Holiday Marketing Ideas and Checklist

The holiday season is upon us! Many businesses and industries are in the midst of the busiest time of year for sales, giving, dining, and events. Right now, your holiday marketing really needs to stand out. You don’t want to continue using the same old content marketing from earlier in the year. Holiday marketing needs to be refreshed, including festive colors, seasonal imagery, and holiday-focused promotions. 

Festive holiday marketing ideas 

For your holiday marketing campaign this year, we made the case for why you need a holiday lookbook. In addition to creating a multi-page lookbook this holiday season, you need interactive graphics to share on email, social media, and on your website or blog. You can also layer special holiday promotions, deals, and giveaways to feature in your marketing and move the needle for your organization. 

Holiday marketing ideas and content to create:

• Holiday cards for your organization

• Holiday brochure or a one-sheet

• Gift guides

• Black Friday promotions

• Cyber Monday or Cyber Week offers

• 12 days of giving or discounts

• Unique holiday graphics including GIFs

• Social stories for your seasonal content

• Holiday recipes

Use these ideas to start your own holiday content marketing plan, or explore even more ideas in our December content calendar inspiration post.

Content and promotion creation, however, is only the first step. You need to build out multi-channel campaigns and distribution plans. We’ve got you covered with a holiday marketing checklist to help you maximize content marketing efforts.

Holiday marketing checklist

Here’s your step-by-step guide to launching a multi-channel marketing campaign using Issuu. 

1. Create your holiday content. 

Focus on 3-5 main holiday content pieces that you can use at the center of your holiday campaign. For longer-form content, don’t forget to check Issuu for our downloadable templates for Catalogs, Brochures, Menus, and more in your Publisher workspace. You can also design in Adobe InDesign, Powerpoint, Google Docs, Canva, or Piktochart.

2. Use holiday-inspired colors, images, and designs.

Make sure your holiday content really stands out from the rest of the year. Use greens, golds, reds, and colors that evoke the holidays. Incorporate imagery reminiscent of holiday decorations from trees, candles, menorahs, snowflakes, and gifts to name a few! Check out Unsplash.com to find holiday images that are free to download and use in your content.

3. Upload your content to your Issuu account.

Once your content is ready, you can save it as a PDF and upload it to Issuu to add interactive features and more! On Issuu, you can also upload .doc, .docx, .ppt file types, or sync your Issuu account to import your files directly from Dropbox or Google Drive. And if your design started as an InDesign file or Canva template, you can also easily export those files as PDFs for easy uploading to Issuu.

4. Activate shopping links within your marketing content.

Enhance your uploaded content on Issuu by activating shopping and weblinks to turn your content into an eCommerce tool or to drive traffic to your website. Your Issuu content is now directly connected to your online store or Shopify site ensuring maximum engagement from your content to your web properties with Issuu. 

5. Publish your content as a sleek flipbook.

The Issuu flipbook maker does all the hard work, by turning that PDF, Powerpoint, Google Doc or Keynote file into a dynamic, page-turning asset in only a few seconds. Experience the satisfying page-flip that will delight your customers. Plus tap into your customer’s nostalgia for the iconic holiday catalog!

6. Create derivative assets such as GIFs, social stories, and mobile-optimized articles.

The flipbook is just a start when it comes to creating marketing assets on Issuu. Issuu deconstructs your original file into reusable bits of text and images. Create new assets that are derivatives of your original content by selecting your favorite images and text, then repurpose them into shareable mobile articles, email banners, and even motion-graphic social stories and GIFs. All of the assets are automatically optimized for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. Issuu offers integrations with Mailchimp and Hootsuite so that you can easily access your Issuu derivative assets and add them to emails or social posts.

7. Use Issuu's grab-and-go code to embed the lookbook on your own website

Upgrade your website by embedding your Issuu content on the homepage or a specific holiday campaign landing page. We give you the code, no engineering skills needed! Plus, with your Issuu content at the center of your website, all the holiday-inspired imagery will transform your website for the season without any extra design or development work! 

8. Share the fullscreen link on social media. (Follow and tag @Issuu for the chance to be shared across Issuu's channels!)

Issuu’s fullscreen sharing is the ultimate distraction-free experience and instantly turns your content into its own flippable web page. Use the fullscreen link in your social media posts to fully immerse your readers in your content, and by removing banner ads, you keep your content front and center. Gain more exposure by adding tags to your social media posts that will allow you to be discovered more easily by new customers. 

9. Email your content’s fullscreen link to your customers.

It’s time to share your awesome holiday content with your customers! Create an email campaign to launch your catalog, lookbook, brochure, menu, or whatever unique holiday content you have created. Use the fullscreen link to your flipbook as the call-to-action in the email and watch the read counts rise.

10. Create and share mobile-optimized article stories of product pages or collections.

Do you have a new collection or specific product pages that you would like to spotlight on their own? You can create an article story that includes just those individual pages. Article stories are mobile-optimized and ready to link directly to in your marketing content. Promote the article story with social media posts to focus your marketing and engage readers on their smartphones, with scroll-ready content!

11. Post Issuu-created social stories to Instagram and Facebook linking back to your lookbook.

Issuu helps you engage your audience like never before by turning your awesome flipbook content into interactive visual stories that are perfectly formatted to share on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. In a few quick steps, our social story creator makes it easy to select images and text from your flipbook to create social stories with multiple screens. By utilizing your flipbook content you are saving time, but still creating a fresh asset to engage customers in a different channel and new format. 

12. Track your content stats including reads, impressions, and page views.

Issuu Statistics delivers insights to help you understand who is consuming and interacting with your content, and how it is performing. Check out your Issuu dashboard for up-to-date information on impressions, reads, read-time, clicks, and more — filter by publication or even by specific page. Generate charts and graphs to share in reporting including filtering by content type, geographic location, and more.

13. Use Issuu analytics to optimize your holiday marketing campaign.

Make data-driven decisions about your content to drive reader engagement, subscriptions, and know what products, links, and messages drive the most traffic and sales. Continue to optimize your campaign and content using Issuu Statistics as your guide.

14. Pat yourself on the back and enjoy a holiday treat for a job well done!

You did it! Your multi-channel marketing campaign is live and doing its job to engage customers, generate new leads, and drive sales for your organization. Grab something peppermint, pumpkin spice, or gingerbread flavored to celebrate!  

Content marketing on Issuu all year long

The holiday season is a great time to launch a unique holiday marketing campaign, but it is not the only time of year that this marketing checklist is useful. As you put together your 2022 marketing plan and campaigns, don’t forget to reference this checklist for launching successful content marketing all year long. Make sure to keep Issuu on your list of “must-have” marketing tools for the new year as well. Focus on building a robust marketing technology (martech) stack that helps you accomplish more and save time while producing even more results from your marketing efforts. Issuu is the perfect addition to your martech stack to enhance your content marketing while also increasing productivity with all the content creation and distribution tools. 

Stand out and sell more this holiday season when you join Issuu today. On Issuu you can create beautiful and festive holiday content and distribute everywhere.