I know what you’re thinking, “Just let me get through Thanksgiving and Black Friday first!” But you know (as well as your boss knows), holiday planning is already in full effect.

This year don’t wait until your boss starts forwarding you creative and engaging social campaigns from your competitors with not-so-subtle subject lines of:

“We should try something like this next year”

“Why aren’t we doing something like this?”

“This is a REALLY great idea by our competitors!”

It’s not too late to get ahead of the holidays now, and create engaging campaigns that will turn your competitor’s marketing team green with envy.

To help get you on the right track, here are some of the top social campaigns from holidays past, to give you a little inspiration to create campaigns that will cut through all that holiday noise.

 

1)   Be Fun and Engaging

Social media is a crowded landscape and it’s hard for brands to stand out, especially during the holidays. This is where being fun and engaging is more crucial than ever. Humor, when tasteful and relevant, is a great way to cut through the holiday noise of promotions, sales and discounts, and get your audience’s attention

For the 2015 holiday season, Temptations cat treats releases an advertising campaign to say sorry to your pets for dressing them up in holiday costumes. Temptations promoted this across social channels by using #SaySorry

 

2)   Be Sensitive to Diversity

Every marketer understands the need for diverse campaigns that address their entire audience base, and the holidays is certainly a time where there is a need to be diverse, while also being sensitive to those with varying religious beliefs. It is crucial that you don’t alienate your audience with terms and imagery that are only relevant to specific groups. Try to come up with content that is engaging for everyone in your audience.

For the 2015 holiday season, Kohl’s released their #AllTogetherNow holiday campaign that puts a spotlight on couples of all different sexual orientations.

 

 

3)   Be Helpful

As you know, the holiday season is a very stressful time for people all over the world. Between ending the work year, buying presents, planning vacation and time with family members and organizing holiday events, this festive season of magic and joy is actually the most stressful holiday of all. If you can make things just a little easier for your community this time of year, they will certainly appreciate it.

In an effort to highlight how in-store expertise can help shoppers buy great books, Barnes and Noble sent personalized recommendations to those asking for ideas using the hashtag #BNGiftTip. Tweeters asked for a recommendation and @BNBuzz answered with tailored suggestions.

 


4)   Don’t Forget to Listen

Sometimes when you have a lot of great creative campaign ideas it’s easy to jump right in and start pushing out all your hard work to your followers. Of course your blog post is interesting and creative, but have you been listening to your community? Are you sure that you know what they want to hear? Be sure to fully understand your industry’s social landscape and the needs of your community in order to provide truly helpful and relevant content.
Learn more about using Social Intelligence to help boost your marketing campaigns, check out our ebook: Turn Social Insights into Business Strategy