Why and how to start with your Christmas marketing
I know, I know, it’s still August. Having Christmas decorations up before December drives me nuts too but from an escape room perspective September is the latest when you should start planning your marketing campaign for the festive season.
I’ve collected my tried and tested best practices to plan a Christmas campaign with to do’s and ✅ checklist at the end.
Why start now?
It’s simple, since it’s the busy season you’ll be extremely occupied with operations and marketing will be the last thing on your list.
The main reasons for starting now:
Some corporate teams start booking their Christmas activities during the summer. Yepp we already start receiving enquiries with my escape room - clueQuest - as early as July.
You will be busy with your operations in November/December, so you can potentially miss out on some serious cash relying only on people remembering to come to you.
How to start?
First and foremost you need a plan in place. - Duh! I know. - This will guide you through the campaign so you don’t have to come up with things on the spot.
Your plan should focus on two things:
Large groups or corporate teams (if you have at least 10ppl capacity)
Gift cards and regular teams
The plan should include:
📅 Dates for newsletters, social posts, website changes, etc.
💭 Marketing narratives about why they should book with you, like “Spend quality time with loved ones
📈 Promotions and the finer details
Plan example. No need for fancy software to plan out your campaign.
The finishing touch I like to do when I’m creating a marketing plan is to categorise things in terms of what goes where and when as you can see in this snippet above.
The main areas that you have to keep in mind when planning out your content for the festive campaign.
🌐 Website: Give your website a festive makeover to help people get in the mood
🏰 On location: Prep your location and hosts to market the large group offer and gift cards after their experience.
🔗 Socials: Less is more so pick the platforms that you are good at rather than trying to focus on all of them.
📧 Newsletters: Have the dates and at least an excerpt ready. ChatGPT can fill in the rest for you
📨 Automated emails: You should update your automated communication - reminder email, photo email, etc. - with the Christmas offers
💡Pro tip: Throughout your campaign you should change things based on what is at the forefront. For example you would want to put Christmas team building front and centre in September and October but you would want to switch that to gift cards in November.
Large groups
One of the reasons this part of the year is so lucrative is because you get a large amount of corporate bookings and they tend to book for the midweek which is usually quiet throughout the year.
These teams however are on a different schedule than your regular teams. While the latter might book a few weeks ahead of time, large groups book their team activity well in advance, sometimes even 3-4 months which already brings us back to September.
📝 To do list:
Update your team building page, or even better create a completely new subpage for Christmas team buildings.
Create a one pager that you can send out easily when someone enquires.
Segment out the company emails in your newsletter list and send them a newsletter in September and then keep following up until November.
💡 Pro tip: Strike up conversation with the local restaurants now so you can recommend them for dinner after the experience and they can recommend you to their bookings.
Gift Cards and Regular teams
Chances are that your weekends will fill up nicely on their own so you might wonder why even bother with regular teams. Because the earlier you can fill up the popular slots the more likely you can fill up your calendar fully.
Start marketing to your regular teams around early-mid November. If you are in the US you should start with Thanksgiving then smoothly change the marketing narrative to Christmas right after.
Start off with promoting to regular teams and as soon as you see the popular slots filling up change up the marketing and start pushing gift cards. Switch to gift cards no later than mid December.
📝 To do list:
Create the master design. I recommend Canva. It's amazing how quickly you can adapt your design to different aspect ratios.
Update your gift voucher page on the website and give it a Festive look
Send the first newsletter no later than mid November.
Write a pitch to your hosts and make them practice so they can promote gift cards on site.
💡 Pro tip: Send a couple emails right before Christmas and on Boxing day. E-vouchers make a wonderful last minute gift.
Sign up by the 3rd of September here using the code ZTPXmas and you’ll get 20% off.
I am running a 5 week workshop from the 12th of September so join us there if you would like to follow tried and tested formulas.
Checklist
✅Newsletter list: Have your email list in order. Corporates segmented out.
✅Black Friday: Make a decision ahead of time if you will take part or not. Keep in mind that this will eat up a good chunk of purchasing power that might hurt your sales for the rest of the season.
✅Graphic designs: Visuals help a lot to sell. Have the master design ready ahead of time because this is the most time consuming part.
✅Website: Figure out what goes where as the campaign progresses and notify your web person ahead of time so they have the bandwidth for you when changes need to happen.
✅Seasonal room: Start promoting as early as October if you have a seasonal room coming. Also do a sell out if another room is being closed to give way.
✅Partnerships: Pick your partners - restaurant, bars, charities - in September so you can work out the details while you both have the time for it. You won’t during the busy season.
I hope this helped to organise your thoughts about Christmas and gave you the motivation to get started. If this feels overwhelming, I get it but don’t leave your busy season up to chance.
