As an artist or maker, your relationship with the Christmas season is probably….layered?
On the one hand, it’s a huge opportunity for your business to not only make a lot of sales, but also to substantially grow your audience so that the next year is even better.
On the other hand, that lopsided seasonality can make you behave in ways that aren’t exactly likely to add up to a healthy and happy Christmas for you.
From FOMO to burnout, to resenting your customers, to giving yourself a hard time because of everything you didn’t do, to worrying about January cashflow.
Of course you want to make the most of the opportunity in front of you, but you may also secretly be hoping for a few more weeks of calm before it all begins.
But the best time to start your holiday marketing is early. As early as you can and definitely by the beginning of September.
It extends your holiday season, takes some of the pressure off and allows you to build momentum with your customers. And you can start it without needing to be overtly Christmassy when everyone else has barely got the sand off their shoes.
And as many of us don’t do a great job at marketing in an intentional and organised way, this can be very low hanging fruit for you to easily boost your holiday performance.
Let’s dive in.
The Benefits of Starting Your Holiday Marketing Early
One of the most common conversations I have with artists and makers in business is about why their marketing is not working.
And when we look into the details, many times it is simply because they have not been posting often enough for long enough to see the benefits.
Because every time you post or email, a large proportion of your people do not see it. And of those that do, a large proportion are distracted or in the middle of something else, and they don’t really pay attention to you.
And of those who pay attention, many aren’t ready or able to buy something from you at that moment.
So each time you put some marketing content out into the world, the potential for immediate sales is limited to a far smaller number of people than your entire audience.
But if you are marketing to your audience more frequently, you just have more opportunities for people to see at least some of your content. Plus there is a buildup of familiarity and attention from those people who might see your content but aren’t always paying attention.
That all means that a piece of content you put out after putting out ten previous pieces of content is likely to have a bigger impact on your sales than one you put out after a few weeks of procrastinating.
Put another way, there is a snowball effect. Your marketing gains momentum over time and becomes more effective as a result.
This is all even more important at Christmas.
The holiday season is a huge opportunity for you to maximise your sales and generate profit for your business that can sustain you over the quieter months that follow.
But it’s also a time when it’s harder to get attention. There’s a lot more noise on social media and in inboxes, plus people have a lot more stuff going on in their personal lives. So it’s noisy and busy and hard to get seen.
One of the best ways to combat this is to do the groundwork early. It’s far easier to appeal to a distracted, busy person when they know who they are and what you are selling (because they’ve already seen it a bunch of times). Being a familiar presence when they’re ready to buy gives you an enormous advantage.
Plus, by starting early, you just get more opportunities. There’s more time for your content to repeat and repurpose messages without sounding repetitive. And you can encourage followers to drop hints with their loved ones, with plenty of time left to order.
The Holiday Shopping Period is Longer Than Ever
People approach Christmas shopping in wildly different ways.
There are people who buy gifts in the previous year’s holiday sales. People who start as soon as their summer holiday is over. People who wait until they hear Mariah Carey for the first time. People who love to make gifts and need to start early. And people who wait until the last possible second.
If you only start to ramp up your Christmas marketing in November, you could be missing out on sales earlier in the season. Sales that could boost your cash reserves so that you’ve got more options when it comes to advertising or ordering more supplies.
You can start subtly earlier on in the season so you don’t have to mention Christmas eleventy billion times before December. Shifting the focus of your campaigns to your most giftable product can be enough in these early weeks of the season.
And don’t forget the last minute shoppers too. If you are able to offer digital products or expedited shipping options you could also benefit from the trend for waiting for the last moment.
Getting started on your marketing campaigns earlier gives you the opportunity to target different types of shopper at different stages in their buying journey.
Key Elements of Your Holiday Marketing Strategy
Identify Your Most Giftable Products
Start by figuring out which of your products are the most giftable? Which could you bundle together? Which could you package differently so they feel a little more special to give?
These are going to be the main focus of your marketing campaigns and promotions so ensure that you’ve got great product descriptions and photos for them.
Create Your Content Calendar
Plan out your blog posts, social media updates, email campaigns, promotions/sales, and promotion for your in-person events on a calendar so that you can see what needs to be created and also what you can reuse and recycle across channels.
Working backwards from your Christmas cut off dates can be a good way to ensure that don’t start with a lot of momentum and then fizzle out when you start getting busy.
Focus first on having a few points of contact each week and then fill out everything else. That way, if you get really busy your activity won’t drop to zero.
Email Marketing
Email is the gold standard for conversions. It’s also not controlled by an algorithm and so more of the people you send to will actually see your message in their inbox.
As a result, when you send regular emails, you stay in that subscriber’s mind and you keep some of that recognition, even if they’re not opening all of your emails.
A series of targeted email campaigns that focus on generating interest in your most giftable products and building anticipation ahead of your promotions is one of the most effective marketing strategies for the Christmas season.
Social Media
Social media can be a great way to fill in some of the details of your products, showcase reviews and testimonials, provide a closer view of some of your work, and share some behind the scenes and general Holiday content.
Don’t worry too much about overlap with your emails. Think of your email as a way to make an argument about why someone should buy a specific product, and your social media as a way to repeat short snippets of that argument to remind people.
For example, if you have an email focusing on one of your products and talking about the features and benefits and sharing customer reviews, you could chop that up and provide several pieces of social media content: demonstrating a feature in a quick video, creating a graphic for a review, creating a graphic with the different options etc.
Remember, nobody except you sees 100% of your posts so you need to post a lot more than you think. Don’t overcomplicate it. You just need to stay top of mind and keep showing up.
And don’t forget about social media advertising. This can be a really affordable way to find more customers – sometimes more affordable than in person events.
Don’t forget that you will need to spend some money to train the algorithm to understand who your best customers are so this isn’t something to just switch on for a day or two when you’ve got a promotion coming up. You need to set a budget and spend it over time to ensure that Facebook and Instagram are able to find and send you the type of traffic you need to make more sales.
Collaborations, Partnerships and PR
Partnering with other artists, brands or influencers can help to boost your reach and expand your audience to a whole group of new people.
Likewise, getting your work featured in a magazine, online feature or gift guide during the festive season can also be a really big deal.
This is an area where an early start is really important. Print media will be working on their festive issues around 6 months before publication so reaching out in early summertime will be most effective. And the bigger the brand or influencer, the more likely they are to have a very long lead time on their content strategy.
Keep your eyes open for digital and gift guide opportunities later in the season. Journalists will often post these on social media (especially X) so try to find their names and follow them or add them to a saved list you can check regularly.
But if you’ve already missed the ideal timeframe for this, don’t forget that you’ve already got partnerships with all of the shops and galleries that sell your work. Work with them to build a deeper relationship and raise both your profiles over the season by offering them exclusive products or colourways, highlighting their events and promotions and letting your followers know what they have in stock.
Early Bird Offers and Promotions
Promotions around Black Friday are common but it can be smart to have another promotion earlier in the season for the early shoppers.
Remember that promotions are for providing an incentive for people to make a purchase today, rather than waiting for later. They’re not for bringing your prices down to an affordable level for more customers.
So a time limit is a must, and it should be relatively short. A weekend or a couple of days midweek is a good option.
Early buyers may be concerned that if they purchase today at full price they will feel bad if you have a Black Friday promotion later so an early promo can help to make them feel like they’re not going to be missing out.
And if you’re not going to be taking part in Black Friday it can be a good idea to mention this on your website banner or in your product descriptions. That way buyers know that they don’t need to wait for a better deal later.
Practical Tips for Implementing Your Strategy
It’s definitely not easy to fit all of this extra work in ahead of the festive season. Most of us have a full schedule during the summer with events and family time, so getting your marketing preparation done can be challenging.
But don’t forget that you don’t need to do everything to have really great results. In fact anything at all you can do now that makes things easier in the busy season, will help you to improve your results.
So don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by the options. Just pick the ones that either feel most achievable or most beneficial and do your best.
Here are some tips on how to fit in the work.
Set Realistic Goals and Deadlines
Deadlines can help us to prioritise this work over some of the other things we could be doing today.
You’re less likely to get distracted fiddling with colours on your website if you know that you wanted to get your Christmas email marketing mapped out by the end of this week.
But keep your goals and deadlines somewhat realistic. It’s easier said than done if you haven’t previously worked in this way but a good option could be to dedicate a set amount of time each week to this work and then try to decide what you’ll get finished in that time.
As you do this more often, you’ll get better at predicting how long things will take and you’ll also be doing something useful towards Christmas prep every week.
Break projects down into smaller tasks
If you have “Write Christmas emails” on your to do list, I would bet that you’re definitely going to procrastinate on that. It’s too big and too vague and there’s too much thinking about where to start.
So take some time to break it into the actual tasks to get done.
For example, we might decide that the first two steps of this project should be:
- Enter your business and product information into ChatGPT and ask it to suggest topics for a six week email sequence designed to maximise awareness and holiday sales
- Decide on a publication date for each email
And you can see straight away how easy it would be to get started with each of these, just get them done and move on, rather than still avoiding the project because you don’t know where to start.
Use Tools and Resources for Efficiency
Take advantage of any available tools to help you get your work done more quickly, from AI to social media schedulers to email marketing services.
And don’t forget about Burnout Free Christmas for Makers, my system for streamlining your workload over Christmas by eliminating the three biggest sources of wasted time.
Balance Marketing with Making
As someone who really likes to focus on one thing at a time and gets overwhelmed when there are multiple projects happening simultaneously, I can understand the impulse to zone in on one thing and forget all about your other preparations.
But unfortunately the holiday period makes it difficult to work that way and you need to maintain a balance between promoting your products and actually making them. Having a weekly schedule with time dedicated to each can be helpful.
By starting your preparations early you’re setting yourself up for increased visibility and brand recognition, better time management and, of course, better sales.
The festive season is an endurance event and when it gets to November and December, you may be very grateful that you either have content ready to go, or at the very least some direction on what to write or film.
If you want more help to organise your workload, check out Burnout Free Christmas. It’s a complete organisational system for maker businesses to streamline their work and make more money over the festive period. You can find out more here.
