It’s time to think about that time of year, you know what I mean: The sun is out, the flowers are in bloom, you’re making foreign holiday plans and fighting over spots in the park… That’s right! It’s time to start planning for Christmas. If there’s anything more certain than Christmas starting earlier every year, its people complaining about Christmas starting earlier every year. But this year you need to forget about your misgivings and start making innovative plans, because it could mean the difference between a boom and a bust.

Here a few points to think about when you start planning your Christmas campaign early:

Think like a tech start-up

There’s something about Christmas campaigns that seem to sap creativity from even normally dynamic brands. The innovative thinking that makes them so successful for the rest of the year disappears, and tired old notions about how Christmas should be done creep in. Maybe they’re exhausted from choosing presents?

To invigorate your campaign, think less like a big unwieldy organisation set in its ways and more like a nimble tech start-up. Instead of one cumbersome campaign, try lots of smaller and shorter campaigns with offers that encourage competition for limited stock and have time limits. You’ll get people excited during the run of each campaign, and the thrill of competition will keep them coming back from the next one.

Discount creatively

What would Christmas be without the post-festive bargain hunting? We call them the January sales still, but the offers often start before the pudding is even out of the oven. Discounts have been part of a company’s Christmas arsenal for decades, but they’re often generic, boring percentage cuts. Hardly gets the blood pumping, does it? Not only that, but our research shows that it doesn’t work.

Cuts of 20, 30, 40% just blend into the hullabaloo of similar discounts that everyone else is making, especially on Social Media. In fact, we found that you have to cut by as much as 80% to get people to take notice, which is crippling to profit margins at a time when companies will be hoping for bumper profits.

Instead of a half-price sale, try ‘gamifying’ your campaign. Encourage your social media followers to share deals among their friends in exchange for incrementally lower prices as more people come on board. Your customers will have more fun, they’ll feel like they’ve got a deal and you won’t have to kiss goodbye to your profits to get them interested.

Listen to your customers

This will sound like a no-brainer (especially if you got socks again last year), but people like gifts more when it’s something they actually want to receive. People personalise presents that they buy others based on their interests. So why when most retailers discount are they practising ‘top down’ deals, telling their customers what is discounted and encouraging them to buy it?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to listen to your customers before you decide what’s on sale? Reach out to them via social media, find out what they would like to be discounted, and make it happen. You can introduce a gamification element here too: Tell them they can have that teddy bear at a bigger discount if they can get 20 friends to join you, and if they can get 30 friends it will cost them even less!

It might seem early, but the festive season will creep up on you sooner than you think, and it’s never too early to have interesting, dynamic plans in place. Plus, the more time you spend listening to your customers and planning around them, the more information you’ll have to make that campaign as strong as it can be when The Season finally rolls round.

 

By Gideon Lask, founder and CEO of BuyaPowa. 

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