You Ask, I Answer: Planning Ahead for Holiday Campaigns?

In today's episode, Sasha asks, how far in advance does planning need to begin for seasonal or holiday shifts in a digital marketing strategy? So it depends. It depends on the holiday. Um every holiday, depending on how many people are participating in. It's going to have very different patterns.

Um some holidays, like you know, the winter holidays, for example, have very long run-up times to them. Other holidays, uh like say uh Mother's Day have a much shorter run-up uh in terms of when people are interested in that holiday, at least for the purposes of marketing. So there's two things you need to do. Um three really. Uh you need to know your processes, you need to have your holiday data, and then you need to build your plan.

Let's take a look at how you would do this first. You need to know your processes. How long does it take for you to get a campaign up and running? And this is a time where you have to be brutally honest with yourself. If it takes you nine weeks to get uh campaign, budget, creative designs, um, your marketing automation software, all that stuff set up, then you need to know that it's a nine-week thing and don't sugarcoat it.

If it really takes you nine weeks to launch something, that's the truth. But you've got to know that first. So do some uh investigation of your internal processes, do uh some uh post mortems looking back at what happened, and be blunt. Yep, it's gonna take us nine weeks, or it's gonna take us two weeks, or it's gonna take us however long it is it needs to take. This also means auditing the individual processes that make up a campaign.

So, how long does it take to get ads deployed? How long does it take to get a campaign trained? One of the things that um with many machine learning based advertising systems now, they need run-up time. They need time to calibrate. Uh it can be as little as two weeks in some cases, in some cases longer, depending on how uh popular your uh search volume is for if you're running uh searches or for social interactions on on social networks.

So you have to factor those processes in as well. So that's step one. You need to know that window, because that window is gonna be something you move around on your calendar to say, okay, if we know the go date is March fifteenth, and it takes you nine weeks, uh, then you know you know you need to be basically ready to go, uh, ready to start the campaign on January one, right? Because it's gonna take you that long. Step two is using data, using data and forecasting software.

Take your pick of any of the the you know, statistical packages out there. Uh I like to work in R, uh, and use uh some uh really, really uh sophisticated machine learning uh forecasting libraries to do forecasting, but whatever whatever it is that you have, um, use it. Let's go ahead and look at uh this example here. So this is uh the holiday searches. So this is gonna be holiday searches for the coming year.

So forecasting software, the one of the powerful things you can do with it is you can based on back data, and assuming the back data is good, uh, forecast it forward. Now, there are some things that the pandemic has thrown totally for a loop, right? But there are other things where the the search interest is going to remain relatively the same. Um, in the sense of, you know, people will still search for holiday gift guides, people will still search for Mother's Day gifts. Those things haven't changed.

Other things, certainly like, you know, uh Mother's Day dinner reservations, that's going to be totally different. Uh, so you're gonna have to accommodate that in your data. But for at least understanding the overall season, um, take the biggest, most obvious search for that season that's relevant to marketing and see what shakes out in the data. So let's look at this here. Uh, we have for Valentine's Day gifts, right?

In the coming year, no surprise, February 7th is when that sort of peaks, and I believe Valentine's Day is is shortly thereafter. But search interest really starts right around January 10th. What you're looking for in this data is called an inflection point, at the point where the search volume changes. So let's look at just gift guide here, right? You see, gift guide kind of goes throughout the year, you know, stable, and then right here, October 17th is when you see this big run up, right?

That's the inflection point. That is the point where you want your campaign in market. So again, if it takes you nine weeks to get a campaign up and running, then if you're just starting on October 17th, you're hosed, right? You've missed the window. You need to have your campaign in market on the 17th, which means that you're probably gonna have to get the planning started like August 8th.

Um, if it takes you that long to get uh a campaign in here. Let's look at another one, Mother's Day gifts, right? Mother's Day gifts, obviously, Mother's Day gifts peaks around Mother's Day, right? And then you have to account for things like shipping time and stuff. But the interest starts really right around, you know, the the second or third week of April here.

So you work backwards and figure out, okay, what do we need to do in order to get our campaigns in the air. So this is the strategy that I recommend for cyclical, predictable holidays. There are other things where it's not as predictable. So, for example, conferences, if you are in a in like a space like you know, marketing, uh the Salesforce Dreamforce conference is a super big deal. Dreamforce this year was kind of a flop because pandemic, right?

And it was a different date. So you have to look at the back data for previous years and make some guesses and assumptions as to when interest would peak once conferences return in person. Uh you know, whatever that that run-up is. You also want to use 2020's data for virtual events, right? So if you know you got an event in the first eight months of 2021, you want to look at 2020's data for virtual events from March to the end of the year, and not previous years, because previous years were in-person events.

So you have to do a lot of apples to apples matching. So that's where you need to look at the data and find those inflection points and work backwards from those inflection points to align your processes. And then, of course, the last part is getting that deployment, getting it out into the market. And that's a function of your operations cadence. You don't want to be too early.

You definitely don't want to be late, right? If you are if you are marketing and you're just getting your marketing campaign from Mother's Day started on on May 2nd, you're you're in a bad spot. So three things. Know your processes inside and out. Forecast from reliable data with good judgment, uh, particularly for the year that we've had, and then figure out how you're going to get into market now, what your deployment strategy is going to be.

That's that's what you need to do. Now, how far in advance does your planning need to begin for all this stuff? This kind of analysis is something you should be doing really now, right? Um, whenever now is, whenever you're watching this. I like to do stuff like this at the end of a uh calendar year so that you can have the plans built out a year in advance.

Um, my business partner uh and CEO uh Katie loves to do year-end planning like this, where you can just start putting dates on the calendar, like, hey, we know Mother's Day is gonna be a thing on you know, April 18th. So she'll put a uh you know pin in place. You know, our operations gains is roughly about two and a half, three weeks. So she'll put a pin for like last week of March. Hey, we need to start our Mother's Day planning.

Great. You plan just those timelines roughly in your calendar, and then you don't miss anything. You get you set up reminders in your task management system, and you're there and you're ready to start your campaign planning at those times. So that's the process for doing this. Um the sticking point for a lot of people will be that first stage of knowing your internal processes and being honest with yourself.

The forecasting is relatively straightforward. Uh, but getting people to admit, yeah, it takes us. We still we tell executives it takes four weeks to get campaign going, it's really 12. Getting people to admit that, really tough. So that's that's where your first and biggest, I think biggest challenge is.

If you got follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems?

Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.