There are two types of marketing and sales teams in the world – those who passionately claim you can’t sell anything in the last week of the year because everyone is on vacation, and those who claim it’s the best week to close deals.
Our opinion? It depends… on your product, target audience, and other variables. But either way, we recommend not giving up on the last week of the year. 💪
We’ve already shared some common myths about B2B holiday marketing (and why you should question when someone says it’s a waste of time and effort). In that spirit, let’s drill down even further – specifically, to the last week of December.
If you’re selling to countries that don’t celebrate Christmas or New Year’s, this is a good time to target them. And even in countries that do celebrate, not everyone takes a week-long vacation. Depending on the seniority of your ICP, they may be more likely to be at the office. And they will actually have more time than usual to open emails, read articles, and research products for the new year. We have run successful webinars in the last week of the year, and had a lot of leads who were at the office with plenty of time to listen in.
It’s not too late to plan marketing campaigns for the last week of the year that can help close 2023 deals faster and get you on the right track for pipeline creation in 2024.
Here are our battle-tested ideas for marketing campaigns that you can plan, run, and see results from before the year’s end.
- Trends from the previous year, predictions for the next one. Go beyond the obvious topics that everyone will cover. Think interviews with key industry personas and data journalism (data analysis relevant for your industry, preferably based on your own proprietary data). These can set you apart and make distribution easier. Distribute these wide and deep across PR, email, social, and your website.
- Survey. Send your audience a survey about industry trends, 2024 goals, and 2023 surprises. This is one of our favorite campaigns to run, and Q4 is an excellent time for it. You can then package the results of the survey (ChatGPT is great at synthesizing survey results to help you get started) as another piece of meaningful content in Q1 and beyond.
- Customer referrals. A lot of our clients have referral campaigns with prizes or incentives that we promote throughout the year. Q4 is a great time for a final push. You can build a message like “help a friend start off the year right (with our product),” or offer a special incentive for the end of the year.
- Awards / “Best Of.” Share the best examples of customers using your product. Splash’s “Hall of Fame” is a cool example.
The bottom line
Don’t underestimate the attention span of your audience during the last week of the year – particularly if your ICP is not the Fortune 500 CISO on family vacation, but instead the young CMO of a mid-size firm. Look for channels that inspire your prospects to take action, such as surveys and referrals. Lastly, don’t be afraid to get sentimental – “Best Of” & “Year in Review” content is easy and effective. Here’s to running a couple of quick campaigns to close out the year with a bang, and keeping the momentum going for 2024.
