Holidays are the most wonderful time of the year. For most businesses, it’s also the most happening time. With busy weekdays and weekends it’s important to make the most of this time of the year for your business. This is one of the biggest times for online sales, and businesses need to take the right steps to take their business to the next level. Facebook is a social media platform that is bustling with activity, especially during this season. Your marketing and social media strategies should be aligned to leverage from this platform.

It’s important to keep a strategy in mind before the holiday season actually kicks in.

Define a goal and decide what you want to achieve

Even before you begin, it is important to create an outline of your goals for the holiday season. What is it that you would like to achieve with your Facebook Campaigns? This goes for any kind of advertising – not just for the holiday season.  It’s important that you tie all your tactics to an overall strategy to accomplish an objective. Without that goal in mind, you can’t have real success.

Create a content calendar and work on it

Break down your campaign into various milestones and mark your key dates on the calendar in advance. Figure out the timeline and deadlines in advance. It’s also a good idea to create a spreadsheet with a column for each of the date identified. It need not have too many details, but just enough to give you an idea of where you are going with your marketing efforts at a glance. Keep working and highlighting your major dates, accomplishments as you hit your deadlines.

Define exactly what you want to measure

Measuring success is important. Well, deciding and defining what to measure for your success is crucial. Well, you should judge the success of your marketing efforts as per the goals you were trying to achieve. For example if you aim at increasing sales at a physical location, the cash register at that location will be the deciding factor for the success of your campaign. If your aim is brand awareness, you will need to check the page insights or campaign statistics provided by Facebook.

Interesting images

It’s important to get your Facebook page noticed during the holiday season. Do something fun with the cover images.You can change the image frequently to ensure that viewers are inquisitive about what’s next, or you can add a bit of humor for customer engagement. People are in a good mood during holiday season and are ready to spend. Attracting them to your offerings is the key. So, make your marketing messages entertaining, lighthearted and attention grabbing.

Think like a person during the holiday season not a marketer

It’s important to remember that in business, you are always dealing with people. This means that you need to think like people, not like a marketer. People usually check what their friends and contacts on Facebook are doing – not what big brands are posting. So, while you add content to Facebook, make sure that you are contributing positively to their day and not only creating ads that are selling something – that’s easy to ignore.

There’s a lot that businesses can do on Facebook to get more sales during the holidays. For brick-and-mortar businesses – you can target audiences by using the new Local Awareness feature. This feature enables you to target ads to people only when they’re physically near your business. It’s also a good idea to give people directions to your location right on their phones.

Facebook could be your best friend in marketing during the holiday season – make the best out of it!