We don’t need to tell you how important the holidays are for B2C companies.

Chances are you’re not only aware of how much money consumers spend during the holidays, you’re also one of those consumers.

Last year, Shopify saw $1.5 billion in sales within the long weekend of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday. They had almost 11,000 orders per minute (!). On average, $375M left consumers’ pockets every day of Thanksgiving weekend.

If you’re like us at DigitalMarketer, you see one thing. Opportunity.

The opportunity to have your product be the answer to your consumer’s gift-buying problems is right around the corner. There’s something you have (your product) that your customer wants. It’s time to start showing them how your product can help or entertain them is today.

You don’t want to be scrambling at the end of October with fingers crossed that your thrown-together holiday marketing strategy is going to work. Instead, you want to be confident that you’re about to make some serious conversions.

How do you ensure that you’re the latter?

You schedule your holiday marketing meeting at the beginning of October. Sit down with your team and figure out what deals your consumers want from you, how you’re going to present them, and how you’re going to make sure your website and checkout can handle the inbound traffic.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your holiday marketing funnel isn’t going to be either. While the pumpkin spice is still fresh in the air, you need to get your holiday marketing strategy down.

If you’re a B2C business owner and you’re ready to crush the holiday sales, here are 4 tips to get you started:

Figure Out What Holiday(s) Your Audience Cares the Most About

This is the first tip for a reason—it needs to be done first. For different products, the customer may care more about one holiday than another. For example, an Etsy store selling Halloween costumes knows that their customer cares about Halloween (obviously).

They can tune their ads to fit their customer’s wants, for example: “Guaranteed Delivery by October 31st!”

This is easy to figure out for products that are specific to holidays (like Christmas decorations) but what if your product works well as a Cyber Monday deal and as a Christmas gift?

Create 2 different ad copies for it. Leading up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, you’ll showcase the ad copy that talks about your product as something the person buying it wants to own.

The copy leading up to December holidays will be different. This copy will talk about your product as a gift. You can use happy customer testimonials from customers who received the item as a gift or people who gifted it and were thrilled with the person’s reaction.

This is what DIY Gift Kits did for their product of a DIY hot sauce kit (thanks to the help of Molly Pittman!).

Here’s the ad they are showing to promote their product as something the buyer wants to own:

And here’s the ad they are showing to promote their DIY hot sauce kit as a gift:

So once you have your product’s holiday targeting picked out, you can move on to building out your ads’ driving factors.

Use Urgency to Show Customers This is a Short-Term Deal

Like every holiday marketing ad, the time is ticking. Your customers are going to be aware of this when they see that your copy mentions the holidays and is giving a discount/promotion because of it—but you still want to remind them.

You can remind them in your email funnel or in the ad copy itself. Give your customers a definitive date for the end of the sale (ex. December 17th) to create a sense of urgency.

Then, double that urgency with a hard-to-beat offer.

This can be something along the lines of buying a knife set and getting a free wooden cutting board, but only if you buy before 12/4. If you buy after the knife set is still at a discount, but the cutting board isn’t included.

This creates double the urgency (as long as you’re offering an upsell of a product your customers want).

(NOTE: Before you get started, you need to know who your ideal customer is, where they are, and what they will buy. Download our FREE proven Customer Avatar Worksheet now and get clear on who you’re selling to.)

Compare Your Holiday Ads with What’s Working Already

Odds are you already have the basis for a killer holiday ad. And it’s probably an ad already running. So take a look at the ads performing well for you right now and audit how you could transform the copy and CTA to be holiday-friendly.

This should be done before your scheduled holiday marketing strategy meeting. You don’t want to waste time finding what ads are performing best once your team is together. Have somebody collect the data ahead of time, so your team is ready with ideas when you all sit down together.

For example, let’s say the below Facebook ad is doing well at getting people to buy a ticket to Wim Hof’s World Tour event (we don’t know for sure because we haven’t dared asked his team, in case they force us to get into an ice bath).

Before their holiday meeting, Wim Hof’s team would start to brainstorm how they could change this ad to make it more festive. For example, they could give a 10% Bravery Discount to people who sign up for the event during November and December. The Bravery discount could be linked to copy that talks about how brave you have to be to get into an outdoor ice bath in the middle of winter (and deserving of a discounted ticket).

Rothy’s can use the same strategy. Like you’ll see below, they already have their ads talking about fall wardrobes. When the holidays start to approach, they can swap out fall wardrobe for “holiday wardrobe” in their copy.

Remember, holidays don’t mean you need entirely new content. If you already know what ads work, use their strengths and figure out how you can make small changes that feed into the holidays.

Use Holiday Specific Content to Drive Website Visitors to Your Landing Page

If your funnel involves pre-sell articles, like BOOM! By Cindy Joseph uses to acquire new customers, turn your presell article into a holiday-themed article. For example, BOOM! makeup line could use a pre-sell article of 5 Holiday Makeup Tips for Older Woman. This isn’t far off from their original pre-sell article, 5 Makeup Tips for Older Woman.

Moment could do the same. Below is their CTA of a “OnePlus 7T First Look and Camera Review”. Assuming this content was converting well for them, the Moment team could make a new review titled, OnePlus 7T Camera Review in Overexposed Winter Settings. This would attract photographers taking photos in places where it snows and are looking to see if this camera would fit their winter photography needs.

You see what we’re doing here?

We’re looking for ways we can turn what is already working into a holiday marketing strategy.

(RELATED: The 4 Critical Steps to Landing Page Optimization)

In 2018, there were $1 trillion of retail sales during the upcoming holidays. The top B2C companies started crafting their holiday strategy months ago, but you’re not too far behind.

If you’re a B2C company, the time to craft your perfect holiday offer is now, so you’re ready for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the December Holidays.

(NOTE: Before you get started, you need to know who your ideal customer is, where they are, and what they will buy. Download our FREE proven Customer Avatar Worksheet now and get clear on who you’re selling to.)