7 Ways to Plan Your Christmas Content

In 2018, according to the BBC, 1 in 5 Brits had started and completed their Christmas shopping by November, with others pushing it right into the last weeks of December. With this in mind, we should be looking to plan and publish Christmas content at the right time, starting as early as October in some cases. 

However, it’s not always that detrimental in terms of timing. Often, those who have blogs will wait until the festive season is in full swing to publish their Christmas content; which makes sense because that’s the time when people are most likely to be making festive searches.  Basically, it’s not too late if you’re looking to plan some Christmas content, especially if you’re looking to keep it light. So here are a few tips as to how you can do that successfully and publish on time:

1. Look back at last year’s Christmas content performance

You don’t necessarily need to run a campaign to know how well your Christmas content is performing. You can use things like Google Analytics and even the blog platform itself to see how well previous Christmas articles and other forms of content have done. If infographics performed better last year than long form articles, then maybe push those more this year as opposed to prose. 

If something flopped, like a downloadable Christmas content calendar, then don’t bother wasting time on it again this year. Instead, push the old content on social media platforms or remind your readers that there’s a calendar available from last year if they need one. When analysing previous festive content pieces, then pay particular attention to the following:

• Page views
• Engagement rates
• Number of impressions
• Bounce rates
• Time spent on the page
• Heat maps (to see where they’re going next on your site)

You’ll be able to use heat maps to decide what to write about. For example, let’s say that you own a perfume store and your website pages are separated out and labelled as ‘Perfume for Him’ and ‘Perfume for Her’ and you find that more people are clicking on ‘Perfume for Her’ instead of ‘Perfume for Him’, then write a blog post that’s aimed around ‘Perfume for Her’. 

This is because ‘Perfume for Her’ is clearly more popular and more desirable than ‘Perfume for Him’. To make it Christmassy, you could make it into a gift guide: “Christmas Gift Guide: 10 Perfumes for Her  for Every Budget”. If you want to, you could do another one for ‘Perfumes for Him’, but make the most popular page the priority.

2. Review & understand your target audience

Before creating your Christmas content, make sure that you’re still targeting the right audience. Typically, target audience, demographics and geographic won’t change overnight, but it’s paramount that you keep up to date with who it is that’s reading your content and who it is that might be searching for the content you’re publishing.

For example, you could own a shop that sells mobility scooters, so your Christmas marketing would have to be different from a business who owns a bar in the city centre. This is because, statistically, elderly people are more likely to be on the lookout for a mobility scooter, with 47% of those between aged 65 or above using a mobility scooter and 9.2% of those under the age of 45 using one also, according to a market study published on Gov.uk. 

Although, how many of those people would be most likely to find your mobility scooter Christmas content online? According to Gov.uk, 54% of the British population who are aged 75 and over have access to the internet as of 2020 – a figure that almost doubled since 2013.  However, 99% of all adults between the ages of 16-44 use the internet regularly. This means that a bar in the city centre would benefit most from online marketing, especially because those between the ages of 25 and 54 make up 76.8% of clientele who visit bars in the UK, according to a study done by the Bar Standards Board. 

This is the sort of research you need to be doing as a business owner who writes and/or manages their own content. If, however, you have paid for a digital marketing agency to write your Christmas content for you, then they should be carrying out this sort of research to ensure they’re hitting a target market that’s as relevant and as accurate as possible. This is the kind of meticulous work we do here at Kumo Digital.

3. Plan your Christmas message

Once you’ve established your target audience and have deduced which types of content did well in previous years, it’s now time for you to establish a message for this Christmas. In order to do this as successfully as possible, you should look into, and consider, at least one of the following things:

• What your audience wants
• What your audience needs
• The mission you’ve set out to accomplish
• Your brand and company values
• How you stand out from your competitors
• How value is delivered to your customers
• What you want customers to do as a result of reading or viewing your content

4. Choose a theme

Once you have decided on a message to put across to your target audience, then you should consider your Christmas this year. This is important because your theme acts as the creative vehicle that’ll get your message out to as many relevant people as possible.  If the theme is wrong, people might not trust your content and, therefore, the services or goods you’re offering. Make it something that’ll work well and can be easily and relevantly shared across multiple platforms and channels. Don’t make it too complicated because your message could get lost in and amongst your theme.

5. Personalise it

According to research done by Pure360, 45% of consumers will engage in an offer that’s shared to them if it was relevant to them, personally. Therefore, it’s important to consider how you can make your content as personal as possible.  It could even be something as simple as personalising a homepage banner or making recommendations based on things they’ve put in their baskets and abandoned or based on items they’ve purchased in the past. 

Personalisation is a highly-effective way to improve rates of engagement and, therefore, increase leads, conversions and sales. Research done by The Bank of England found that, during Christmas time, the UK will spend 25% more than at any other time of year, so use this to your advantage.

6. Create your content & have fun doing it

Once all of the aforementioned has been put in place and implemented successfully, you should then take steps to create your Christmas content. This should be the most fun part of the job. Every client is different, especially if you write for a wide range of industries, like we do here at Kumo Digital. 

But if you write for one client or for your own company, then it can make coming up with different ideas a little more difficult. However, there will always be a way in which to put a Christmas spin on everyday content. For example, you could write for a blinds company, and you might be wondering how you can create festive content for them. You could write a number of articles, such as the following:

• “5 Roller Blind Designs to Transform Your Bathroom This Christmas”
• “5 Blackout Blinds That’ll Keep Your Children Snoozing Through to Christmas Morning”
• “How to Clean Your Venetian Blinds in Time for Christmas Guests”
• “Which Blinds Should I Put in the Spare Room When Hosting Guests This Christmas?”
• “How to Decorate Your Windows for Christmas”

7. Share any supporting content you may have

It might be that you wrote an article last year all about how to host the perfect Christmas get together and you’ve written an article this year that details how to make the perfect cheese board, then you could link back to the article about how to host the perfect Christmas get together because the two go hand-in-hand. Cheese boards are synonymous with parties and, often, Christmas. By doing this, you’ll be able to gain views and pump up engagement on content that’s a year old as well as publishing brand new content that’s relevant to the season and the old content – it’s a win-win!

Kumo Digital have over two decades of experience in the digital marketing industry, carrying out SEO and PPC services as well as content creation and website design for a wide range of industries. We pride ourselves on catapulting our clients into the spotlight, setting them apart from their competitors. For more information about how we can help your business, get in touch with a member of our expert team today – we’re always happy to hear from you.