Christmas may not be everyone’s favourite time of year but there’s no doubt it’s an important season on the marketing calendar – especially for B2C retailers. But given the enormous revenue potential of the festive season, surely there’s enough to go around for B2B organisations too?
The reality is that B2B Christmas campaigns can be just as effective at attracting customers, growing businesses and boosting bottom lines as B2C ones. As a B2B PR agency with a good number of Christmases under our belt, we’ve helped many clients take advantage of the very festive and hugely lucrative opportunities this time of year presents.
As we head swiftly into December, here are five easy ways you can implement a B2B Christmas campaign for effective results.
Create an Advent calendar of content
Most Christmas traditions have been successfully commercialised, including the Advent calendar. Nowadays, many B2C brands release Advent calendars featuring their product in miniatures – and customers love them.
A B2B Christmas campaign can leverage the same idea – with a little tweak. You can create a digital Advent calendar as a way to publish new and compelling pieces of content every day. These daily doses don’t have to be essays, in fact, it’s best to mix it up with infographics, listicles, videos, images as well as articles and blogs.
You can also consider repurposing your best performing internal content, as well as collaborating with suppliers. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have some fun and get creative – but not at the expense of your professional reputation. Don’t get carried away with irrelevant, yet Christmas-y, content. Whatever you post, it has to be of interest to your targeted audience. If it doesn’t serve them in some way, then your efforts will be wasted.
Ramp up your email marketing
Some existing and prospective customers may experience a bit of a lull in their workloads at this time of year. Not all businesses experience a slowdown over Christmas, but many do. For those enjoying a bit of a quieter time, they may be more inclined to read their emails. This presents a good opportunity to send through well-timed and relevant content that includes interesting information and special offers.
Enjoy some festive social media
While once the preserve of B2C brands, social media is now also used effectively by B2B businesses as part of their marketing strategies. Christmas is a busy time for social media as people share their holiday adventures with friends and family and are online a lot. Which means now is a good time of year to put together a social media plan that includes content curation as well as advertising. Of course, bear in mind that Twitter and Facebook advertising is more expensive over the Christmas season so if you are going to advertise, do it well.
Organise a get-together
Before December comes and goes, see if you can organise an end-of-year event with your clients, suppliers and partners. You can reach out to prospective business and invite them too, making a good opportunity for everyone to network as well as have some much-deserved festive fun. Nothing like a bit of Christmas spirit to help generate new leads and keep existing ones warm.
Offer New Year specials
It’s easy to forget that after Christmas comes the new year. If you can, don’t put all your marketing budget into the B2B Christmas campaign but rather allocate some to harnessing post-Christmas opportunities.
A great way to sustain customer interest through the festive season is to not suddenly go quiet after Christmas. Send them great content with exclusive offers and quite literally, stay in touch – this will enable business to pick up far faster in the new year.
If you’re interested in learning more about B2B Christmas campaigns, then give our directors a shout.