In this episode of The Bathroom Break, hosts Daniel Murray and Jay Schwedelson discuss holiday marketing tactics that go beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday. They share insights for both B2B and B2C marketers, emphasizing the importance of maintaining marketing efforts during the holiday season.

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Best Moments:

(02:50) B2B marketing tactics for the holiday season

(04:24) B2B companies leveraging end-of-year sales and offers

(05:08) Using LinkedIn for personal branding during the holidays

(05:59) Utilizing out-of-office replies for ABM and retargeting

(07:19) Implementing simple loyalty programs for customers

(08:12) Hosts discuss Thanksgiving food preferences

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Welcome to a new special series called the Bathroom break. That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom. Or both. But I don't recommend both. But that's your choice.

This collab is going to be super fun.

We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson from the do this, not that podcast and subjectline.com each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, fine, just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

Welcome back to another episode of the Bathroom Breaks. I'm here with the number one podcaster in marketing, Jay Schwedelson.

He hit number one in the charts recently, so now I can call him the number one podcaster. And I'm Daniel Murray, and I've never had number one in podcasting for a reason.

We are excited, but I want to kick off and say, what are some traditions you have going into November, December? Do you have any holiday traditions that you do every year?

Yeah, so we always do Thanksgiving at my house.

The family always comes to my house, and this year, for some reason, like, all of our family's coming in and it falls on me to, like, get the chairs, I get the crap and get everything together and. And no matter what I do, it is always wrong. Like, I wind up, like I said it all like, oh, that looks terrible, you're an idiot.

And I do it seven more times, but it's always at my house and it's always my fault. So. Yeah. What about you? I mean, you bring your South African, like, Thanksgiving because you're from South Africa.

Do you bring, like, your South African traditions?

It was actually crazy because obviously Thanksgiving isn't in South Africa. So my mom did not know what to do for Thanksgiving. So we really just went winged it for a lot of years.

So we don't really have many traditions around this time period. I used to, since my mom was in travel for a long time, usually always during Christmas break, we would plan a trip. So that's the only tradition we.

I've. I've kept for years. I know it's boring, but we've always planned a trip during that time because we have the travel bug and Al.

Jeans, but probably, like, invite like, giraffes and donkeys and whatever safari is your backyard, and they all come over like it's Noah's ark for your Thanksgiving or something.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

Okay, get into this thing.

Okay. Well, I want you to kick it off. We're going to talk about some holiday tactics you could do that aren't bfcm, that aren't Cyber Monday.

What are some tactics you have that people can do during the holidays?

All right, so let's first talk about our business to business marketing friends because a lot of times business to business marketers turn their brain off like oh, this time of year is dead. Nobody's reacting or anything. It's just a mess. And it couldn't be further from the truth.

I'll give you a couple of things that are kind of interesting.

So from the data that we see December 1st to December 15th, if you're sending out sales oriented, you know, text kind of based emails to contacts that are director level and above, so directors, vice presidents, C level for those first two weeks of December, we see a 28% higher average click through rate on those emails to that audience than any other time of the year. And the reason being is every those executives have a little bit of time for the first time throughout the whole year.

So don't turn off your marketing engine if you're a business marketer because it's actually a perfect, perfect time to reach certain audiences. Daniel, what do you got?

Yeah, I think something that B2B marketers don't lean into is actually doing what B2C D2C marketers are doing during this time. I think leaning into actually doing offers during BFCM end of the year is actually a great tactic because people are in a buying mode.

They're used to seeing sales so it's not interruptive anymore to see a sale. So if you're a B2B company, I would plan around this and you should plan around it ahead of time. But if you can throw up a campaign quickly.

I've seen a lot of success when I've worked in a lot of SaaS companies because a lot of people are have two things going on B2B. They have budget, they need to spend or they lose it at the end of the year.

And two is that there, there are, they are looking for deals during that time as well.

So if they can find a deal that works for them that could flip a lot of people over the limit and also sending it to people who you've closed, lost or who have ghosted you. Those are great people to target during this time as well.

Yeah, capture, get them in buying mode. That's what they're in. I'll tell you something good for your personal brand or if you're trying to like Grow your connections and all that stuff.

So on LinkedIn towards the end of the year, it's the perfect time to do, you know, open ended holiday themed questions that you put out on LinkedIn. So for example, you put a post out there that says something like, what's one lesson from this year that you're taking into next year?

Give yourself a shout out and this is the time that we're all kind of reflecting and thinking about next year and then people will engage, they're going to write about their thoughts for next year, what they did this year. It's a fantastic way to drive a lot of engagement doing these kind of open ended questions on social. So that's a fun test to try.

What else, what else you got?

One thing that also works very well now is actually sending emails the day before or actually on holidays because you'll get a lot of out of office replies from people. So what that could do is one, give you extra contacts in those companies you're trying to target.

So it's a good way to do abm, but also taking those lists and retargeting them on social or retargeting them on your targeting platforms that you're doing because B2B is buying with by committee. So the more people you can get in front of and top of mind is always a great move.

In B2B people always think that you have to pick this one Persona and go after them. But if the four other Personas that are going to make a decision know about you, it's way easier to sell into a company that knows about you.

I love that and it's so true. I mean leverage those auto replies, get somebody to help. You could either use a system or something that's clerical to organize all that data.

It is absolute gold. And then the last one I would put out there would be everybody likes to have a loyalty program, but it's really hard to do that, right?

You may not have like a rewards program with stars that you earn points and all this stuff.

There's a really simple thing whether you're a consumer or business marketer is at the end of the year all you have to do is send out, hey, this is for our customers, you know, vip only for our customers. This is a thank you for working with us this year.

There's a thank you for buying from us this year and you give them a little bonus discount, a little Whatever. But acknowledging somebody's loyalty to your brand and then giving them something, it's a loyalty program. It couldn't be easier.

And everybody can do it, and it works incredibly well. So not everything that you do this time of year has to be Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

There's a ton of different things that you could do to drive engagement for your personal brand, for your business brand, for whatever it is. So the biggest question I have for you, Daniel, is Thanksgiving. Will you eat sweet potatoes with marshmallows, or is that disgusting?

No, I think sweet and savory is an underrated combo. I honestly think that people hate on it way too much. But sweet and savory.

But again, the amount of times I've got exactly the perfect Thanksgiving dishes is zero. So I probably had that once in my life, and it was pretty good. So shout out to my good friend Vinnie's mom, Barbara. She's the best.

She's the best cook. And I got invited to Thanksgiving there one year, and they made some good. What. What is. I know you are very healthy.

You have salmon Tuesday, turkey chili Thursday. Is your Thanksgiving just healthy? Like, what goes on your Thanksgiving?

No, my Thanksgiving is definitely not healthy. And I just want to say something for all of the world that's listening. You should not serve salad at Thanksgiving. That's not normal. Okay?

This is the time where you wear, like, very comfy clothing, you get disgusting, and you eat an enormous amount of food. And by the way, everyone should DM Daniel because clearly he's a little sad, a little down. He doesn't get invited to Thanksgiving.

I don't know why I'm not inviting him, that's for sure. So DM him and invite him to your Thanksgiving because he's lonely. It's just the way it is.

You know what? I could be a really good chair carrier and help set up the table. So it's actually upsetting.

I didn't get invited to the shon family party, but it's all. All good. All good. All good. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Go subscribe to do this, do that, not that podcast.

Why did I can't say that in a sentence. I don't know why it's such a good name, but I. It has a comma, so I should pause. Do this, not that. Subscribe.

Thank you, Daniel. Come on, man. I gotta get back to work. Get out of there. All right, while he's still in there. This is Jay.

Check out my podcast, do this, not that for marketers. Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Marking Millennials podcast, but also tune into the series. It's once a week, the bathroom break.

We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it. Just give us a.

A shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out.

Later.