Are you someone who plans early or would you rather wait until the final hour? – This phrase can relate very closely to our everyday life!
But we should discuss how early it is that you need to plan for your campaign, especially for a festive season campaign! Because let’s be real here, much like renewing your passport for an upcoming trip, that is definitely something that we can’t leave it to the final hour.
When it comes to planning for upcoming campaigns – timing is one of the most crucial elements that brands should take into account, to be able to stay on top of current trends and keep up with the season. This is to ensure that the brand can leverage on the trending topics to effectively meet the objective set, while garnering the best possible results in terms of awareness, engagement and sales from the campaign. Oftentimes, with the lack of time in campaign planning, we can observe that the campaign achieving an undesirable result, due to the off-timing festive messaging or missing out on leveraging on the latest TikTok trend
Based on our experience executing campaigns in Nuffnang – to achieve the best possible results of campaigns, ample planning time is crucial to the success of the campaign. The timeline in this sense would be at least 3 – 6 months before the official launch of the campaign.
Why is this so? Ample time is required for sufficient research, strategy planning with various stakeholders and identifying what the current and upcoming potential trends that brands can leverage on to effectively reach out to the target audience. By having a solid framework for the campaign plans, it allows the brands to pivot their execution strategy to relate to upcoming trends, despite the ever changing trends from time to time.
As we approach festive seasons such as Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, Deepavali, Christmas; these are the most exciting times for brands as they are able to leverage on past campaign studies and upcoming trends to strategise their campaign to further amplify their messaging during these seasons. It is also a time where brands are able to showcase their creative content that appeals to their targeted audience, allowing for the potential to create a trend during the festive season, not only driving engagement and awareness, but ultimately driving sales for the brand as well.
How to target relevant target audiences during these festivities
During festive seasons, the most essential and obvious target audiences are those from the relevant groups celebrating this season. Creative planning around the relevancy of trends and cultural elements would hit the “sweet spot” when it comes to attracting the target audience’s interest during the current season. This strategy of keeping the target audiences at the top-of-mind may work traditionally, however, there has been another strategy that we have observed through executing Nuffnang campaigns that have worked well, which is to focus on creative direction targeting other races as well, during festive seasons.
By leveraging on Malaysia’s landscape of being a multi-racial country, there are various opportunities where brands can target different ethnic groups during a particular festive season, for instance, by engaging with Malay content creators during a Chinese New Year campaign works as well, because it can help to generate more awareness among other races as well, while showing that the brand celebrates the diversity of races within our country. This could also spark interest from the public as it can be deemed as a ‘special/unique’ content curation direction from both the brand and the content creator.
In summary, the two key points that brands should always consider when it comes to planning for their campaigns are timing and relevancy, these two key points are important to note be it for sustenance campaigns or festive campaigns. As we are currently living in an era where “social media is king”, where trends are ever changing on a daily basis and it is important for brands to stay relevant in order to achieve the expected results during their campaign, it is ever more so important for brands to constantly stay informed on upcoming trends, current social issues and understanding past campaign results to ensure a better campaign planning process to achieve a successful result.
