It’s never too early to start thinking about the next holiday season—especially if you want your business to be ready when Q4 rolls around! If you’ve been in business for a while, then chances are that your marketing plan will look a little different this year than it did last year. Maybe you’re expanding into new markets, or maybe there was something that didn’t go as planned last year. Whatever the case may be, planning ahead can help ensure your business is ready to go when Q4 rolls around! In this post we’ll cover some things you can add to your marketing plan now to prepare for the next holiday season so that come Christmas 2022 everything runs smoothly when it matters most.

Whether you’re a retailer, service provider or other type of business, it is never too early to start thinking ahead to the next holiday season. Planning ahead can help ensure your business is ready to go when Q4 rolls around!

Reasons to Start your Holiday Marketing Plan Early

• It gives you time to prepare marketing campaigns that will be effective during the most critical time of year
• You can get products in order and restock inventory before customers start demanding more product than usual
• You can develop strategies for increasing foot traffic at stores, restaurants and other businesses in your area

Consider the ways your business has changed in the past year.

You may want to review the following questions:

• What is your business’ biggest challenge?
• How can you improve your product or service?
• How can you improve your marketing strategy?
• What products or services performed the best?
• Which ones did not perform as well as you expected?

How to Manage the Holiday Productivity Lull

If you are in an industry that typically slows down during the holiday season, you can use it for planning.

• Plan for the slow-down. If there is a slowdown in your business, take advantage of it. Use that time to catch up on backlogged work and plan for Q4 and early 2023. You may even want to review your marketing strategy and make any necessary changes before the holidays rush back into your life again.
• List out key marketing priorities and organise them in terms of importance and urgency. Focus first on those that are both most important and most urgent.

While it’s important to keep your priorities in line, it’s also important to understand that urgency and importance are two different things. The importance of marketing is how well it will impact your business. Urgency is how soon you need to get the marketing done.

For example, if one customer has just signed up for your service and paid for three months in advance but has realised they won’t be able to use the service in their new office building due to lack of internet access, then this would be both an urgent issue as well as having high importance since you want to retain this customer and make sure they don’t cancel their subscription early on because of the inconvenience. On the other hand if one of your clients needs some minor edits made before approving a video ad campaign for next month’s event then this may not be quite so urgent but still has high importance (the client might cancel otherwise).

When thinking about how much time should go into each marketing activity list out key priorities first and organise them by their relative urgency versus importance.

Holiday Marketing Plan to Boost Your Sales

1. Update Your Online Listings

Before the holiday season, make sure you update all online listings s (e.g., Google My Business) so they’re accurate and up-to-date. You want to make sure you are easily found online, especially when customers are searching for your products or services during peak times.

Listings are also a great way to attract new customers. They allow people to find you more easily, no matter what device they’re using: desktop computer, mobile phone, tablet or smartwatch. In addition to being displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs), they can be linked directly from other sites via “citation,” which means that someone else has written about you or otherwise mentioned your business name in an article; this helps build awareness of your brand across different platforms and devices!

2. Quick Tips for the Holidays:

Here are a few other quick tips to help make your holiday planning a breeze:

• Make a list of customers who have purchased from you during prior holiday seasons. These customers have already demonstrated an interest in what you have to sell, so encourage them to return, even if they don’t do so right away!
• You can use email marketing, social media and other tools to reach out to these customers.
• Create a marketing budget for the upcoming holiday season now and plan how you will spend that money throughout Q4 and into early 2023. Remember to set aside some money for marketing activities beyond just promotional materials.
• Assign specific dollar amounts, percentages or both to each task in your marketing calendar (see below) so you can track your progress on an ongoing basis. For example, if you have $50,000 total available for promotion during 2019, then assign $5,000 each month between August through December as part of your annual budgeting process – or whatever works best within your company’s financial framework.

3. Prepare a Content Calendar

A content calendar is an essential marketing tool, especially when it comes to holiday marketing. A good content calendar will map out all of your social media posts, blogs and other pieces of content that you’re going to use in your campaigns throughout Q4 2022 and into early 2023.

You can create a simple spreadsheet or use a free online tool like Asana or Trello to keep track of who is doing what and when. Make sure you have at least two people in charge of managing the schedule so that no one forgets about creating relevant posts for each day or week leading up to the holidays.

A few things to consider as you set up your calendar:

• Try to plan out all of your content in advance so that you don’t have to do it right before the holidays. This will help you avoid getting stressed out and missing important deadlines.
• Make sure that everyone has access to the calendar so that they can see what’s coming up next, how long certain pieces of content take to create and when they need to be ready by.

There are many things to consider when planning for the holidays. It’s never too early to start thinking ahead and planning for next year, so don’t let this opportunity pass you by! Take some time now to think about what worked well last year and what didn’t work as well. Think about how your business has changed over time and how those changes might affect your marketing strategy going forward.