It’s gearing up to be the most wonderful time of the year! Soon, the snow will be falling, sweet treats will be shared with friends and family, and of course, the magical sounds of holiday spending will ring through the air. As the seasons shift, so too should your content marketing strategy. From holiday gift giving guides for your consumer customers to content marketing tips for your B2B buyers, let’s get into the spirit of the upcoming winter months by sharing a few winter content marketing ideas so you can seasonally theme your content topics and types.

To give your 2021 content marketing a bump this winter season we’re updating this post with a couple other great content ideas for your B2B or B2C business.  

What’s the Big Deal About Themed Marketing?

One of the easiest ways to increase engagement on a specific piece of content is to “seasonalize” it. That is, make it relevant to the season or holiday that it’s being published in. Seasonal content doesn’t just impact the individual content piece either. A study conducted by Liftoff found that seasonal product marketing generated 10% rise in email open rates.

Before diving into our seasonally themed content ideas, here are a couple questions to ask yourself:

• What do people care about right now?
• What is everyone looking for?
• What urgent questions can you answer?
• How does the current season impact my target demographics’ buying habits, lifestyle, and desires?

B2C Winter Content Marketing Ideas

With Black Friday 2018 predicted to have $5.80 billion in sales, themed marketing matters big time this year. 8 in 10  holiday shoppers say that they are influenced by the internet before making a purchase. The more often a potential customer interacts with your brand by engaging with your content, the more likely they are to convert to a paying customer.

Here are a couple winter B2C content topics to keep in mind for the upcoming season:

Holiday Gift Guide

No matter which holiday you celebrate, everyone can agree that giving and receiving gifts plays a role in most celebrations during the holiday season. We all know that we’ll probably buy a gift or two, but that doesn’t mean we already know every gift we’re buying. It’s not uncommon to become totally stumped about what to get the people who are closest to you.

To help align your brand as the solution for the “Oh no, what am I going to get my Mom?” quandary, consider creating holiday gift guides to help your consumers make their gift-giving decisions. Be sure to segment your content to align with your product mix and target audiences.

You can create sections like “Gifts for Him,” “Gifts for Mom,” “Gifts for Grandma,” etc.

Holiday Giving

If your company is active in the community or regularly donates money, time or items to a national or local charity, the winter months can be an optimal time to spread the word about the great work you’re doing to support your favorite charitable organizations.

Even if your company doesn’t usually participate in charity work (hey, we don’t judge), your customers might! A recent study found that about 20% of all donations and giving takes place during the month of December.

To aid your customers in their mission to give, consider creating content pieces that introduce them to new and reputable charities that tie into your brand. As a shameless plug, here are a couple of our favorite charitable organizations:

Give Directly

Directly distributes donations to less fortunate people in Kenya and Uganda to spend as they see fit.

Helen Keller International

Provides technical assistance to, advocates for, and funds Vitamin A supplementation programs in sub-Saharan Africa to reduce the child mortality rate.   

The End Fund

Provides solutions to neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) that affects more than 1.5 billion of the world’s most impoverished people.

Water.org

Dedicated to bringing safe water and sanitation to the world through access to small, affordable loans.

Festive Winter Photo Contest

Dressing up isn’t reserved only for Halloween. If you’ve ever looked at Pinterest this time of the year, then you know just how important winter decorations can be. Aside from being fun, posts created by your social media fans (user-generated-content or UGC) generates 28% higher engagement rate when its shared to your social media profile.

Here are a couple of our favorite winter-themed photo contest ideas:

• Pet costume contest
• Wreath decorating contest
• Outdoor lights contest
• Snowman decorating
• Winter escape (encourage your customers to share how they keep themselves warm during the winter months)

Pro Tip: Managing a UGC contest can be a complicated and a bit time consuming if you’re using spreadsheets or some other form of a manual management system. That’s why we recommend using a fan engagement platform like SocialToaster to help you solicit contest entries, moderate posts, and award winners. Don’t forget to come up with a clever, festive hashtag for people to follow along throughout the contest.

Countdown With Content

Whether you opt for a traditional 8-Day or 12-Day countdowns or want to be ambitious with a month of daily post, you can tap into the excitement of the season with countdown content. 

Commit to publishing a new piece of content every day during your countdown. Be sure to theme your content around  a core concept that will resonate with your audience and relate back to your business.

A couple of our favorite types of countdown:

• Favorite products or gift ideas
• Tips for managing stress during the holidays
• Advice on a productive New Year
• Health and wellness tips

Showoff Where The Magic Happens

Winter is a great time to remind your audience who your business is by creating content that tells the behind-the-scenes story of your brand.

Consumers (especially Millennials and Generation Z) value authenticity. Showcase your authentic self by:

• Highlighting the amazing talent on your team.
• Getting real about the holiday rush
• Get deep on the care you put into your packaging and shipping
• Take them on a tour of where/how you source your products

B2B Winter Content Ideas

Seasonal winter content isn’t just for consumer brands. B2B companies can benefit from getting into the holiday spirit as well. 67% of B2B buyers rely on content to research prior to making a purchasing decision. Even more interesting, 50% of B2B buyers seek out information on products and services on social media.

Great content not only informs, but persuades potential buyers to choose your product or service. Here’s how you can get in on all the winter action this year.

Create a Roundup Post That Features Your Most Popular Blog Posts of the Year

You’ve created a lot of strong content this year and this is your time to let your best content shine. Don’t be afraid to show off your feathers a bit. and give your customers a nice recap of the great content you’ve created for them over this past year.

You can pull together a list of your most popular tweets, your most engaged with blog posts, fun employee-centric photos, and anything else that really highlights your year. Roundup posts are a popular form of content because it makes it easier for your consumer to identify which pieces of content they should invest time in engaging with, while also providing you with an opportunity to guide their journey to your strongest conversion-driving pieces.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to provide a brief recap and overview alongside each piece of content you include in your post.

State of the Union

New Year’s resolutions aren’t regulated to personal items like losing weight and cleaning out the garage. Businesses can get in on the action too by using the New Year as a catalyst to further develop their brand and business.

Consider creating and sharing content pieces that outline your big accomplishments over the past year and how you plan to move forward. You can also use these posts to let your audience know if you have a new product or service offering you’re rolling out in 2022.

By making your audience more aware of how they helped you achieve your goals from this past year, you create a stronger bond with them. They become invested in your business’s success and it makes them want to help you get further in the next year. Their involvement in your brand’s success should never go unnoticed.

Looking Ahead to 2022

Speaking of 2022 business opportunities, Benjamin Franklin once said, “failure to plan is planning to fail.”

You’re not the only business that’s planning for 2022. While you’re busy planning out your strategy for conquering the world, so too are your customers! Provide your customers with value by using the winter months to create and publish content that assists them with their planning needs.

Winter planning content can include:

• Trend identification and analysts
• Pricing changes
• New technologies and emerging industry developments

2022 is going to be an amazing year for your company, so why not say so?

Employee Superlative Shout-outs

Let’s be honest, you wouldn’t be in business if it wasn’t for your amazing team. The end of the year is a perfect opportunity to give your employees a public shout-out of gratitude.

One of our favorite ideas is to channel our inner high-schooler and award superlatives to team members.

Here are a couple of superlative ideas to get you started:

• Best Zoom Background
• Most Likely To Help Others
• The Hard Worker
• Most Fun Coffee Mug

You get the idea. We recommend creating a mix of fun awards alongside awards that exemplify your business values.

Year-End Promotions or Discounts

If your end of the year brings with it promotions or discounts on your B2B offering, be sure to create content that communicates this discount.

Blog posts, emails, and videos are all excellent channels for disseminating content around your year-end sale.

Pro-tip, don’t just promote your year-end pricing on one channel. Use multiple channels to help get the word out and reinforce your message.

Get Your Content Seen

The best winterized content isn’t worth the snow it’s written on if it’s not seen! In addition to a content publishing strategy, your brand needs to also have a strategy for ensuring your content gets seen.

For many brands, paying to promote every piece of content isn’t feasible. There simply isn’t enough in the budget to support this plan. That’s why we recommend that brands lean on their biggest fans to spread their branded content across the internet through an advocacy marketing program.

To learn more about how an advocacy marketing program can help increase your content visibility in 2018 and 2019, check out our blog post here.

Ring in the New Year with Us!

If you’re looking for ways to take your online marketing campaigns to new heights in 2019, lets chat! Send us an email, request a free demo, or give us a call at 855.62.TOAST today – we can’t wait to ring in the new year with you!