It’s the Tuesday after Labor Day and you just sat down at your desk, refreshed after the long weekend and ready to start preparing your brand for the upcoming holiday gifting season, the Superbowl of the annual American sales cycle.

If this is you, you’re already too late.

If you’re preparing for your brand’s first-ever holiday gifting campaign, your timeline to success should have started in May/June as you mapped out product offerings, content schedules, and sales campaigns.

If you’ve run holiday campaigns before, your campaign planning should have begun in Jan/Feb, when you sat down with your digital strategists and executive leadership to review what worked and what didn’t with the previous year’s campaign, and map out what adjustments you plan to make this year.

When I worked on the brand side, my annual holiday campaign cycle looked like this:

Jan/Feb: Analyze data, review spreadsheets, put together wrap-up presentations for executive leadership. Deep dive into every email sent, every product sold, every promotion run, every retail event. Discuss what worked, what didn’t. Make specific notes for yourself and your team on what to improve.

March/April: Put together your creative brief for this year’s campaign and develop your project roadmap. Outline visual and aesthetic styles as well as all needed content. Review and determine product mix, pricing, and COGS to set specific sales targets. Determine needed print and digital collateral. Align organic + performance media strategy. Contact + schedule creative partners, if needed.

May: Book photog + videography sessions. Outline creative needed for collateral. Determine shot lists.

June: Create + edit all holiday content. Outline the exact beats of your holiday campaign, including a comprehensive schedule for when each email or collateral piece will drop, what promotions will be included, and what products will be featured. Coordinate with production + shipping teams to ensure alignment.

July: Create + edit all collateral: gift guides, one-sheets, corporate gifting, mailers, tabletop, promotional.

August: Finalize, print, and ensure delivery of all holiday collateral. Any physical collateral should be in-house by September 1.

September: Design + build all e-commerce promotions and aligned social media content calendar. Finalize all digital media.

October: Finalize + schedule all emails in the holiday campaign series. (Always be prepared to adjust & adapt as sales data starts coming in!) Tease product drops, BFCM promotions, and catalog launches. Use promo teases to acquire new email addresses. Get your core audience of buyers, as well as new potential customers, excited about your product mix + promo offers. Larger, well-established brands should drop gifting catalogs this month, if not sooner. (Williams Sonoma dropped their first holiday email into my inbox this morning.) Smaller brands should wait until around Halloween, to generate maximum interest for less effort when the majority of buyers are thinking about gifts.

November – December: As sales data starts to roll in, review results, analyze trends, and make adjustments. If you’ve followed the schedule to this point, your campaign should be mostly on autopilot, letting you focus on oversight, monitoring, and game-day calls.

Running your holiday campaign with this level of planning and foresight allows for maximum results with minimum stress. Additionally, the freedom to monitor results as they come in, without worrying about execution, allows you to make smarter real-time decisions about how to adjust. Every season will be different; to stay competitive, you need to monitor and adapt based on current realities.

If you need support developing or monitoring your holiday campaign strategy, I invite you to get in touch. I’d love to understand what challenges you’re facing this season and see how we can help.