Hey coach! Yes… YOU. Guess what? If you are reading this you are already late to the holiday marketing party. This means you need to stop and develop your strategy right now. Not next week, not next month, NOW.
You cannot afford to miss this opportunity. The holiday season accounts for 20 percent of annual sales, and it is often responsible for up to 30 percent of some businesses’ total sales.
Yeah… this is GO time.
Lucky for you, we’ve planned it all out and strategized your holiday marketing for you. Complete with calendars and step-by-step help, plus we created it just for coaches!
Who are we and why would we do all this for free? We’re Cass + Tee and our mission in life is to help coaches reach more people so they can facilitate change and impact the world. We are truly passionate about helping coaches succeed. And we know, that you know, that you need to prepare for the holidays!
We also know that you have no idea how to start. you are a coach! Your job is to help others. This online business thing is already overwhelming, the competition is fierce, and you have a lot on your plate already.
Plus… isn’t holiday marketing for e-commerce stores only? Not at all! Holiday marketing is for coaches too!
Ready? Let’s get started.
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Who This Guide is For
This guide is for any type of coach who wants to get the most of the holiday season. You are willing to:
- spend 3 to 7 days working on a holiday marketing strategy,
- brainstorm, create content, and schedule your marketing,
- make the necessary changes to your branding and social media
- and, optimize your website to get more holiday sales.
This is for you if you are not afraid of sales and you don’t have money mindset issues!
You are empowered to increase your profit, smash revenue goals, and get a piece of 2023’s projected $1.54 to $1.56 trillion in holiday sales (up 4.6% over 2022).
To do that, you understand that you need to try and have everything ready to go right now.
Sounds like you? Then you are ready to move on and get to work! Let’s go.
The Ultimate Guide to Holiday Marketing for Coaches
You have 4.5 weeks to market your coaching business as you’ve never marketed it before! From November till January 31st, more people than ever will be online looking to buy coaching services, products, and offers.
Follow our step-by-step strategy, and we promise, you’ll be READY.
Phase 1: Develop Your Strategy
Step 1: Determine your coaching promotions, deals, or special holiday offers
Before we can get started you need to figure out what type of promotions you’ll be offering this holiday season.
If you are not sure, here’s what we would suggest:
Coaching Gift Cards: Self-development is big business, and so many people are looking to gift their loved ones with tools to help them reach their greatest potential. Coaching is no exception. No matter what you sell, you need to have gift cards ready to go. Gift cards are the most desired holiday gifts — with 61 percent of people looking forward to them during the holiday season.
Percentage Off: If you are selling coaching products or services, offer a percentage off for a limited time. This is so easy to implement! Just choose a percentage, but make sure it’s something worthwhile. Shoppers want real deals, a minimum of 30 to 40% off is the norm during Black Friday or Cyber Monday. We know how expensive coaching services can be, so consider limiting the number of people who can redeem the offer, selling a 1-on-1 coaching call, OR promoting a coaching product instead of a coaching program.
Exclusive Holiday Coaching Products & Services: To stand out, you could create an exclusive coaching program, product, or service offering only available during the holiday season. This helps create a sense of urgency for your potential coaching clients. For example, if you are a health coach, you could offer a special program just for getting healthy after the holidays.
Free Shipping: Do you have a physical coaching product? Like a journal or a planner? Then offer free shipping! Those two magical words are even more valuable than a discount. Everyone loves free shipping.
Free Gift Wrapping: This is also for coaches with physical products. Offer free gift wrapping for customers who purchase from you during the holiday season. Make sure you hire seasonal staff to help and remember to choose beautiful gift wrapping that matches your branding. The gift receiver could be a future customer!
Give a percentage to a charity: Tis the season! Another creative option that leverages the spirit of giving, is giving a percentage of the proceeds you make during the holiday season to a charity of your choice that aligns with your coaching philosophy.
Remember, get creative! This is about your coaching clients, your brand, and your holiday sales goals. Choose the promotions that are created with your coaching business model in mind.
Once you’ve decided, let’s get into the holiday spirit by making seasonal tweaks to your brand.
Pro Tip – Let Your Shopping Cart Do All The Work
At Lovely Impact, we use ThriveCart as our shopping cart. It handles all of our coupons, donations, payment plans, and more. For every product we have, all we have to do is add a promotion, and it’s instantly available to our customers.
It even allows us to set up automations and trigger emails through our email marketing software.
If you are looking for a shopping cart that handles your holiday coaching promotions, we highly recommend using ThriveCart.
Features:
- Sell more with carts designed to boost conversions
- Create additional revenue with our upsells
- Increase average order value with eye-catching bump offers
- Deploy one-click upsell funnels designed to convert
- Embed your cart anywhere to capture more sales
- Seamlessly integrate with the tools you already use
Step 2: Create a holiday style guide
Did you know that 73 percent of your potential clients will choose someone new to work with during the holidays? About one in five holiday purchases will be based on impulse!
So you see… your holiday marketing needs to stand out PLUS still be a cohesive part of your everyday brand. To do that effectively, you’ll need to create a holiday style guide.
Here’s what should be considered:
- Colors: What are your brand colors and which 1 to 2 holiday colors work with them? You’ll want to use those extra holiday colors on all your holiday promotional designs.
- Fonts: What fun holiday font can you introduce that will stand out yet complement your current coaching brand fonts?
- Social Templates: When creating branded holiday images, what are the main templates that you will use? Include sizes for each platform and best practices for images.
- Photography: Will you be using holiday stock photos or conducting a holiday-themed photoshoot? Will you use a consistent filter for consistency? Will you use certain crops or a consistent negative space? Holiday borders or icons?
- Hashtags and Emojis: Are there specific holiday emojis you’ll be using in all of your content and updates? Branded hashtags for tracking user content?
You can create your holiday branding style in a Google Doc, or if you’re feeling fancy, you can also use graphic design software like Canva.
The holiday style guide is an important step for coaches! It reduces overwhelm and helps you stay consistent with your brand across all platforms.
Step 3: Create Your Holiday Editorial Calender
Okay! Let’s keep going. It’s time to get this all on a calendar. Your holiday editorial calendar will be your bible for the next 2 months.
You can use a spreadsheet, a Google calendar (our favorite), or a paper planner. Whichever you choose, add these to your calendar.
#1 Add important shopping dates.
November 2023
23 – Thanksgiving
24 – Black Friday (The day after Thanksgiving represents the start of the holiday shopping season.)
25 – Small Business Saturday (Annual tradition that promotes people shopping at small businesses.)
27 – Cyber Monday (The Monday following Thanksgiving promoted to get consumers to shop online.)
28 – Giving Tuesday. (For nonprofits, #GivingTuesday kicks off the charitable season for end-of-year giving.)
December 2023
11 – Green Monday (Yearly spike in online sales on the second Monday of December)
14 – Free Shipping Day (For those with physical products, this day is dedicated to free shipping)
24 – Christmas Eve
25 – Christmas Day
31 – New Years Eve
#2 Add promotional emails dates
Now that you’ve got all the big dates on your calendar, let’s create a schedule for sending emails to your lists and past coaching clients. Not sure what to send? Depending on your offer, here’s a simple strategy you can follow:
- 2 weeks before your promotion send an email announcing your coaching offer.
- On your coaching promotion launch day, send an email announcing its start.
- Every day, send reminder emails to stay top of mind. (We know this seems like a lot, but remember that everyone is emailing during this time, so it’s okay to email daily.)
- 2 days before your promotion ends, send a promotion ending soon reminder.
- Morning of the last day of your coaching promotion, send a last chance email reminder.
#3 Add social media dates
If you really want to increase your holiday sales, you should be sending out social media messages EVERY SINGLE DAY for the next 4.5 weeks.
Remember when we said this is for coaches who don’t have money mindset issues and are ready to take full advantage of holiday sales? This is why.
This is the biggest shopping season of the year. Consistency is important. Your potential coaching clients will be making impulse decisions! Your marketing WILL trigger sales. You can’t afford to miss a day.
However, you don’t want to overwhelm your audience with constant promotions and sales. It’s important to mix in some fun non-promotional social media posts into your strategy. As a rule, you should be promoting your offers at least 2 to 3 times per week. The rest of your content should provide value or entertain.
If you are not sure what non-promotional content to post, here are some ideas:
- Holiday quotes, memes, and jokes
- Seasonal coaching tips and strategies
- Local events and attractions that you are attending
- Holiday wishes and thanks
- Gift guides that work with your coaching niche
- Contests and Giveaways
#4 Add blog posts to the calendar
Do you have a coaching blog? If so, add your holiday-themed content to your calendar.
Again, the goal here is to provide value or entertain! You can add promotional calls to action and banners within your content.
One great blog idea is gift guides! Using your own coaching offers, products, services, or affiliate programs, publish multiple gift guides for different types of coaching clients.
You could do this once per week for 4 weeks. It’s an easy way to keep your coaching blog updated and promote your coaching offers!
Phase 2: Create & Design Holiday Content
Step 1: Write your content
Okay. Now it’s time to write the content for every single thing on your calendar. You can write it all now, write it each week before it’s due, or hire someone to write all the copy for you.
Either way, get it done. This is the hardest part for most coaches. And it is the #1 reason why marketing strategies fail. Take a weekend and write it if needed, just get it done!
Here are a few tips:
- Have a cheerful engaging tone, taking full advantage of the holiday spirit.
- Include clear calls to action. Tell your audience exactly what you want them to do. Purchase? Click below? Fill out a form? Click a link in bio? Comment? Share? Tag a friend?
- Be bold. Please don’t be shy. It’s okay to sell. It’s the holiday season. They are looking to buy. They will buy from someone, so why not you?
- Use emojis, locations, and hashtags. Hashtags help you get found. Location tagging helps you get seen locally. Emojis are fun and buyers really like them.
Pro Tip – DIY Holiday Coaching Graphics with Canva
Gone are the days where you had to hire a graphic designer to have gorgeous and eye-catching coaching marketing graphics. This holiday season, you can just use Canva. Canva has a GAZILLION holiday marketing templates ready to be customized for your coaching business. Check out some of them here >>
Don’t make this harder than it has to be! Use Canva Pro, quickly swap your colors and text, and move on to reaching your holiday marketing sales goals!
Step 2: Design graphics for your coaching content
You’ve made it to the home stretch!! Let’s design your graphics and choose the imagery for all your holiday coaching content.
First, for each thing on your calendar, choose imagery or design graphics. You can do this yourself using predesigned templates from Canva! Canva has a ton of holiday-related graphics.
Remember, what you design depends on your holiday promotional calendar and your content.
For example:
- Email content: Create email headers and email graphics,
- Promotional content: Create holiday-themed graphics or videos that emphasize your coaching offers.
- Social media content: Source holiday-themed social templates, do a holiday photoshoot or create videos.
- Blog content: Design featured images, vertical Pinterest images, in-post promotional images, and gift guide collages.
Tips:
- Make sure you create multiple sizes for sharing on multiple platforms. If you have a paid Canva Pro account, it will resize your graphics for you.
- Stick to the holiday style guide you created so everything is consistent with your brand.
- Go hard or go home. Create the best graphics you can that are beautiful, on-brand, and that stands out.
- Have fun! It’s the holidays. Embrace the joy of ending the year financially strong.
Step 3: Schedule it all
You’ve got your strategy, content, and your imagery, now it’s time to schedule it all! This is the easiest part!
- Schedule your emails: Whether you use ActiveCampaign or Convertkit, build and schedule all your emails in advance.
- Schedule your blogs: Our Showit coaching website templates use WordPress for the blogging part, which allows you to schedule your blog posts in advance.
- Schedule your social media: There are a million tools out there. Our two scheduling favorites are Tailwind or Facebook Creator Studio (Free).
Phase 3: Optimize your website for holiday shoppers
We’ve done all that work, but it won’t do you any good if the shopping experience is horrible.
Let’s fix it!
- Temporarily swap your image headers and graphics for holiday-themed ones that highlight your promotions.
- Clearly showcase holiday promotions throughout your site.
- Double-check your website speed and take steps to speed up your website. 20% of online consumers will abandon a website if pages take 3 seconds or longer to load.
- Make sure your website is mobile optimized.
- Double-check your social media links and swap for holiday-related landing pages.
- Strengthen your security by getting an SSL certificate from your hosting provider. This will add a green padlock next to your URL in the browser. This is the universal sign that a site has the highest level of security.
- Streamline checkout by testing your checkout prices and eliminating any unnecessary steps. The average abandoned shopping cart rate is 69.23 percent. To prevent that, make it as easy as possible for your consumers. We love Thrivecart for this.
- Be prepared. Hire seasonal staff for customer service issues, shipping problems, or site crashes. Better safe than sorry.
Is your coaching website not quite ready for the holidays? It’s not too late to make a swap! We offer restyling services and can get you a new coaching website ready to go in 2 weeks. Or you can buy one of our coaching website templates and add on our Website in a Week Challenge.
It’s ambitious, but if you are in a crunch, it’s totally possible!
Final Thoughts + Bonus Tips
That’s it!! You are fully prepared for the holiday marketing season.
Before we go, we’ve got a few 7 extra advanced tips for the overachievers and super hustlers:
- Temporarily add holiday keywords to your product descriptions and website content.
- Create Instagram story graphics and Reel videos to promote your holiday offers and content.
- Create multiple Pinterest graphics for your holiday offers, products, and content. Share to Pinterest and optimize the description with keywords.
- Run a retargeting ad on Facebook to target all your website visitors who may have left your site out abandoned their cat.
- Reach out to reporters, bloggers, and influencers to get your products and services placed in gift guides and featured on social media.
- Create abandoned cart emails to automatically send emails to customers who have products and offers in their carts.
- Send happy holiday cards, promotions, and emails specifically to past customers.