Raising your marketing budget over the festive season

For most business to consumer markets, the festive season is the most important time for your marketing strategy. This is the time of year where the potential to sell your products and services is at an all time high.

If this applies to your business, we would highly recommend you keep in mind that it’s worthwhile increasing your marketing budget over the festive season. It may be important to plan ahead for this so you can adjust your marketing spend across the rest of the year accordingly.

Here are just a few reasons why it may be worth putting aside more budget to cover the festive period...

Pay for more time from your marketing manager

It’s likely you’ll have much more activity to promote over this period, such as events, offers, and new products. Therefore, if you work with an external agency you’ll be asking your marketing manager to increase the volume of content they’re creating for you and this may exceed their usual contracted hours.

If this is the case, you may need to ask them to agree to an increased set of working hours during the festive season. They’ll require an increase in payment, so be sure to negotiate this with plenty of time in advance so they can plan ahead to manage their time suitably.

Create new promotional materials

Your festive products, offers, and events may require the creation of additional marketing materials to promote them. For example, if you’re hosting a festive event you may need posters and flyers to distribute around your local area to generate more attention.

Not only will this entail printing costs, but further costs will arise from the design and creation of such materials whether you use an agency or freelancers. Again, be sure to plan well in advance as many creatives are in high demand over the festive period!

Increase the amount you boost posts by on Facebook

Boosted Facebook posts work on an auction based bidding system  where the higher the bid, the higher the impressions and engagements posts will receive. The festive season sees the auction become more competitive as more businesses compete to get their products and services seen, especially around Black Friday.

Despite getting results you’ve been happy with for a relatively low bid in the past, don’t be fooled into thinking this budget will gain you the same results over the busy festive period. In order to compete with the market you’ll have to be prepared to raise your budget, putting a sufficient amount aside for promotions of higher importance to your business.

Be prepared to set up giveaways and competitions

If you want to avoid spending more on boosting individual posts on social media, another way to get your audience's attention is through setting up giveaways and competitions. Posts where users have the chance to bag a freebie tend to gain a large reach without having to raise your ad spend too high. Find out more about running competitions on our article exploring the importance of social media competitions. 

You could relate this to the product or service you want to promote by setting up a competition suggesting something along the lines of “name our new Christmas cocktail”, with the reward being that the winner gets to sample your festive menu for free. This will draw attention to the fact you have a new menu you want people to feast on and people will be willing to engage to potentially win the prize. Make sure it’s within your budget to cover the cost of the prize you promote so you’re not setting yourself up for any kind of loss.