The Grinch who ruined your campaign: 5 marketing mistakes to avoid this Christmas

Everyone loves a Christmas marketing campaign – whether it’s a million-pound TV advert, a big influencer partnership, or just some festive social media content – there’s hundreds of ways to sprinkle some seasonal joy over your marketing at this time of year.

While a well-executed Christmas campaign could make a huge difference to your sales and revenue, there are a few things we see brands getting wrong every year. We don’t want to sound like the Grinch, but if you want your campaign to sleigh this Christmas, here are five marketing mistakes to avoid.

Not preparing your website

If your marketing campaigns have done their job, you’ll likely be expecting a few extra visitors to your website at this time of year.

You need to make sure you’re prepared for an influx of traffic, because the last thing anyone wants is the website crashing just as they’ve decided to buy something.

You might need to move to a dedicated server if you’re expecting major traffic, make sure your images are compressed and not taking too long to load, and of course, make sure your website is mobile-friendly.

You should also set up some analytics, so you can keep a close eye on your visitors and find out exactly where they’re coming from.

Leaving it too late

Lots of people start thinking about Christmas in October – making plans with their families, starting the Christmas shopping, even putting their decorations up. It’s no good leaving your Christmas marketing until a week before the big day, as a huge proportion of your target audience will have finished buying by then.

Your Christmas campaign should be budgeted in with your annual marketing plan and organised well in advance of the actual event. You may find yourself shooting Christmas content in March, and still humming Christmas tunes in July, but it’s so important to make sure your design work, content and imagery are all set to go on time.

Abandoning ship

It’s tempting, especially for smaller companies, to shut up shop and take a couple of weeks off over Christmas. Of course, you and your team deserve a well-earned break and should have some time to relax and be with loved ones.

However, it’s a good idea to make sure you still have some content scheduled to go out on your social media accounts during the break, and you may even need some ongoing customer service support.

Lots of people take to Facebook and Twitter over Christmas if they’re not satisfied with their gifts or food, and you don’t want to give the impression that you’ve abandoned ship and are ignoring your customers.

A few strategic scheduled posts could go a long way to helping you appear active and available, even when you’re not. You could consider setting up an automatic response letting people know exactly when you’ll be available to assist them. Whatever you decide to do, try not to give your audience the silent treatment.

Forgetting your brand guidelines

We’ve seen this one time and time again. The big boss drinks a glass of mulled wine and gets a little Photoshop-happy with the logo, adding baubles, tinsel, and flashing light GIFs to the website, and insisting you change your social media icons to dancing Christmas trees.

Of course it can be a bit of fun to add some festive flare to your marketing at Christmas, but please, we beg you, stay away from the garish and crude graphics. Give your design team some creative license to sprinkle some tasteful festivity on your marketing, without being tacky.

Remember you have brand guidelines for a very good reason, and you don’t want to undermine the hard work you’ve done building your strong and recognisable brand for the sake of a funny GIF (that actually isn’t that funny).

Being a cliché

That’s Christmas, all wrapped up! It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Does Christmas come early this year? Nothing says Christmas like… a bad cliché.

These phrases have all been used to death in Christmas campaigns. Year after year, companies bring out the same old, tired, cliché straplines to go with their marketing. We don’t know about you, but we cringe every time we read them. Can you come up with something a little more creative this year?

Instead of using silly Christmas puns and over-used catchphrases, spend some time thinking about how you can make your Christmas marketing more original and authentic to your company, and how you can really add value to your customers who are already being bombarded with Christmas campaigns.

The best way to make sure your Christmas campaign goes down with a bang is to plan ahead, come up with something new and creative, and stay active across all your channels.

If you need a hand with your seasonal marketing next year, we’d love to help. Take a look at some of our previous work, and get in touch for a chat about Christmas 2022.

In the meantime, we’d like to wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at team Wildish & Co – let’s see what next year has in store for us!