- Decorated apparel businesses large and small can enjoy big holiday promo paydays with the right social media strategy
- When it comes to holiday-adjacent promotions, you don’t need to continually reinvent the wheel, big-box retailers certainly don’t!
It’s summertime in cottage country, and I’m melting into a lawn chair with my laptop on my knees. The sun beats down, threatening to fry us both. On my computer screen, what do I see, but a social media content calendar full of snow globes, miniature reindeer and faux spruce garlands.
It’s my first year as a social media manager working for a home-goods store, and it feels insane to me that we’re mapping out our Christmas content this early.
It even seems to take some of the magic out of the season. I remember one time walking into a department store on November 1st only to discover the place had been changed into Santa’s village overnight. That sudden shift away from the spooky season into holiday cheer seems wrong somehow when you’re knee-deep in angel ornaments during the six months leading up to it.
I quickly learned, though, this kind of planning only makes perfect sense.
By the time consumers start thinking about a holiday, the goods they want to buy must already be on the shelves, shipped weeks earlier and strategized months in advance.
Granted, especially for smaller businesses, it can feel impossible staying that far ahead. Let’s dive in, and I’ll tell you how.
The Best Holidays for Custom Decorated Apparel Sales
When it comes to holiday-adjacent promotions, you don’t need to continually reinvent the wheel. Most big box brands repeat the same promo calendar annually, and small businesses can do the same.
Just because consumers are receiving a ton of other solicitations, that’s no reason for you to hold off on making a pitch as well. Photo by ribalka yuli – stock.adobe.com
You may feel the urge to shake things up or worry your audience will be bored if you repeat last year’s initiatives. But is that really the case? Familiarity is comforting. People like looking forward to things. They like knowing the annual Valentine’s Day “drop” is coming up or turning on notifications for your “Back to School Blowout” or “Turkey-day Sale.”
Think about the buying seasons for your customers. Corporations are planning their holiday swag buys in September when it’s still shorts weather, high schools will be ordering their “Class of 2027” hoodies long before graduation season.
In addition, while the period extending from Halloween through New Year’s is a clearly big one for many decorators, there are plenty of other holidays offering opportunities for increased sales as well. Whatever the case, the trick is to plan your content calendar backward.
The reason for this is that by the time a given holiday actually arrives, your sales push will already be over. Especially with an online business, you’ve reached the point where it’s too late to sell. By the time the holiday in question arrives, a truly savvy marketer will already be setting reminders to repeat the posts that got the most clicks the last time around in preparation for next year’s event.
With that in mind, here’s the backward content planning flow:
- In the run-up to the holiday your content will be focused on selling.
- Before that, focus on growing your followers and entertaining them.
- Before that, zoom out to plan and prep your timelines for the three or four holidays you want to prioritize, year over year.
You will also need to order and/or make samples weeks before an actual sale, in order to have them on-hand to filming and photographs—something else you need to plan ahead for. At the home-goods store I worked for, by the time Santa was sliding down the chimney, our socials were full of fun, carefree content and charming family-centered stories. Something they weren’t full of were CTAs (calls to action) to buy. Why? Because by then the Christmas selling season was long over.
That said, something we would do around the same time Santa was doing his thing was pivot to our Boxing Day “buy-now, huge discounts bonanza” on December 26—a sales pitch scheduled and scripted out months earlier with the help of an overheated laptop splattered in SPF 50.
The Holidays Are Intertwined with Decorated Apparel Sales
One of the many reasons holidays like Christmas and New Year’s have become so consumption-focused is because they offer an easy application of marketing psychology: They give your audience a reason to “choose now” to buy.
At any given moment, there are any number of consumers out there watching your Instagram posts, keeping an eye on your email newsletter and holding your website open on a dusty Chrome tab. But they haven’t actually decided to buy anything yet. Why is that? It’s because they’re waiting for you to give them a reason to stop putting it off. Worse yet, if you never give it to them, they may just sit on their hands forever.
By pairing promotions with holidays, you create a sense of “urgency.” Tie in a special of some sort, and you create that much more of a psychological incentive.
Most people think “special” and start offering discounts. The “reason to choose now,” though, doesn’t have to be a slashed sticker price—just the opposite. In fact, I would caution you to be wary of running discounts. The reason for this is you don’t want your audience to come to expect them, and, ironically, end up postponing their purchase until they see you pitch a better deal.
Think how many times you didn’t buy some pricey gadget juuuust in case there might be a Black Friday Sale down the road. Same thing when you hesitated to order a bag of dog food because the last time around you were able to snag it for 25 percent less. What happened was those companies trained you to wait, to expect a deal. You, on the other hand, are going to train your audience to buy at full price.
There are a number of different urgency mechanisms you can try on for size. Among these is scarcity-based urgency in the form of a limited supply or one-time-only collection; value-based urgency via free add-ons, mix n’ match sales or an upcoming price increase; or what I call logic-based urgency using a variety of different deadlines, e.g., “order now, and your purchase will arrive in time for Diwali!” or “don’t wait until Mother’s Day to think about buying something for you Mom the way you did last year!”
What to Post Online Before You Actually Start Selling
As mentioned earlier, before you actually start doing any selling, you should be focused on increasing the number of your followers, that and entertaining them. The reason for this is one of the more brutal ironies of social media—specifically, the more you sell, the less you grow.
Don’t just share product shots when creating your social media. Let consumers get to know you and your company as well. Photo by Anam – stock.adobe.com
Have you ever noticed how views take off when you post something fun or interesting, then fall off a cliff when you sell? That’s normal social media behavior. You don’t share Home Depot fliers on your family group chat. What you do share is hilarious dog memes. You don’t comment “Lol, that’s totally me!” on a Kia ad. What you do comment on is clips from stand-up comics describing relatable scenarios that are so accurate they make you wonder if they haven’t secretly been watching you when you weren’t looking, right?
With this in mind, the social media strategy I teach includes three distinct types of content:
- Growth (to get followers and views)
- Nurture (to build trust and connection)
- Sales (to get people to buy)
Note: among the benefits of following this approach is that when each post has a clear goal, you can judge its success based on that goal and that goal alone. This in turn means you stop beating yourself up if a post designed to get you likes doesn’t sell anything or a post designed to sell isn’t your most viewed.
Now that I’ve laid the groundwork with this three-part framework, the best tip I can give you for making sales during your holiday promo period is as follows: Be intentional about the content you post well before your promo even begins. The more eyeballs you can get with your pre-sale content, the more likely you’ll be able to get your actual sales content in front of people as well.
Be playful, be personal, be generous! Share some behind-the-scenes reels or a few stories about how you got your business to where it is today, some funny things that have happened to you over the years. Before you switch gears into selling, don’t sell.
Think of it this way: If someone interacts with your Tuesday post, the algorithm is more likely to show that person the post you publish on Wednesday. The more they interact with the fun stuff you’re sharing in June, the more likely they are to be shown the sales content you post promoting your products for sale in preparation for the 4th of July.
What to Post When Promo Time Arrives
At this point, you’ve zoomed out and chosen the spendiest holidays in your ideal customer’s year to focus on. You’ve worked backward to decide when your sale dates will be, chosen an irresistible urgency mechanism and started brainstorming pre-sale growth content to help set up your promo posts for more views. Now it’s time to create some social media content that sells.
Holidays psychologically give people permission to treat themselves and others. Those are two easy angles you can use to encourage people to buy! Your customers will be the hero in both cases, either because they got themselves a gift, or because they made someone else’s day. Consider the roots of the holiday and the why behind their purchase, then create a series of posts highlighting that reasoning. This can be as simple as a little “P.S. if an extra one of these ends up in your own Easter basket, we won’t snitch”.
In marketing we have an expression, “Show, don’t tell.” The most interesting posts on social media are videos that bring us into an experience. Don’t just tell consumers what you have on offer, show them the items being made, unboxed, interacted with, worn, styled or shot out of a T-shirt cannon. Product mockups and AI renderings are fine to post every so often, but you’ll reach far more people sharing videos that give your audience something more to look at and think about.
Connect and communicate with your audience. How did you choose this design? What makes it special? Are you personally gifting one to someone special? Bring your audience with you on a journey that introduces the item as part of a story, not just a plug.
When you do post still product photography, a good rule of thumb is to always post two or more photos, (i.e., make it a carousel). The reason for this is the algorithm needs to see users touching/interacting with your posts in order to show them to more people. One photo on its own is likely to get scrolled past, but as soon as you add a second or third photo to the post, your followers have an easy interaction option in front of them: swiping through to see them all (on most platforms). That swipe counts as engagement and will help the post perform better.
Deadlines are your best friend. They give you cheap content ideas (Last chance! Get it now! Only 5 hours left!) at the same time, remind your lollygagging followers to act.
As far as what not to post… When I started out as a social media manager, I would design graphics that said things like “Happy Thanksgiving!” and include a little picture of a cornucopia. Now, I know better. I’ve posted enough of those to know they are filler posts that don’t move the needle and are usually being tossed together because you feel like you’re “supposed” to make them—you don’t need to.
Swap those generic graphics for something that shows who you are: a family photo, a picture of your CEO with a turkey hat on, a football jersey from your high school with a story about how uniforms inspired you to start your apparel business. Give your audience something to fall in love with! Or skip that holiday day-of-post altogether. No one will hold it against you.
Maximizing Your Social Media Marketing Efforts
I’ve got a present for you, just in time for whatever holiday comes next, as you read this, whenever that may be—the gift of saving time on social media. The big box stores aren’t reinventing the wheel every year. You don’t need to either. Choose the holidays you want to lean into, figure out a series of marketing plans and then repeat them every time you unwrap a new calendar. You can repeat your angles, your offers, even a good chunk of your creative.
It may feel like cutting corners, but what if you looked at it as “starting a tradition?” Your audience is so inundated by social media content, even your biggest fans won’t realize you repeated that same Beetlejuice meme you posted last year. If something worked, switched around the colors, update the backdrop and an icon or two and use it again.
Some of the most successful viral videos on the internet have been making the rounds for years now. Creators have even been known to turn their viral videos into scripts and then remake them frame for frame to help keep the party going.
Not only is repetition encouraged, it’s necessary. Your customers need to see you talk about your products over and over again in order to remember them. With every post they see, they’ll be convincing themselves more and more that they deserve a little holiday treat.
Action Steps to Better Target Your Online Holiday Sales
First, pick your poison! It’s not realistic to try and keep up with all the holidays, and your audience won’t be receptive to urgency tactics if you try to. Choose the three or four most relevant or exciting ones and start planning backwards from there.
Choose urgency mechanisms that don’t teach your leads to wait before they buy, but to buy now.
Collect footage of your items, not just pictures. Get your hands on some samples of your featured products and then experiment with creative ways to interact with them on camera. The earlier you start collecting videos, the more you’ll have to work with when promo time comes—and the more you can avoid pulling an all-nighter the day before a launch, desperately thinking of fresh ways to film a T-shirt!
Channel me, a sunburnt, social media manager scheduling Rudolph gifs in mid-August and plan your year early. Your schedule can be subject to change, but having a plan will prevent you from scrambling to take advantage of important sales seasons before it’s already too late. You’ll feel more in control of your social media strategy, and you can embrace seasons of growth and play when you know a promo is on the horizon.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Chanukah Happy Canada Day, Kwanzaa and Cinco De Mayo to all who celebrate! May your cashflow be high, your credit card fees low and your customers happy.
Jenna Harding is a marketing coach and consultant, and host of the Shiny New Clients Podcast. Through her program Magic Marketing Machine, she helps service-based business owners use her proven marketing formula to look amazing on Instagram, run their accounts in 15 minutes a day and turn their followers into clients. For more on Jenna, go to jennaharding.com.
