4 Holiday Social Media Tips for Promoting Small Businesses

During the holidays, social media traffic increases 73%. Data also shows that small businesses tend to receive 18% more social messages during these months.  

Have you ever wondered why there’s a tremendous surge in traffic and conversations on social media platforms during the holiday season?

It’s because everything happens on social media, from product discovery to promotions to sales and even customer service.  

With over 3.6 billion social media users and a spike in time spent on social platforms, it’s crucial to develop an effective social media plan that will help your small business achieve business goals before the year ends.  

One of the easiest ways to enhance your brand’s organic reach during the holiday season is to create social content that resonates with your target audience, allows you to form connections with your customers, promotes holiday deals and discounts, and encourages them to engage.  

In this article, the experts at this digital marketing agency in Miami will share how to create an effective social media plan that will propel your business during the holidays.  

4 Tips to Building an Effective Social Media Plan for Your Small Business

1. Brainstorm Holiday Campaigns and Strategize Ad Spend

The first thing you need to do is determine your goals for the holiday season.  

Is it to be profitable? Get new customers? Or both?

It’s important to have an overarching objective because this will direct your social media campaigns.  

Once you’ve determined your goals, think about three different campaigns for the following:

• Pre-Black Friday
• Pre-Cyber Monday
• Black Friday

• Cyber Monday
• Christmas
• New Year

If you’re not sure what kind of social campaigns you should be running during the holiday season, take inspiration from your competitors and other online stores. Conduct competitive research, take note of trends, and see how you can apply them to your small business.  

Also, don’t be afraid to consult with the best digital marketing agency in Miami.  

Here are some ideas to help you get started:

• Create a series of Christmas video campaigns.
• Do a social media holiday contest.
• Offer holiday gift cards to those who subscribe to your emails.
• Run a Christmas countdown where you offer deals on different products every day.  
• Collaborate with influencers and do a Christmas giveaway.

Aside from making content to drive organic traffic to your site, it’s also important to invest in paid social ads to boost your promotional efforts during the holiday season.  

Organic reach on social media is no longer what it used to be. Plus, competition is very tight during this time, so to effectively reach your intended audience and get ahead of your competitors, you need to invest in social ads.

When planning your paid ads across social channels, you want to do the following to ensure successful campaigns:

• Set success metrics and indicators.
• Determine ad budget and profit targets based on various holiday deals.
• Decide on your target audience.

• Develop multiple visual creatives for different target segments.
• Create unique ads for different social platforms depending on how users engage with them, their expectations, and how ads are presented.
• Do A/B testing and monitor performance.

Another key to a successful paid social media campaign is to make sure you’re spending your ad money effectively throughout the month. Here are the five main factors that impact the efficiency of your ad spending:

• Determine what part of the month you’re starting your paid ads and how much time you have left to hit your overall ad budget for the month (e.g., $2000 divided by the remaining number of days in a month). You want to get any online assets ready before the holidays so you don't feel time pressured to consume your ad budget for the month and generate the best results.
• Understand which combination of social platforms is best to use to advertise your products and services during the holiday season. Ideally, you want to be on platforms where your ideal customers are.  
• Assess how your campaigns are performing so you can better allocate your spending to what works and scale for better results.
• The best time frame to achieve your goal and spend your ad budget.

2. Design Holiday Offers and Make Content

The next step is to focus on designing holiday offers and making content to get your assets ready for the incoming shopping season.  

Here are some best practices to follow:

• Keep your social account fresh and your audience engaged by posting educational, entertaining, and promotional content every other day.  
• Set a schedule so you can be consistent in posting. It’s best to use a social media scheduler to automatically upload content at the best times. This allows you to focus on other tasks such as growing your business, catering to customers, and preparing orders.
• Develop vertical creatives that support the various social platforms you'll be using to advertise your small business. Right now, short-form video contents are very popular so you should consider making more of them. Instagram also rewards users who use Reels by boosting its organic visibility. Use this to your advantage this holiday season.  
• Take advantage of Stories too. Use it to announce upcoming offers, teasers, and other ways to build anticipation.  

When it comes to designing your holiday offers, think about what your target audience finds valuable and use this to create irresistible holiday sales, offers, product bundles, and packages.  

Consider offering free shipping, giving away a gift for every purchase, and huge discounts on slow-moving items. It's best to personalize your offers depending on the segment you're targeting. For example, some customers are more attracted to offers that give out free gifts while others are more likely to buy from you if you offered free shipping.  

Boost your posts with holiday promotions to ensure they reach your intended audience and build awareness about the incoming sales and gimmicks you’re having this holiday season.  

It’s best to start boosting your posts starting in October. The reason why you want to start early is that ads cost much less during this time but spike starting Halloween and onwards.  

This also allows you to build brand awareness and retarget the audience later on, which increases your chances of converting them into customers when the big holiday shopping days come.  

3. Focus on Building Anticipation and Hype Around Your Holiday Sales

Right after Halloween and before Thanksgiving, focus on putting out the following content to build hype and excitement around your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales:

• Teasers – Keep your Black Friday deals secret until the day of the sale. However, it’s important to give your audience a hint of what they can expect to build excitement and anticipation. It’s also a great way to keep them engaged and build value in your offers.  
• Create urgency and FOMO – Use terms that create urgency and fear of missing out on your copy, such as hurry, today only, don’t miss out, once in a lifetime, offer expires, now or never limited stocks only, and many more.  

• Gift ideas and ideas – Before Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year, make sure you put out gift guides featuring your best-selling products. Give people a sneak peek of your offers and product bundles for the holidays. You should also consider offering a “give one, get one” deal to get more people to buy your products and consider giving them out as gifts.  
• Holiday-tiered- discounts – Tier discounts are a great way to get customers to buy more. Deals like “spend $100, save $30” motivates them to increase their spending to access that $30 discount. If you want to take this to a whole new level consider offering something like this:

Spend $100, save $20

Spend $150, save $50

Spend $200, save $80

• Early access – Give customers early access to your holiday deals in exchange for their emails. Doing this is a great way to drive traffic to your site and grow your email list.  

4. Only Release Your Black Friday Offer Once the Clock Hits Midnight

Once the clock hits midnight, it’s time to launch your Black Friday promotions on social media to drive more people to your site. As your trusted digital marketing agency in Miami, we suggest you repeat the same strategy for the rest of the holidays.  

Use social media stories to continue building hype around the sale. Let people know how many people are buying certain products, and what your best sellers are, share user-generated content, and urge people to buy before you run out of stock or they miss the deal.  

Remarket these posts to the audiences who have previously engaged with your posts in the past across all placements, such as feeds and stories. People who are already familiar with your brand will most likely buy from you. Just make sure you’re offering the right deal with a clear and concise ad copy.  

During this time, you want the messaging on your promotional content and ads to be clear and straight to the point. Let them know what you’re selling and what your holiday offer is.  

Build new creatives and launch new ads for different holidays. You want your creatives to be relevant, timely, and speak to the needs and wants of your target customers.  

After a holiday, once an offering is no longer relevant, make sure to turn off these ads.  

For example, after the duration of your Black Friday sale, make sure you turn off your social ads for it.  

For the days leading into Christmas, focus your offerings on value propositions that convert and drive urgencies, such as free gift wrap, free shipping, last day for shipping cutoffs, and many more.  

After Christmas, focus on post-holiday social media campaigns to get rid of excess inventory you’ve accumulated throughout the holiday season. It’s also the perfect opportunity to tease customers about new January releases.  

Additional Tips to Further Boost your Social Media Plan

• Use previous data. Instead of starting at zero and randomly figuring out what you should do, analyze your social media data or Google analytics from last year to identify which campaign and social media platform generated the most leads, traffic, and sales. Identify the strategy that worked and double down on it.
• Do competitive social media research on your competitors to know what they do during the holiday season. Determine what type of content they put out and which of them get the most engagement and results.  
• Generate holiday-oriented content from your customers and feature them on your account. This makes your customers feel seen and it also serves as social proof that motivates others to give your products a try too.  

Looking for The Best Digital Marketing Agency in Miami to Help Your Small Business Grow During the Holiday Period and Beyond?

Digital Resource is a digital marketing agency in Miami that specializes in helping small business gain traction online through SEO, SEM, social media, and paid advertising efforts.  

If you want to generate more sales this holiday and capture new customers, we can help! Contact us today to get started!

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