
Christmas Marketing Campaign for Malaysian Businesses: A Complete Guide
Christmas. 🎄 The season of giving is here!
Customers are rushing to buy gifts and presents online and offline. 🎁
This means: it’s a great time to launch a Christmas Marketing campaign! 🚀
During this festive period, an example of your target audience could be: Christians living in Malaysia.
This group of people would be actively buying gifts and presents, especially for church events.
In fact, your target audience doesn’t have to stop there. It can also extend to non-Christians buying gifts for their loved ones too.
My point: Whenever there is sales or promotion in Malaysia, you can bet there’ll be people flocking to buy their needs and wants.
So, don’t miss your chance to grow your business this festive season!
I know, coming up with a Christmas Marketing campaign plan can be hard. That’s why I’ve already done all the hard work for you in this guide.
This guide contains all you need to know about launching a Christmas Marketing campaign in Malaysia. 🇲🇾
If you’re interested to learn more, continue reading below.
The Ultimate Christmas Marketing Campaign Strategy: Malaysian Edition
How to Develop A Christmas Marketing Campaign in Malaysia: Step-by-Step.
Step 1: Identify your customer’s behaviour during Christmas
This first step will lay the foundation for your Christmas Marketing campaign. So, you’ll need to make sure you get this right.
The safest way to start is: creating a customer persona. If you’ve already created one, skip to Step 2 below.
But if you haven’t, I’d really encourage you to continue reading this section.
For starters, it’s good to create a customer persona because it helps you to predict how your customers will behave during Christmas. 🤔
Let me name a few benefits of creating a customer persona:
- Content Personalisation
Creating a customer persona helps you to develop a better content strategy for your Christmas Marketing campaign.This is because: you’re more focused on who is your ideal customer in the Malaysian market. As such, you can create better content to attract them for Christmas. 🧲
Above all else, a customer persona helps to keep your brand messages in sync across different Marketing channels such as your blogs, videos, newsletters, and website.
- Customer Retention
Having a customer persona also helps you identify your customer’s pain points and troubles more accurately. 🔍As such, you can use their pain points to create better content to address their needs, which could potentially turn them into loyal raving fans of your products.
Moreover, your customers are more likely to come back to you even after your Christmas Marketing campaign, especially if they feel you understand their needs.
So, this is your chance to use your campaign to improve your customer retention rates.
- Customer Value
This refers to how much value your customer attaches to your products or services.Achieving customer value all begins in your customer’s mind. Your brand needs to occupy a space in their mind.
To get there, you’ll need to know everything about your customer, inside and out.
That’s why a customer persona is helpful because when you know your audience well enough, you are able to influence their perception of your brand and possibly attach more value to your products.
Step 2: Develop your Christmas theme and Marketing message
At this stage, you’ve already created a customer persona for your Christmas Marketing campaign.
Now’s the time to craft a Christmas theme and Marketing message which appeals to your customer persona.
Your campaign’s message should reflect your brand’s values, and express such values clearly to your target audience. 👨👩👧
Pro Tip: The key to crafting a brilliant campaign message is to observe what values your customers treasure, and then use those same values in your campaign.
In other words: you tell your audience what they want to hear. 👂Now comes the important part.
Avoid focusing only on: ‘Data-driven Marketing’. This is a big mistake a lot of businesses make.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying data isn’t important.
In fact, data is very important because it uncovers new insights about your customer’s behaviour.
But relying solely on data and statistics to guide your Marketing actions is a huge red flag! 🚩
Data cannot completely substitute creativity.
When creating a Christmas Marketing campaign, you’ll need both data and creativity. You need to develop a campaign which is relatable to your target audience.
You can achieve that by making your campaign message sound like a human. Appeal to their emotions like a human, not a faceless corporation in Malaysia.
I’ll show you how to do that very quickly. 🙂
Here are some tips to consider when crafting your Christmas campaign message:
- Your audience’s needs
- Your brand values
- What makes your brand different from competitors
- What value does your product offer to customers
Step 3: Update your Marketing collateral
What’s the reason for updating your Marketing collateral?
Two words: Customer Experience.
Don’t just slap a Christmas decoration on your product and call it Christmas.
You’ll come across as very insincere to your customers. You want to give them a special experience. Let me give you a relatable example.
Say it’s your best friend’s birthday today, and you bought him a gift but you left it unwrapped.
Now, compare this to another situation where you bought him a beautifully wrapped gift with a red ribbon, sprinkled with rainbow glitter. 🎁
Which gift do you think is more well presented? I think you already know the answer. 😉
The point is: to make your products presentable.
That’s why it’s important to update your Marketing collateral. It helps to evoke festive feelings within your customer, and eventually improves their user experience.
“A happy customer is the best advertisement for your brand.” 😃
Besides that, updating your Marketing collateral also shows you have a commitment to quality.
If your Christmas packaging design is stunningly beautiful, it will create a sense of exclusivity around your product.
In short: Give your customers the greatest user experience as they unbox your products on Christmas day.
Lastly, don’t forget to decorate your website!
Remember, your website is your online shop. So, decorate it as if it’s your physical shop. 🏪
Customise its background with a Christmas theme by adding stunning colours such as: red, green and white.
(Don’t forget to add Christmas elements to your logo!)
Step 4: Promote seasonal products
Focus on one or two products you’d like to promote.
But pay attention to the products which are commonly bought by customers.
Promote these in-demand products during your Christmas Marketing campaign. Avoid promoting too many seasonal products. ❄️
Doing this will only overwhelm your customers and slow down the effectiveness of their decision making.
On your website, you can make it easy for your customers to find all your seasonal products in one web page.
Pro Tip: Create a digital catalogue to promote your seasonal products.
Other ideas: If you’re worried about your Christmas Marketing campaign budget, you can create a product gift bundle instead of giving out insane discounts.
Doing the above helps you to avoid cutting too deep into your profit margin. Moreover, you can get your customers to buy more than they were originally planning to.
Bonus: In your gift bundle, you can add a mystery box for your customers who purchase it. 🔮
It’s a good idea because your customers will get random products in the mystery box at a reasonable price.
This will definitely make your customers excited to know what’s inside the mystery box, and may encourage them to buy the gift bundles.
If you want to go the extra mile for your customers: you can also launch Christmas Marketing campaigns for last-minute shoppers.
If you’re targeting this group of people: you should use words that will create a sense of urgency to influence them to buy faster. ⏰
For example, you can use these subject lines in your Email Marketing strategy:
- The Best Christmas Gift: 30% OFF (TODAY ONLY)
- ORDER NOW: Get Your Gift Before Christmas!
- CLAIM YOUR CHRISTMAS COUPON HERE!
- GET FREE SHIPPING!
Step 5: Focus on customer retention
Recently, I was chatting with a business friend over lunch. We talked about business and work as usual.
Then I asked him: “What’s the ultimate goal of your Christmas Marketing campaign?”
He said: “It’s sales, of course!”
I replied: “What if I told you there’s something better than sales?”
He paused for a moment with a curious look on his face. 🤔
Finally, he answered: “What else could be more important than sales? Don’t you start a business to make revenue?”
I said: “There’s something better. It’s customer retention.”
Successful customer retentions helps you get more sales. 📈
This means: you’ll be receiving continuous and repeated sales from the same customer on a consistent basis.
Isn’t this exciting news for your business?! It’s so much easier to retain existing customers than acquire new ones. 😌
They’ve bought your products from you before. So, they already trust the quality of your products compared to newer customers.
Yes, acquiring new leads is great, but you shouldn’t forget about retaining existing customers.
These are the people who will help to keep your business going in the long-run. 🏃♂️
If you’re interested, you can start improving your customer retention today by creating a customer loyalty program.
Such programs are beneficial for your business because: it helps to improve your relationship with the customers.
Pro Tip: When creating a customer loyalty program, you should look out for potential ways to improve their customer experience.
For example, you can offer them something extra in relation to whatever products or services your business already provides.
Basically, you need to give them something exclusive so that they’ll feel valued, in order to continue buying from you.
With a strong customer loyalty program, you’ll potentially see repeated purchases and a steady rise in your customer retention rates.
There you go! These are all the 5 steps you need to know, in order to launch a Christmas Marketing campaign in Malaysia.
I’ll now go on to explain a few Content Marketing tactics you can use for your Christmas Marketing campaign below.
How Can I Promote My Business For Christmas in Malaysia?
If you’ve read this far, you’ve now gained some basic understanding of how to create a Christmas Marketing campaign in Malaysia.
Right now, I’ll show you some popular Christmas Content Marketing tactics you can use this December.
Christmas Content Marketing Tactics for A Malaysian Market
In addition to that, I’ll explain when you should post them and recommend some of our favourite tools to help you bring these ideas to life.
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Christmas Videos
It’s no secret, people love Christmas videos. Christmas-themed videos give people a sense of joy, warmth, and thanksgiving.
Videos are SO powerful, I’d argue even animals love them too! 🐶
On a serious note, here are some tangible benefits of Video Marketing for your business:
- Greater brand awareness.
- Gets your target audience’s attention.
- Influence the buyer’s decisions.
- Helps your business to be found on Google.
- Helps your target audience with better brand recall.
For these reasons, video is great for Christmas Marketing campaigns. So, don’t wait. Use videos to tell your brand story today!
If you need some video ideas for your Christmas Marketing campaign, I could suggest a few such as:
- Christmas sales promotion videos
- Christmas DIY gifts videos (how-to guides)
- Christmas countdown videos
- Christmas storytelling videos
- Happy New Year videos
Moving on, I’ll show you an awesome Christmas storytelling video from Heathrow Airport, United Kingdom. 🇬🇧
Hopefully, this video will inspire you, because it certainly inspired me! 😊
The video’s name is: Heathrow Airport – The Heathrow Bear Returns.
It’s entire plot is centred around family and the Christmas spirit, which evokes a lot of warm emotions from viewers.
It’s a video that many of us can relate with, because we all have families. Anyway, I won’t spoil the video for you.
You can watch it here:
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Create Videos
People love FREE GIFTS. 🎁 That’s why contests and giveaways are excellent ideas to promote your Christmas Marketing campaign.
I know what you’re thinking: “But how does my business benefit from giving away free products? 😩” Don’t worry, I will get to that now.
Running Christmas contests and giveaway has many benefits. For example, it can help you to:
- Gain new customers, and grow your customer base.
- Boost your website traffic.
- Christmas countdown videos
- Increase the number of your social media following.
- Increase your social media page’s: reach, views and engagements.
The best thing about Christmas contests and giveaways: it generates hype about your brand.
In other words, it starts a conversation for people to talk about your brand.
When there’s a big hype about your contests or giveaways, it may entice your audience to try out your products.
If they like it, they’ll start sharing about your products with friends and family.
When there’s FREE STUFF, you can be sure many of us Malaysians will be there to grab it! 👨👩👦
This is a good thing because: it could potentially lead to successful Word-of-Mouth Marketing. 🗣️
Needless to say, it is the most powerful form of Marketing. From there, your customers can help amplify your message in a way that was not previously possible.
Pro Tip: Remember to organise your Christmas contests or giveaways on multiple channels, not just one.
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Christmas Blogs
Never underestimate the power of a blog post! ✍️
Businesses who blog during Christmas have potential to draw traffic into their website. Why?
It’s because: they’re creating content around their niche.
Creating such content makes it easier for customers to find them when searching for information on Google. 💻
So, if a customer finds your blog and reads it on Google, you’ll get more brand exposure.
Blogging is a common Marketing tactic used even during non-festive periods, and it works!
So, imagine what blogging can do for your business during festive seasons such as Christmas!
When writing your blog, don’t forget to include relevant Christmas keywords. Using keywords helps to: optimise your blog for SEO.
When you optimise for SEO, it’s easier for your business to be found on Google.
Once you have generated traffic to your website, you could convert those traffic into leads. 🚦
I’ll explain how to do that. After writing your blog, all you need to do is include a CTA (call-to-action) at the very end of your page.
CTA means: the action which you want your audience to take after reading your blog.
For instance, if you want your visitors to contact you after reading your post, then include a link to your website’s Contact Us page at the end of your article.
Remember, not every post will turn your traffic into leads. No business, not even big brands can convert all traffic into leads.
But that shouldn’t stop you from trying to improve your Marketing results.
It’s good practice to always include a CTA in every blog post. 👍
From there, you can set a benchmark for yourself each month to try and increase your leads. That’s how you measure your ROI from Digital Marketing.
If you’re looking for Christmas blog topic ideas, I have a few popular suggestions which may help you:
- Write a Christmas blog that showcases what you do
- Write Christmas posts that inspire people.
- Write ‘How-to’ Christmas guides.
- Write Christmas gift ideas to buy for loved ones.
In your blog, you can subtly promote your products by just merely mentioning them in a few sentences.
Once you’ve written those sentences, you can add a link to your ecommerce page, so that your customers can purchase your products if they like it.
Pro Tip: Always write your blog without hard-selling your products. It will only drive your customers away.
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Christmas Sales & Promotions
This is the most important tactic for your Christmas Marketing campaign.
It’s because: the bulk of your revenue will come from your Christmas sales and promotions.
For starters, it’s best to focus only on one or two products to promote for your Christmas Marketing campaign. ⛄
Analyse which products are commonly bought by your customers, and then promote them during your Christmas Marketing campaign.
Promoting too many seasonal products will only overwhelm your customers. Plus, it also slows down the effectiveness of their decision making.
As best practice, it’s always good to create a catalogue to promote your seasonal products.
A catalogue is very helpful for your customers because: it helps them quickly grasp what products are available on sale.
You can also do the same on your website: create a digital catalogue for Christmas. 💻
Pro Tip: Try to make it easy for your customers to find all your seasonal products by gathering it all in the same web page.
With that said, don’t forget about last-minute shoppers! You’d be surprised how many people spend their time doing last-minute shopping just a day before Christmas. 📅
For better market segmentation, you can launch a Christmas Marketing campaign specially for this group of people.
If you’re worried that sales and promotions will harm your profit margins, then you can try creating a gift bundle.
Gift bundles are an alternative solution, if you’re worried about giving out insane discounts.
Plus, they’re also a good way to: get your customers to buy more than they were originally planning to.
Now, we’ll move on to the last Content Marketing tactic you can use for your Christmas Marketing campaign.
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Christmas Greeting Cards
Use traditional, not digital. 🙅♀️ Sometimes, the old ways are better.It’s SO tempting to send out digital greeting cards online.
They’re super affordable and convenient for businesses. But that’s why traditional greeting cards trump digital greeting cards.
Paper greeting cards take time and effort to make. It’s not as simple as whipping up a design on Canva, and posting it on your social media page.
That’s why you should give your customers paper greeting cards because it shows you’re going the extra mile for them. 🏃♂️
As such, your customers will think you genuinely value them. Don’t be that cliche brand sending digital greeting cards.
On the surface, it comes across as insincere. It’s the physicality of a paper card that causes your customer to feel a stronger connection to the sender, your brand.
So, pop a Christmas greeting card into your customer’s shopping bag when they purchase a product from your shop.It might even put a smile on their face. 🙂
Lastly, Christmas cards are similar to newsletters. Why do I say that?
It’s because: They’re used as an indirect way of popping up on your customer’s radar without being too pushy.
In fact, they’re the perfect excuse to get your clients to notice you, if you haven’t been keeping in touch for awhile. This is especially useful for B2B businesses.
To conclude, these are all the Content Marketing tactics you can use for your Christmas Marketing campaign.
Top 3 Global Christmas Marketing Campaign Examples
I won’t lie. Brainstorming for your Christmas Marketing campaign can be a pain.
It requires a lot of creativity. But sometimes all you need is a little inspiration. 💡
Watching how other brands do their Christmas campaigns can help feed your mind with more ideas. That way, you’ll have more creativity to work on your campaign’s direction.
With that said, here are the best Christmas Marketing campaign examples from around the world:
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John Lewis: The Man On The Moon 🌙
It’s no secret, people love Christmas videos. Christmas-themed videos give people a sense of joy, warmth, and thanksgiving.
Videos are SO powerful, I’d argue even animals love them too! 🐶
On a serious note, here are some tangible benefits of Video Marketing for your business:
Top retail brands such as John Lewis release Christmas ads as part of a Marketing ritual every year.
Ads from John Lewis are well-known for their clever storytelling, loveable characters, and meaningful messages.
Jean Marsini, 77, may not be the most popular actor in the world. 🌎 But he successfully tugged on the hearts of viewers in John Lewis’ 2015 video ad, The Man On The Moon.
The video is heartfelt, emotional, and relatable to all audiences watching it. You can’t ask for a better Christmas video.
Yes, it’s true. This video seems a little sad and melancholic.
But the video still emerged as a HIT because: it’s relatable to people who feel lonely without a family to celebrate with during Christmas.
It doesn’t hurt to show a little emotion on-screen. In fact, it only makes your brand appear more human.
That’s why John Lewis’ Christmas Marketing campaign made it to the first on our list.
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Starbucks: Christmas Cups 🥤
As early as 1997, Starbucks has been releasing new designs for their Christmas cups each year.
The brand’s first signature red cup was released in 1999, and has since become known for that colour until today.
Have you ever wondered: “Why do Starbucks’ customers pay so much attention to their yearly Christmas cups?” 🤷♂️
“Shouldn’t what’s inside the cup be more important than the design itself?”
The answer to this question is: Branding.
Starbucks is a pro in its brand strategy. Their yearly Christmas cup tradition is an expression of the brand.
More than that, their cup designs help to keep their brand on top of their customer’s minds as Christmas approaches.
This is a game of psychology: It sparks a feeling of curiosity within their customers. They can’t help wondering what design will be released next.
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Coca-Cola: Christmas Truck 🚚
It’d be a sin for me to leave out Coca-Cola’s iconic campaign.This campaign is none other than: The Coca-Cola Christmas Truck.
The brand’s Christmas Truck has been touring the UK since 1995.Many local authorities invite these Trucks to visit their cities during Christmas seasons.
For instance, in 2017, the Truck was reported to have visited 38 cities across the UK. 🇬🇧
The Coca-Cola Truck is beloved by many as it distributes free drinks across the UK each Christmas.
Between 2011 – 2015, approximately 3.5 million visitors came to see the Christmas Trucks. Some people even waited hours just to receive a cup of Coke.
This shows that their Christmas Marketing campaign was a HUGE SUCCESS because of the public’s willingness to engage with the brand.
Wrapping it Up
You’ve reached the end of this article!
I really hope this complete guide has taught you how to launch a Christmas Marketing campaign better.
Take your time to digest all the information written in this guide, don’t rush.
Once you’ve done that, implement each step as I’ve outlined above for your Christmas Marketing campaign.
To wrap up final goodbyes, here’s a small gift I made for you. It’s a FREE Downloadable Christmas Greeting Card. You can print out the card to send to your clients, customers, friends and family.
Brand360 wishes you the Merriest of All Christmases! 🎄 And many many more to come. 🎅