Christmas, New Year, Hanukkah, Easter, Make Your Dreams Come True Day (yes, that’s an actual celebrated holiday!), there are many days that we celebrate throughout the year, but how do we use and leverage those holidays to promote our brand and share our message? Well, that’s what we’re going to explore in this blog. If you’re struggling to create content ideas to align with your marketing goals, then leveraging a social media holiday calendar could be just the thing you’re looking for to make content creation easier.
What is a holiday calendar?
A holiday planner is a schedule that includes a map of all the holidays celebrated throughout the year. Businesses create custom holiday planners to find celebrated days that align with their goals and use those days to promote awareness for their brand or send a certain message that fits this holiday and their company perfectly.
Why does your business need a holiday calendar?
Using a holiday planner should be an essential part of your content strategy and we highly recommend you consider implementing one into your marketing plan. But why are holiday planners vital in marketing?
1. Saves time
Implementing a holiday calendar into your content strategy makes idea generation so much easier. This is because social media content ideas are already generated for you. It adds a few extra ideas to the mix when you're planning your monthly content strategy.
2. Raises your profile to the right people
Using days relevant to your business utilises another technique to reach your message to the right people. Holiday planners can help businesses to raise their profile and enhance awareness for certain causes and beliefs their company stands for.
It’s not just holidays, such as Christmas, New Year's, Easter etc. celebrated either. Holidays like Turtle Day and World Ocean Day are widely celebrated among ocean lovers, conservationists and wildlife enthusiasts. Using these days in the conservation world enhances the profile of certain issues affecting the ocean or raises awareness about how people can help from home.
3. Generate leads and sales
Using commonly celebrated days in a community is a fantastic opportunity to generate leads and sales. When using holiday content, it encourages people to buy your product or use your service.
How often should I use holidays in my content?
Using holidays is a great way to promote awareness for your brand, communicate your core values and reach your target market. However, if you’re using holidays as one of the main forms of promoting your content, your audience will quickly become quite bored with your content. Don’t overuse holidays in your content calendar, make sure to add a mix of different types of content so that it’s not too overcrowded with holidays.
We suggest that if you’re creating 15 posts per month, set aside 2-3 days for celebrating holidays and using these days to promote your message. Any more than this can become overpowering for your audience and overused.
How to create a custom holiday planner to align with your strategy
When we onboard a new client for content creation, whether it’s developing blogs, editing videos or managing their social media, we create a custom holiday planner.
Why do we do this? Every business is different. One holiday that works for one company might not work for another. For example, using Time Management Day for an ocean conservation company won’t work. Days such as: Shark Awareness Day, Whale Day, Ocean Conservation Day or World Wildlife Day may fit well to promote their message and raise their platform.
So when you’re creating your social media holiday calendar, you will need to research and evaluate days that align with your goals, industry, message and beliefs.
When researching national and international holidays, our usual go-to website, which is excellent for research, is National Today. There you will find most of the widely celebrated holidays. National Today is a great tool to find holidays and discover more about why the holiday was invested, its history and why people celebrate this day. We have found that some holidays are not on this website, but for more niche markets and audiences, we usually use Google to find more holidays, using keywords including “celebrated holidays in [industry]” or “[niche] national holidays”.
Holiday planner example
Looking to create a custom holiday planner? Then here’s an example of a holiday planner that we’ve created for March for a wildlife conservation company. This highlights all the key dates and events they might want to use for campaign tie-ins and messages throughout March.
As you can see in the holiday calendar example for March, the planner highlights all of the significant days and events that could be beneficial for their content planning.
Use this template and research holidays to come up with a custom holiday calendar for your social media content.
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