienced before, and this cannot be ignored in our marketing efforts. We need to keep our audience and their current situation front-of-mind at all times - whether this means toning down on images of large crowds gathering for a Christmas light switch-on, or taking the pressure off when it comes to giving “the best gifts”.
Thankfully, the social media whizzes here at Goho know just the trick! Well… tricks, actually! Keep reading for our 8 top tips for planning your organic and paid social media activity for the next 6 weeks.
PLAN AHEAD
It might sound like an obvious one, but perhaps the most important thing you can do to prepare yourself and your business ahead of this insanely busy period is to plan ahead. Plan your organic content, plan your ad spend and your ad campaigns, plan your blogs, website content, google ads campaigns, sales, plan anything and everything in your marketing calendar to ensure you’re ready for whatever comes your way.
And before you say it, it’s not too late! Planning your December content in these last couple of weeks of November is still a great way to get ahead of yourself before Christmas gets ahead of you!
STAND OUT
This time of year, scrolling through your social media feed is like walking into Aladdin’s cave. It’s all glitter and sparkles and sales, so it takes even more than usual to stand out. But standing out doesn’t have to mean using bright colours or more sparkly creative (it was a simile guys, we’re not magpies). There are so many more creative ways to stand out. It could be about being simple, getting straight to the point and not dressing it up. It could be trying ad formats, new creative, or new copy. Find out what “standing out” means for your brand and roll with it.
DO MORE WITH LESS
You don’t need a huge budget to make the most of the busy Christmas sales period. Focusing on your key audience in both your paid and organic social media activity can help you to get the very best out of your efforts.
If you’re setting up social media ads, customise your audience as closely as possible and adjust your budget and bid strategy to ensure your ads are as effective as possible. If you’re creating organic content, don’t clutter it up with multiple messages or image types, keep it simple and let each post push its own unique message.
LEARN FROM YOUR MISTAKES (AND YOUR SUCCESSES!)
Use learnings from earlier in the year to learn what audiences, creative and copy works best for you - particularly in your ads. If you had a particularly successful campaign, work out why and ensure that success factor is a key part of your Christmas activity. If you had a particularly unsuccessful campaign, how can you make sure these results don’t repeat themselves?
This also goes for next year - set up as many A/B tests as possible when creating new social media ads to monitor what works best. Test your copy, your imagery, your tone of voice, your audience, and keep track of what works best. It will all come in handy when you’re looking for those key learnings come Christmas-time.
FOCUS ON LOW-HANGING FRUIT
Christmas isn’t a time to be focusing on the top end of your marketing funnel. With a limited window of opportunity available to make your sales, your marketing efforts should focus on the ‘low-hanging fruit’. This means converting those currently ‘considering’ your brand into paying customers, and your paying customers into brand advocates.
The best way to do this? Focus your advertisements on retargeting - use the audience targeting capabilities in Google Ads or your social media platforms to target people who already know about your brand with unique content, messaging, and perhaps even pricing that is tailored to them.
COMBINE ORGANIC AND PAID
Whether you’re a seasoned pro with social media advertising or strictly organic-only, there is no denying that the combination of paid and organic social media is the best way to make the most of your presence on the platforms.
Use the results of your organic content to learn what resonates best with which audience, and then use those learnings in your paid advertisements.
PERFORMANCE OVER AWARENESS
You might have focused the entirety of your 2020 marketing activity on increasing brand awareness and gaining more reach for your business, but the festive period is all about conversions.
This is the one time of year that customers nationwide - perhaps even worldwide - are in ‘purchase mode’ pretty much 24/7. Making the most of this means focusing your calls to action on creating conversions.
DON’T RUSH
You know how they say “never send an email when you’re angry?” well, even at this time of year, marketing decisions should be the same.
Whether it’s your social media or a wide marketing initiative, don’t let important business decisions be informed by knee-jerk reactions, and do not change your strategy unless you have had a chance to really think about it first.
