It’s time for Christmas content. Seasonality is one of the Ss in our Three S Timing approach, and it’s that time of year, when marketing materials get a sprinkling of snow and elf-related puns abound. For some added tips, we asked three content marketing experts for their top tips on Christmas content that really works. ~ Bryony Thomas, Author & Founder, Watertight Marketing 

Make your festive content useful, inspiring… and achievable…

Tip from Sonja Jefferson & Sharon Tanton of Valuable Content

Half-hearted content is like novelty socks – the Christmas present nobody wants! The best content is always created when you’re having fun so give yourself time to enjoy the process too.

Christmas is the perfect opportunity to serve up creative, seasonal-themed content for your audience. I saw some very valuable advent calendar-style content last year. Hats off particularly to product company Sugru and designer Christian Tait, as well as Watertight Marketing’s gift bonanza.

Genuinely useful and inspiring, this is just the type of content that is appreciated and therefore gets spread far and wide. But remember, all this fabulous tinselly content takes work. And Christmas is a busy time for all of us – key shipping time for product companies, tight project deadlines for service businesses. Be careful not to make a rod for your back (like we did last year – 12 Valuable Content awards in 12 days, phew!) without thinking it through and planning realistically well in advance.

Great Christmas content doesn’t have to take ages. A few hours of really creative thinking, with a great designer and writer, can sometimes save you a lot of legwork. Take a look at Wealth Horizon’s Christmas tale. Light hearted, shareable fun suits the season well. Think your idea through carefully. Is it genuine and worthwhile – to you and your audience? Don’t just add to the noise because you feel you have to do something.

Get into the Christmas spirit

Tip from Stuart Roberts, Managing Editor, Future Content

You can write festively-themed articles ’til the reindeer come home but if it’s dull, no-one’s going to get involved.

Nobody wants to download your ebook on sheet metalworking a week before Santa comes, however many Christmas references you chuck in there. Christmas is a time of joy, goodwill, and relaxation, often by way of mulled wine and raucous office parties. As such, there’s an opportunity to relax your tone a bit too. Be a little irreverent, have fun, take some risks with your content.

Think more awareness-related pieces with your Christmas content rather than hardcore lead-magnets. Everyone’s in high spirits, use it to your advantage.

Make your Christmas content highly visual

Tip from Watertight Marketing Certified Practitioner and content strategist, Stephen Bateman

At Christmas people want visual inspiration. Sharp graphics are a great way to get noticed.

At Christmas people want to be inspired, and good graphics inspire, but they also cut through the noise, which is particularly abundant at Christmas.

Think of Lush, the retailer, and why people love to shop there: It’s very visual; Very inspiring. Pinterest is popular for the same reasons, because people find viewing visual images more relaxing and enjoyable than reading text.

For the same reason, book covers are very visual. When I worked at Dorling Kindersley in the 1990s, we learned the importance of visuals from our CEO, who’d always say “a picture is worth a thousand words.” How true that is.

Women aged 25-44 represent the primary demographic on Pinterest. They spend over an hour a day browsing boards for inspiration, which tells you that engagement is very high. Participating on the site is intuitive and interactive, and the sharing interface with your website, blog, Twitter and Facebook is seamless and instantaneous. It’s addictive.

What to do to make the most of your Christmas content:

• Enable ‘Pin it’ on your website. If you’re on WordPress go here.
• Invest in visuals. Do keyword research so that ideas match popular search queries at Christmas.
• Head over to ‘Google Trends’ to check the search trends, then get started.
• Commission a designer to do some good graphics. One for each day of your campaign.
• Always post your updates at the same time daily. People like a routine rendezvous.