The Holiday season can be a busy time for a lot of businesses, and with only so many hours in a day, how do you take a step back from managing your marketing without taking your foot off the gas? It’s never a good idea to completely stop advertising, even when it’s busy - having a presence online sustains your brand recognition and loyalty among existing customers, while continually exposing your brand to new customers.

Plan

Schedule posts on social media. Create a library of content to share, and post at the right time to maintain engagement with your audience. It will require organization and a bit more time upfront, but you’ll be able to free yourself up on a daily/weekly basis; which is key, especially as we enter the busy season.

Consider using downtime to build a content library around annual events, holidays, planned sales events, etc. Plan what assets you might need, things like photos, graphics, and landing pages.

Automate

Use Automated Ad campaigns. Keeping an eye on multiple campaigns all the time, and being hands-on, may be difficult to maintain during times when your energy may be better spent elsewhere. Using Automated Ad campaigns that leverage machine learning algorithms to monitor and optimize the campaign can save you time, and in many cases improve performance. Platforms like Google and Facebook run millions of campaigns and have performance insights that you might not consider when building or optimizing a campaign.

Invest in Automation Software. If you’re running multiple platforms, or your customers have a longer path to purchase, it may be worthwhile to look into investing in Automation Software. This can help with many of the more tedious, but necessary tasks like sending emails.

Outsource

Consider adding Chat (specifically Chatbots) to your site. As with anything, there are pros and cons, but using AI for a Chat on your website could help improve your customer satisfaction and allow you and/or your staff time to do other things. Chatbots work 24 hours a day, so they can answer questions immediately, and because they have a library of answers to respond from, you know that their answers are consistent. FAQ Chatbots can answer basic questions like "Do you sell giftcards", "What are your holiday hours?", "Can I pre-order and pickup?".

Maintaining a marketing campaign can be demanding regardless of what time of year it is. The key is to know where your own strengths lie and use tools, planning, and partnerships to bridge the gaps so you can spend your time doing what you do best!