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Discover How to Boost Your Thanksgiving Marketing Campaigns Successfully
Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that is often associated with quality family time and great food. Oh, and who can forget the turkey. Moreover, it is the day when people consider the things they are grateful for. Capitalizing on the holiday’s emotions, businesses come up with great Thanksgiving marketing ideas designed to get people into the spirit of things.
But if everyone is following the same script, how can your business stand out? Well, there are several ways that you can capitalize on the power of Thanksgiving to give your business a boost. For some businesses, it can be a way of promoting their brand as more consumer centric, while for others it may be a mode of boosting sales.
No matter what way you prefer, you need to ensure that your marketing strategy casts a wide net in order to cover a wide range of target consumers. Let’s discover some of the most popular ways to boost the impact of your Thanksgiving marketing plans, and check out some examples of famous brands and their own Thanksgiving strategies.
Thanksgiving Marketing Ideas – Consumer Associations with the Holiday & Their Role
There are a few styles of imagery associated with the Thanksgiving holiday, just like there are for Christmas or Easter. For Thanksgiving, people commonly associate the holiday with big family dinners, specifically a turkey dinner with all the fixings, a cornucopia, pilgrim hats, and of course, the eponymous turkey itself.
Thanksgiving is a holiday that is all about being thankful for life’s blessings, and sharing those blessings with the less fortunate and those in need. That means that it is a great time to implement some charitable branding ideas. For example, some retail grocery stores allow their employees, especially those at the lower end of the food chain, to buy products like food items etcetera, at unbelievably low prices as a way of helping them out.
Other businesses organize food banks or Thanksgiving dinner handouts for the less privileged in order to include those in the festivities of the season. Even the various soup kitchens see the number of their donations and volunteers go up around the time of Thanksgiving, as people feel the urge to help others and do some community good.
If your business is looking for a way to connect with the local community, why not use the season and make your mark by doing something charitable? The top branding services providers will tell you that there is no better way to earn a community’s trust than to share with them in a time joy and festivity.
Approaching the concept of Thanksgiving from another angle, we can say that the holiday is about caring, sharing your bounties with your friends, family, and neighbors. And a smart marketer can create Thanksgiving promotion ideas centered around this shared experience.
Let’s say you own and manage a company that makes food storage containers, like Tupperware boxes. Why not create a campaign targeting young professionals who would likely be coming back from thanksgiving dinners with leftovers. Similarly, a restaurant or frozen TV dinner manufacturer can target consumers who live alone but would love to enjoy a classic Thanksgiving turkey dinner.
There are many ways a business can mold their marketing plan according to the different needs of consumers around Thanksgiving. However, there is a big question there; does your business need a specific Thanksgiving marketing plan?
Why Does Your Brand Need Awesome Thanksgiving Marketing Campaigns?
Now this is a big question that needs answering before we get on with discovering some of the top Thanksgiving marketing ideas for our business.
Do you think your business needs a marketing strategy for Thanksgiving? If yes, then why?
For starters, as we discussed earlier, Thanksgiving is the season for sharing and thanking the Lord for his blessings. It is a time to come together as a family and as a community and celebrate the bounties of life. And as a business, it can be of huge benefit if you can harness that sentiment into your marketing plans.
People today require a lot more from brands than just a working product. Consumers today have a higher social and emotional investment, and prefer to do business with brand that share their values and understand their needs. You’ll often see brands engaging in community events as part of their Christmas marketing or Halloween marketing ideas, as a way to connect with their target market.
Therefore, it is a great opportunity for a business to create an emotional or societal bond with their consumers, to create loyal and long lasting relationships. That is why your business needs a Thanksgiving marketing plan.
Ten Awesome Thanksgiving Marketing Ideas to Give Your Brand a Holiday Boost
Now that you know the importance of creating and using Thanksgiving marketing plans, you might be wondering how to take these generic Thanksgiving marketing ideas and uplift their impact. Now, there are many different ways to ensure that your marketing idea is unique or sufficiently different from the other brands.
So, let’s take a look ten of the most popular ways on how to create a branding strategy that attracts and converts.
Create Thanksgiving-themed Newsletters and Email Templates
Many people feel that flyers are an outdated mode of marketing, especially since the dawn of the digital age. However, in many areas, and especially with the older demographics, flyers still have a sizable impact on market awareness. Email newsletters, especially around the time of the holidays, can serve the same purpose, albeit digitally.
Let’s say that you email your regular customers a Thanksgiving card, wishing them a great holiday. You might also include a discount code with the email that could be redeemed for a number of different items in your store, as a way to reward their loyalty to your business. You could also mention any upcoming deals and sales on specific, high-demand items, for events such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and more. Essentially, you can use many of the common flyer design tips to create a successful newsletter.
This is a great way to promote your business and offer a personalized experience to appeal to the masses, boosting your brand loyalty.
Arrange a Thanksgiving-themed Contest
Contests are another great way to market your brand or business. For one, they can boost engagement and traffic on your social media handles and website. Moreover, they can also be used to collect and use user-generated content or UGC, one of the greatest brand marketing assets today.
For starters, contests can drive traffic to your social media handles and websites. This is a great option for businesses who plan to increase their user base allowing them exposure to a wide array of users. And when combined with a strong lead conversion strategy, this can boost your followers quite drastically.
Secondly, it can also be a great way to boost brand loyalty. The contest can be in the form of a raffle, with a few winners being awarded something Thanksgiving-related. This will promote your brand, and at the same time attract consumers to it too.
Moreover, it can also be a great way to collect user-generated content. Let’s take the example of the same grocery store discussed above. During the Thanksgiving holidays, many people either are hosting the Thanksgiving dinner, or are invited to one. In either case, side dishes are very important, almost as important as the actual turkey itself.
But people don’t want to bring or make the same old side dishes. They want something new, exciting. Something that would wow the other guests. A smart business owner would ask their customers to share pictures of their favorite side dishes they made, along with the recipes, on to the store’s social media handles, for a prize for the person with the likes at the end of the day.
Not only would it boost engagement, but it would also make the brand a part of the consumers’ conversation, something that could benefit a business hugely.
Show Your Spirit of the Season by Highlighting Your Community Support Programs
Thanksgiving and Christmas are two holidays where the spirit of giving is at its peak. That is especially true for Thanksgiving, which is associated with celebrating the bounties of the annual fall harvest. As a business, you can connect with the locals and stand out from the crowd by using this holiday as a way to give back to the community.
Giveaways, community dinners, soup kitchens, and major discounts are some of the best ways a business can give back to the community. Now, we understand that many businesses do not have the finances to cater to such events. So what can they do?
Well, they can band together with other local brands and businesses, or even individuals, to do such events. These kinds of co-branding ideas are also very successful for new brands looking to make their mark in a new market.
Moreover, established brands can also use their brand power to encourage people to donate for a worthy cause. Food banks, clothing donation, and many such Thanksgiving marketing ideas and campaigns can be managed successfully by brands with established and loyal user bases. That is another way that a brand can give back to the community.
Update Your Brand Visuals for Some Thanksgiving Panache
This may be one of the simplest yet effective marketing ideas for specific holidays. For events like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, or Thanksgiving, introducing a limited-time festive brand graphics set can be quite successful at boosting brand recognition.
It can be as little as adding a turkey in a pilgrim hat hiding behind your logo, or a simple cornucopia hidden somewhere within your design. It doesn’t matter what you choose, if your choice matches the aesthetics of your target market.
However, one point of order to note here. Some imagery, such as that depicting the pilgrims can be offensive to consumers from certain ethnic backgrounds. Therefore, you need to ensure that you research your target market before implementing such customizations.
One of the greatest examples of customizing brand graphics for special events can be that of VLC player’s logo. Each year, as December rolls by, VLC player’s orange traffic cone starts to sport a floppy Santa hat. Its subtle, yet a great easter egg for those looking for such tiny details.
Do Not Forget Paid Social Media Marketing
With so much competition on holidays like Thanksgiving or Christmas, it can be hard for a brand to make its voice heard among the crowd. So what does a brand have to do to mitigate that?
Well, they can set aside a budget for paid marketing strategies. Social media ads, search engine ads, and even video ads on YouTube, can all be a great way to make yourself heard by the user. You can combine paid marketing campaigns with other strategies like raffles, discount code giveaways, and more for a larger impact.
This way, you can ensure that your brand stands out and reaches the right consumers during the holiday marketing rush, and manages to drive traffic to your business.
Create and Promote Thanksgiving-related Offerings
This one should be an obvious one, and many brands do use it to great benefit. Businesses can create special products to commemorate the event. How about a gravy boat that is shaped like a turkey? Or a casserole dish with little turkeys in pilgrim hats running around the sides. Alternatively, if you have an eCommerce store, you may even promote thanksgiving-related items in your inventory.
This one should be an obvious one, and many brands do use it to great benefit. Businesses can create special products to commemorate the event. How about a gravy boat that is shaped like a turkey? Or a casserole dish with little turkeys in pilgrim hats running around the sides.
Similarly, businesses can also create content that connects their offerings with the holiday. A business that specializes in furnishings and decorative pieces may create decorating guides for your Thanksgiving parties. Food companies and businesses may offer popular recipes for the convenience of their consumers.
Essentially, you would be connecting the idea of Thanksgiving with your brand in the minds of the consumers, something that could be of great benefit if done the right way.
Offer Long-Lasting Deals to Ensure More Consumers are Able to Avail Them
The holiday season is often so hectic that people find it difficult to shop properly, thus failing to capitalize on those deals. This forces them to look for brands that still offer some sort of holiday specials, in order to finish their shopping.
As a business, you can become that brand by offering long-term deals that allow more consumers to avail them, rather than just those who manage to do it during the holidays. For example, most people start planning their thanksgiving weeks in advance. Therefore, if your brand starts offering its thanksgiving deals at the start of the month, rather than during thanksgiving week itself, you will have more consumers patronizing your brand compared to the competition.
Promote the Donation of a Percentage of Proceeds to Entice Consumers to Spend More
The holiday season sees the highest amount of donations and volunteers looking to help the poor. The advent of the day to thank god for his blessings make people think about helping others in need around them.
You can capitalize on that, as well as do some good within the community, by offering to donate a specific percentage of your proceeds during the holiday season to a local food bank or charity. Not only would this establish a stronger community connection with your brand, but would also encourage customers to spend more, in order to contribute to the cause.
Have Some Fun in Your Postings and Avoid Sounding Salesy
The holiday season comes with brands left and right promoting their deals and products. This can quickly tire and bore the consumers, to the point where they start to actively ignore any flyers, emails, and promotional messages.
So how can your brand promote its deals during this time? Well, what you can do is take a more laidback, humorous approach. Rather than structuring your promotional content to sound salesy, go with some fun. Not only would your brand stand out to your consumer this way, but also it would subtly turn that feeling of happiness into a loyal connection with the brand.
Focus Your Marketing on the Entire Holiday Season Rather Than Individual Events
Starting from Halloween, the holiday season has back-to-back shopping events, be it thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas/Hanukkah. This means that many businesses find it hard to create and promote each individual event separately. And even the consumers find it difficult to keep up with all the short-lived, highly lucrative shopping events, which makes the shopping experience stressful rather than fulfilling.
Therefore, rather than market and promote these events individually, you can turn it into a long-single shopping event. This would allow consumers to properly plan out their shopping, as well as ensuring that your brand is able to fulfill those consumer needs properly.
This way, you can ensure that your customers have a great holiday shopping experience, and are able to create meaningful connections with your brand.
Examples of Great Thanksgiving Marketing Campaigns by Top Brands
Whenever there is an event or a holiday that provides an opportunity for brands to create seasonal marketing strategies for consumers, some brands are known to lead the others in this regard.
Let’s take a look at some of the most popular Thanksgiving campaigns.
Coca Cola as the Blessings and Bounty of Thanksgiving
Coca Cola is known for its seasonal branding campaigns, especially the polar bear campaign for the Christmas season. Similarly, Coca Cola has also developed some great campaigns for Easter and Thanksgiving. One of the more popular and unique ones was the cornuCokia marketing campaign, which featured a cornucopia filed with bright red cans of the soda.
They’ve also used the “Share a Coke” campaign for Thanksgiving, where the bottles with personalized with names are used as place settings on the dinner table. All in all, a great amalgamation of Thanksgiving imagery and the Coke brand.
REI and the Art of Pulling a 180 with Your Holiday Marketing
The outdoors brand REI went a different way with Thanksgiving campaigns. As most retail businesses rely on Black Friday for the season’s sales and market accordingly, you would assume that REI would do the same. But not so.
REI eschewed the norm and decided to create a campaign called #OptOutside. The campaign called for taking the day off instead of shopping, and exploring the great outdoors. And the campaign was a success. By standing out, the brand managed to mark its mark with the consumers, and it wasn’t long before others started to jump onboard with the trend.
Crate & Barrel Understanding Consumer Pains
As we mentioned earlier, the holiday season can be highly stressful. And even though thanksgiving itself it highly enjoyable, the lead up to can be a bit too much for many. For people who are hosting a thanksgiving dinner, there are many different elements to stress them out. They include things such as doing the grocery shopping on time, getting the right-sized turkey, overcooking the turkey, not having a desired side dish, and much more.
Helping consumers with one or more of these stresses is a great way for brands to establish themselves, and a great way to tweak your thanksgiving marketing ideas. Crate & Barrel, a company that sells cookware among other things, markets their products by placing them front-and-center during the holiday promotions. The idea is that if the consumers have the right cookware and tools, such as meat thermometers and roasting dishes, it would help them with some of their stresses.
Moreover, offering additional benefits such as guaranteed delivery before thanksgiving, or free return if not suitable to consumer needs, and more, make the deal all the sweeter.
Rockets of Awesome Showing Why the Early Bird Gets the Worm
As we talked about earlier, many consumers start their holiday shopping early to avoid the last minute holiday stress. And that often results in those people losing out on many holiday deals due to their preemptive planning.
Brands can target these early birds by starting their holiday deals in early November, rather than at the start of the thanksgiving week. That allows them to tap an ignored market, ensuring that you can convert more consumers throughout the month than your consumers during the holiday rush. This is a technique used by Rockets of Awesome, a clothing store, who starts promoting its thanksgiving marketing campaigns the first week of November.
Material Proving How Fast (& Free) Shipping Makes for Loyal Customers
For most of the year, we consumers would prefer free shipping over everything else. The idea of saving a few bucks over our shipping would be a great incentive to patronize a business. However, the holiday season changes our priorities a little bit.
Let’s say when planning your thanksgiving marketing ideas, you discover that in order to retain a profit, your company can offer either free shipping, or quick shipping. So what would be the best thing to offer during the holiday campaigns, to ensure that more people interact with and patronize your business?
Well, for consumers shopping early in the season, free shipping would be more popular. However, for last minute thanksgiving shoppers, you need to create thanksgiving marketing campaigns that offer expedited shipping, albeit at a small charge. At that time, consumers would be glad to spend a little extra if it meant that they would get their items on time. And that is exactly what Material, a cookware company, is capitalizing on.
Brooklinen with the Importance of Personal Touch in Business
Sometimes, a brand doesn’t want to offer deals or sales for the thanksgiving season. However, they would still like to reach out to their consumers and wish them well on the holidays. But how can they do that?
Well, one way to do it, as followed by Brooklinen, is to send a holiday-themed email from the company, in this case the CEO, thanking their consumers. This example from the company’s 2021 campaign shows the CEO professing their gratitude towards the loyal consumers, while telling them to enjoy the holidays with their loved ones.
This is one of the best thanksgiving marketing ideas to add a touch of personalization to your brand, which makes the consumer-business connection stronger.
People Also Ask (FAQs)
| 1. How can I market on Thanksgiving in a fun way? There are a several ways to market your business on Thanksgiving including: – Connecting with popular influencers – Partnering with another brand for a seasonal collaboration – Create a custom greeting video for your consumers – Hold a contest or a giveaway |
| 2. What is a good slogan for Thanksgiving? Some great slogans for Thanksgiving can include: – There’s always room for seconds – Pumpkin, spice, and a whole lot nice – This year, what are you thankful for? |
| 3. What are some buzzwords for Thanksgiving? Some popular words used with Thanksgiving include: – Gobble Gobble – Tofurkey – Black Friday – Cyber Monday – Cornucopia |
Conclusion
In short, great Thanksgiving marketing ideas can be found all around us. However, how you choose to present those ideas to your consumers is what counts. Seasonal holidays often see people inundated with a variety of thanksgiving marketing campaigns. Therefore, if you find a way to stand out from the crowd and still manage to get your message across, then your campaign is going to be success.
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