Holiday Content Planning Throughout The Year (Part 1)

When most marketing people say “Holiday planning” you probably think of winter holidays or maybe a few bigger ones like Valentine’s Day or Halloween.

But there are brand-relevant holidays all year long.

That doesn’t mean you need to highlight all of them (there are literally holidays every single day of the year), but you can pick the ones which are relevant to you or your business or brand and plan marketing around those.

First, how do you decide what dates to note?

• Look up holidays relevant to your brand

This could be as simple as checking the holidays on each day of the year. It could be something general to working in a professional field such as “National Boss’s Day” or “Administrative Assistant’s Day” or it could be something specific to your field like “National Ice Cream Day” or “Read A Book Day.” Maybe you’re an athlete and could do content around the Olympics or World Championships, or other events.

You can add in religious holidays or national holidays or days of awareness or anniversaries or holidays of people or events as relevant to your team and your brand.

It can also be fun to include your team’s birthdays, or workaversaries, or other days of note even if only for internal celebration.

• Create a schedule of upcoming holidays

This could be an actual calendar or a calendar app or a calendar you create in a list form or spreadsheet or planner or journal or whatever works for you. There is absolutely no right or wrong way to do this as long as you have the schedule laid out in a way you can best access and use.

Knowing the schedule plan in advance allows you to create content ahead of time and be ready to post or share marketing materials before the day of.

You can also look a month or two in advance to plan ahead and have things like sales or special promos for special days.

When you’re drowning in the day-to-day it can be really hard to try to think about planning the future, but taking a few minutes or an hour even just once a month to sit down and do some planning will let you create some navigation for yourself so you’re not just constantly playing catch up!

• Create a schedule for creating & scheduling posts

  This could be once per week or once per month or once every three months or whatever works for you. It is important to note that most scheduling tools limit advance scheduling to 30 days in advance, but you can always sit down and create the content if only to have it ready to schedule within the 30 day window as scheduling can be pretty quick once you have it all set.

This gets said a lot because it is so important but you need to do what works for you. Some people can just post as the content is ready, some prefer it scheduled throughout the week, or through the month. There is no right or wrong way to do this.

• Set deadlines and use timers as needed

Designing graphics, writing content, filming and editing videos - all of this can be really time consuming either in the “I can’t do this” blank screen phase, or falling down the rabbit hole of looking for ideas.

Set a deadline for yourself and set a timer as needed. Maybe you just write for 10 minutes, or you give yourself 30 minutes of scroll time. Or you spend 20 minutes on a graphic.

You can always make something better, and endless revisions are possible for anything. It just has to be good enough to be something worthy of your brand and the message you want to put out into the world, and sometimes overthinking doesn't actually make it any better.

So see what you can get done in a set time frame, and as you get more familiar with everything you’ll get faster at it too!

• Don’t beat yourself up if you miss something!

Forgot to post for a holiday? Missed National Cookie Day and you’re a bakery? OK. There will be another holiday to share, or to run a sale or special event for. You can not change the past, but you can keep moving forward and plan better for the future.

Go back to the last blog post about giving yourself some grace if you need to read that, acknowledge that you messed up, work to reorganize your life so that you don’t keep messing up, and if you do just fix it then.

You 100% are not going to go through your entire career without ever making a single mistake (if only because you’ll learn and then you’ll go back to something and realize you could have done it better and that’s OK). So if you mess up, fine. Try not to do it again and just keep going!

Now, coupled with sharing your story, you can share events and holidays and anniversaries and special days that are meaningful to your audience, you can connect with people and maybe even plan sales or your own events around special days connected to your business or brand!

Looking for what type of content you can make? Be sure to check out Part 2!