A Holiday Marketing Strategy for Black Friday and Beyond

When it comes to building a marketing strategy for a small business during the holiday season, engagement is the name of the game. Engagement marketing is all about three things: reach, frequency, and recency. Let’s break that down, and explain how a low-investment and short-term marketing strategy can pay off around the holidays.

An Engagement Marketing Strategy for the Holiday Season

An article from Marketo puts this concept well:

Engagement marketing is the use of strategic, resourceful content to engage people and create meaningful interactions overtime. 

In other words, you can use engagement marketing to get into potential customers’ heads more easily. When it comes to the holiday season, this can often involve getting an understanding of what a customer needs and how they’ll use and understand your product.

Let’s put this in terms of holiday marketing. Let’s say you’re selling home-made candy canes. A candy cane isn’t going to need as much purchase involvement, meaning it requires less thought before purchasing the product. What this candy cane business needs is a marketing strategy that highlights what sets it apart from other candy canes while also staying in the minds of the customer. This is where engagement marketing comes into play.

Three Steps of Engagement Marketing: Reach, Frequency, and Recency

If we continue with the candy cane example, now we need to figure out how to get the candy cane from the shelf to the shopping cart. This gets into three parts of a marketing strategy that you can take advantage of during the holiday season: reach, frequency, and recency.

Reach and frequency work together to keep your product in the audience’s mind. In the case of this candy cane, maybe it means making a marketing campaign on social media about the natural ingredients in your holiday treat. It also might involve how it is displayed in a store or on an ecommerce site, whether it is at the front of the store or hidden in the back, whether it rests with the candy section or the all-natural section. This is critical when it comes to getting your product in your audience’s hands.

Recency is about getting this product in your audience’s head and keeping it there. If you market your product online, you’ll need to make sure that people remember you when you get to the store. This might involve sending reminders based on location, or (if we return to the candy cane) putting your product in the faces of your audience right when they’ll check out. In other words, how often have you forgot you needed gum right up until you get to the counter at the drug store.

Engagement Marketing Strategy at the Holidays, in Summary

When it comes to building a marketing strategy based on engagement around the holidays, remember how we presented our candy cane:

1.  Reach – how does your audience find the product
2. Frequency – how often is your audience reminded your product exists
3. Recency – when your product is noticed relative to when it can be purchased.