PLAN AND ORDER NOW FOR HOLIDAY MARKETING

September 2, 2025 by

holiday marketing table scape

After twenty years of helping clients with last-minute holiday panic marketing, these are some of the things we often regret not addressing in September.

As autumn begins each year, we remind our clients to start prepping and ordering gift bags, greeting cards, holiday decor, gift certificates, gift tags, posters, etc, and plan online marketing: e-mail campaigns, seasonal website changes, and AdWords campaigns.

Besides setting yourself up for a less stressful fourth quarter, preparation in September means free or economy shipping prices instead of ridiculously marked-up rush shipping for last-minute orders. (Reminder of our rush project policy.) You’ll also have more time to jump on the inevitable last-minute holiday opportunity or crisis.

SEPTEMBER TO-DO

Start a Halloween through mid-January calendar showing holidays, planned marketing campaigns, events, team meetings/training, and drop-dead dates.

  • Why into January? Because there’s often a drop-off in business in the new year. September’s the time to check into your previous January’s’ numbers (what worked, what did not) and also what your competition previously did for Q1 marketing.
  • Note drop-dead dates by working backwards from when you need assets finalized and in-hand. Remember that free or economy shipping may take longer over the holidays and plan accordingly.* For example, if you want a printed bring-back card to include with Halloween treats, note placing the order with the printer by October 17th, and working back from that, calendar planning and developing the asset starting a few weeks before that.
  • Calendar reminders to update your holiday hours over all platforms (especially Google Business Listings).

Research community calendars for events and reach out to potential partners and charities early. When you move forward be sure to plan offers that are trackable and unique to each event/partnership/charity so you have data for informed decisions next year.

Holiday Marketing

Prep a stash of beautiful, printed hand-outs with a generic offer so you have a stash ready and can jump on last-minute partnering opportunities without needing to rush a design and print order.

Check your gift card inventory now! (Gift card companies may have five week lead-times—and possibly longer October through January.)

Start penning your Thanksgiving gratitude message to customers, your holiday greetings, and your Happy New Year wishes so they are ready for social media and email campaigns. During the holiday rush, you won’t have as much bandwidth for sincere message scripting.

Are you sending cards, party invitations, and/or gifts to your clients and partners this year? Let’s get on that too!

Selling gifts? Check your inventory and the lead times of items you wish to stock. From October onwards, order fulfillment and shipping from your vendors may take additional time. Also, be sure you stock plenty of festive packaging and shipping supplies if you plan on mailing items.

Sadly, if you are hosting a holiday party and have not booked your caterer, entertainment, and venue, September may be too late. Skipping the printed invites and going online is a good option to save a few weeks.

Don’t forget your team! The holidays may be extra stressful for them too, so set them up for success and a bit of joy with prepared customer service scripts, holiday season incentives, and share with them your holiday marketing how-tos and goals. Start gathering their holiday plans for your shift schedule.

Plan software updates or IT work in advance.

No stress, added costs, and drama this year — let’s get started on marketing’s silly season work now! We’ve plenty of ideas and sources for product.

MenloVille Shoppe decorated for the holidaysHere’s some key events to keep in mind…

OCTOBER

Halloween

NOVEMBER

Daylight Saving

Veterans’ Day

Thanksgiving

Black Friday

Cyber Monday

DECEMBER

Pearl Harbor Remembrance

Green Monday

Festivus

Hanukkah

Christmas Day

Boxing Day

Kwanzza

New Year’s Eve

*This often trips up our clients—planning two weeks for free or economy shipping saves so much money and stress. Ideally, aim for three weeks for shipping so you have time to react if an exchange or reprint is needed.

PHOTOSHOP (AND GOAT) MAGIC

April 16, 2018 by

Photoshop


Jollity Farms is in the Sierra Foothills, near Placerville – and we love it! We visited in April to snuggle with the new-born kids and to take some product shots.

One thing our client wanted was a shot of their new display case full of cheese. But we did not want to waste their entire stock, so we sacrificed five containers, and took thirty photos of those same five containers in different positions (like the photo you see below) and then merged all shots together to create a “full” fridge.


It was not all work – in fact mostly play. Thanks, Charlie and Mary Lisa, for our fun (and delicious) visit to your farm.

Check out the full album, or scroll down for some adorable goat photos…









Visit the farm! 5314 Marigold Mine Way, Garden Valley, California.

Trip Advisor

California Cheese Trail

Facebook



GOOGLE ADWORDS EXPANDED TEXT

August 17, 2016 by

Here’s John, enjoying his clients’ AdWords reporting on a summer day in the garden.  He says this the new expanded text Google AdWords are a really big deal.

blog adwords

Expanded text AdWords ads are the next generation of text ads, designed for a mobile-first world.  They benefit users with more information before they click an ad and benefit advertisers by giving additional control over messaging.  This can mean higher quality clicks from users with keen interest in the subject while cutting down on lower quality clicks less likely to convert to a sale.  They are also better-designed for device responsiveness and display more clearly on devices from smartphone to desktop monitor.

More bang for your AdWords bucks!

This is all fairly new, but early reporting is showing expanded text ads are getting a 20% higher click through rate.  This is mostly because they are larger and stand out amongst the older, smaller ads.  Right now, we’re suggesting that we upgrade any old-style AdWords campaigns we have running for our clients.

There’s two main updates. The headline (purple text in the graphic below) can be 60 characters, rather than 25.  You can be more compelling and precise which leads to better quality clickers.  And, the ad display text (black text in the graphic below) has been expanded from two 35 character lines to a consolidated 80 character line.

This graphic shows how an expanded text ad will display on a smartphone vs. a monitor:

cs-ad-screenshot

 

Summary – better quality clickers = better quality conversions.

Google AdWords is a specialty of John’s.  Contact him at johnp@metapix.us or 408 252-8664 with any questions.

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ENT PRACTICE RE-BRANDING

May 3, 2016 by

ENT Doctors Business Cards

We’ve recently been working with our long-time clients at Ear, Nose & Throat Associates of San Mateo on updating their brand.  They still like the logo we developed for them a decade ago, but have updated their print items and we’re wrapping up a new responsive website.

ENT Business Ad

 

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO PHOTO SHOOT

March 16, 2016 by

South San Francisco

We enjoyed a trip to South San Francisco last week to photograph a property for our home-owners association management client, Tri-State Enterprises.  Some of the apartments had this view, which even in the rain, looked amazing.

These photos will be used on a new website, currently in production.  Thank you Tri-State!

One of the highlights of this property is the fabulous succulent garden:

Cactus and Succulents

PARTNERSHIP MARKETING

February 25, 2016 by

Partnership Marketing

This fabulous corporate headshot was produced by Lisa DeNeffe Photography – a business we are lucky to work with from time to time.  The model is one of our long-time and favorite clients, Rosemary Camposano of Halo Blow Dry Bars and G3 Strategy.

Lisa and Halo have put together their services in such a great way.  Halo is offering a discount to Lisa’s clients on hair and/or makeup styling before their photo session.  And Lisa is offering Halo clients a discount on a corporate head shot package.

Both Halo and Lisa will send an e-mail campaign to their clients, so Halo will be introduced to potential new clients and vice versa.  There will also be printed collateral for display and hand-outs and the web page version of the Halo e-mail campaign can be linked to from blogs and social media.  At the least, each business is generating new in-coming links from credible sites to their own website for a nice search engine optimization boost.

Partnership marketing is a win-win situation.  Your business’ clients win as they get an introduction to a new service or business and they get a nice deal.  Your business wins with exposure, added brand recognition, and SEO.

MPS wins too!  We have the opportunity to work with these great businesses and we developed the e-mail campaign Halo will send.

And my Facebook post for Halo reached eighty Facebookers in the hour after being posted.

TIPS! Think about the types of services that would complement your business and would be of benefit to your clients.  This is such an excellent sample – what could be better than hair and makeup right before a photoshoot?  Find a partner:

  • with an over-lapping target market to your business,
  • with a nice-sized e-mail list and/or blog following,
  • with the ability or contractor able to bring about a quality e-mail campaign and print collateral,
  • and with your level of energy and commitment to work to maximize all possible marketing pathways to make the partnership a success.

Thanks for reading – Rachel