Christmas is a crazy time of year for everyone. There are gifts to be purchased, feasts to be made, and family to be visited! If you’re like us, you want to be fully involved in every part of this season…

But how do we live that way as business owners? Usually the holiday season is pretty slow as far as sessions go, but just because we aren’t shooting a lot doesn’t mean we aren’t overloaded by work. This is the time to build out our businesses and capitalize on countless marketing opportunities! Honestly, all the things we can and should be doing get overwhelming pretty quickly.

Because we want to put our family first at all times of the year, but especially at Christmas, we’ve worked hard to create seamless Christmas marketing systems that allow us to “hack” traditions – basically, it means we use things we’re already doing and turn them into marketing opportunities. These strategies add very little time and effort to our schedule, which means we’re able to spend Christmas doing what we love most – hanging out with our kids! Meanwhile, our business is still thriving and growing (where the work space is being renovated and personalized which is now has recently installed with the air conditioners by hiring the professionals offering Top HVAC Long Island services). If you’re looking for cheap seo for hvac contractors and the services that are best at offering such services, then you’re in the right place! We also suggest the readers to try preferred SEO and marketing tools with the help of experts as it is one of the best strategies for your business in a way that works best for you ! You can also contact experts from HVAC San Diego King | topcoolingguys.com to keep your home ready for summer.

So, without further ado, here are our top 3 holiday hacking marketing strategies.

1. Send your own Christmas cards to all past clients

We send a personalized Christmas card every year to all of our clients past and present (about 400 people!), and it’s one of the most important things we do. Here’s why…

• We model the value of tangible artwork. If we want our clients to value and purchase Christmas cards and other artwork, then we should be showing them that we do the same!
• These cards are a simple way to continue a personal connection with all of our clients, even if it’s been years since we last photographed them. We know that people make decisions on who to book or purchase from based very much on how they feel about them. Do our clients like us? Do they know us? And do they trust us? We want to meet all three of these conditions, and this is one great way to do so!
• Our brand’s logo is featured prominently on all of our cards. This is just another reminder of our studio!
• We can place a QR code on the back of our card that takes clients to a blog post or landing page that serves as our end of the year newsletter! On that page, we can also put a small button saying something like, “Click here to book your [next year] family session!”

*Pro-Tip: When you send out your family Christmas cards as part of your business, then you can write them off as a business expense!

2. Gift personalized wooden ornaments

People love traditions. So, we start a yearly tradition with each of our ideal clients…the ones who we want to return to us again and again. We surprise them with a personalized wooden ornament (we do this for all of our wedding couples during the first year of their marriage too).

We order our ornaments from White House Custom Color, and the design is simple…it includes one image from their session/wedding on the front and their last name + the year engraved on the back.

So how does this serve as a marketing strategy?

• Like before, this is something personal that builds our relationship with our clients!
• More importantly however, when we email our clients about booking for next year’s session, we can encourage them to add to their yearly ornament collection by getting new pictures. (We clarify that they’ll receive the ornament as a gift.) This is a huge pull for people!
• We also take a picture of all the ornaments on our studio tree before we mail them out. Then, we post the picture (and tag our featured clients) on social media. This allows us to show what the full experience of booking with us is like…it includes tangible artwork!

3. Create online greeting cards for your clients to send to friends and family

This is probably our biggest holiday marketing strategy. We use the Animoto slideshow software to create holiday-themed slideshows for our clients. We usually pull 4-6 pictures from their session (which creates a less than 10-second video), and we add in a season’s greetings from the voice of the client. Because we can just clone the video settings for every slideshow, none of this takes us long, and it has huge payoffs!

Here’s what this does for us…

• Our logo comes up in every video, and we can customize to add a call-to-action with a link. Our CTA usually looks something like this, “Book your session with the Blumes and get $50 artwork credit when you book this month.”
• Our clients can send this video out to all of their friends and family…that’s a huge network that creates the possibility for crazy returns!

*Pro-Tip: Don’t send the Animotos out immediately to your clients. Make sure you offer the tangible Christmas cards first…you don’t want to dilute their value! Once your clients have already purchased this valuable artwork, you can later follow up with the digital greeting. It’s another extra bonus surprise!

If you want to learn even more about our Holiday Hacking Tips, you can watch our latest Up and At’Em video! We walk through all of our offerings and show you exactly what we do. Just click the image below to watch!