Marketing During the Holidays

By Cheryl Salazar, The Partner Marketing Group

Thanksgiving is done and my turkey leftovers have been reduced to pot pie. Now it’s time to hang the lights and empty the bank account! And with that thought often comes a big sigh. How did the year go by so fast? From a marketing perspective, everything appears to shut down because our customers and prospects are too busy with year-end or celebrating or holiday vacations. It’s really, really tough to market during the holidays and get their attention this time of the year.

I’ve recently been having a discussion with a client of mine around organizing marketing efforts so everyone stays sane and executes consistently. There is always a lot of work to do and it just never seems to ease up. We landed on the concept of ‘seasons’ – breaking the year into marketing seasons that build on each other with a different theme. The idea is that over the course of the year we can align sales and marketing efforts around different topics and campaigns, plan tradeshows and advertising and so on.

And then HO HO HO, look what pops up in my Facebook feed – THE perfect example for how to get the attention of customers and prospects during the holidays – the Holiday campaign from Zillow. Even if you don’t celebrate Christmas, this is likely to make you smile.

From the look of the campaign, the marketing team at Zillow had a lot of fun with it. I can only imagine how much traffic this is driving to their website and their brand recognition is probably going through the roof. While I’m not in the market for a new home, I did click through and checked out Santa’s house (cute description of it too). I mean who wouldn’t? Sadly, it’s not for sale.

There’s a lesson for us to learn here. Embrace the Holidays and the fact that our customers are busy. Just have some fun with it because even marketers need to go out and play now and again. Happy Holidays from us to you!