This blog post was written by Ray Sidney-Smith of W3 Consulting.

It may come as a surprise from Small Business owners to start thinking about holiday marketing planning before Labor Day. But, now is the time to start planning the holiday marketing campaigns you want to be successful for this coming fall and winter holidays season. Alexandria Small Business Development Center hosted a series in partnership with Visit Alexandria about holiday marketing planning, as well as the Business Development Roundtable (which happens every third Tuesday at noon at the SBDC) just passed this week on “Planning Ahead for the Holidays.” Here are some of the vital thoughts about early holiday marketing planning.

Choose Your Holidays Widely and Wisely

There are holidays happening almost every day of the year. (See also this list of holidays.) While some business owners might find some of these holidays off-putting, the importance of celebrating milestones and other timeframes throughout the year might be more palatable to them. Either way, there are times of the year when you need to be taking advantage of the marketing opportunities that avail themselves.

The most important holidays are the ones that pertain to your business/industry and directly include your target audience culturally, and hopefully also emotionally. For these holidays, choose wisely what you will do to be culturally sensitive (e.g., don’t post cat videos on National Dog Day to your dog-loving clients!?) and effective. You want marketing campaigns that will be highly effective for your goals (as we’ll discuss in a moment). While, you may wish to do smaller campaigns for holidays of lesser importance, where the holiday is not about your business/industry or your target audience, specifically, but more general that everyone can enjoy it (like World Wildlife Day).

Know Your Goals

“Know your goals” is not some fluff, self-improvement trope to dismiss immediately. (Okay, it can be in the wrong context.) But, here relating to your business’s bottom line, it’s not. You need to manage your goals and expectations as a small business owners, so you can manage your resources better and learn from your experience to succeed at business over time.

Knowing that the goal of increasing awareness and acknowledging the holidays to clients appropriately, as Peter Baldwin, MarketForce Strategies, noted during the Roundtable, provides him with clarity about what he needs to do for the holiday marketing season. This is important to understanding what kind of communications to send and other offerings a company like Peter’s wants to commit to and execute during the holidays season.

For retail business owners, this may be a prime selling opportunity, if your products or services cater to holiday buyers for gifts in honor of the holiday. So, your goals may include hitting a certain sales metric, bringing in particular amount of foot traffic, or donating a number of your products to a charity for good publicity. Whatever the goals are, now you can make a plan.

Map Out Your Plan and Share It With Your Team, Vendors and Other Stakeholders

Plan early for the holidays as the seasons come up on you too quickly. And, trying to plan and execute at the same time usually leads to shoddy campaigns that are ineffective, demotivate your marketing efforts for next year, and make holidays a chore instead of a celebration for you personally.

Plans for holiday marketing typically revolve around a timeline, so a calendar format for holiday marketing plans are usually most effective. You can choose a paper calendar posted in your office or shop for you and your staff to see together, or you can do so using digital tools like a shared Google Calendar or another online calendar of choice. Remember to include everyone who needs to know about the holiday marketing campaign(s) in the calendar, which can include not just staff, but also vendors, volunteers, family members, and other stakeholders who are responsible for helping execute the plan.

You can also set milestones in your plan, for every few weeks. These are opportunities to take stock in what has happened, correct course on where things might need to catch up and/or improve, celebrate successes, and then map out the detail for the next few weeks. This is helpful because it keeps everyone focused on short-term, achievable actions with each longer-term goal in mind.

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These are some of the things you can think about for getting ready for the holiday marketing season(s). There are many more, that you can think about, and find other articles online that discuss this. Good luck with your holiday marketing campaigns this season! We hope you’re getting ready for them now.