Is Your Marketing Plan Prepared For The “Holiday Creep?”

October is almost over and we all know what that means — Christmas music, Santa sightings and holiday movies make their way back into our lives. Yes, we know it’s early, but there’s no stopping the Christmas train once it gets moving.

While Christmas gets an early start every year, so should your digital marketing plan. Waiting until later in the season is big no-no, and here’s why.

Don’t Wait, Or It’s Too Late

While most shoppers will hold off until the big deals hit the market, it doesn’t mean they aren’t sitting at home doing their research.

So if you’re waiting to create your digital marketing scheme and throw it up later in the holiday season, you’re going to miss out on a lot of potential customers who already have their holiday shopping plan mapped out.

And believe it or not, people actually plan on crossing off a good portion of their Christmas list for their holiday shopping in early November. Retail saw $20 billion in eCommerce sales in the early portion of November in 2014. This doesn’t include Thanksgiving, Black Friday or Cyber Monday! So in actuality, if you haven’t gotten your digital marketing plan up and running already, you could be missing out on some major sales.

Shopping Continues To Start Earlier

It’s difficult to determine why people are trending towards shopping so early in the season, but there could a multitude of reasons. One might be that a lot of people don’t really care for the madness and chaos that comes with holiday shopping. While some people might enjoy standing in long lines, finding the best deals and fighting off crazed shoppers for a newly released product, others simply wish to get their shopping done prior to the madness.

Also keep in mind that hot products can go out of stock. Remember when items for the movie “Frozen” came out last year? That was a complete craze fest as parents tried to grab every Frozen item they could. It was reported that an employee at a Disney Store in Times Square had to tell customers over 200 times in a single day that they “We’re all sold out of ‘Frozen.” Seems crazy, right? So in order to avoid this situation, consumers are going to start shopping earlier in the season.

Think about layaway. Many major chains have upped the ante on their layaway programs. For example, Walmart launched its layaway program for last year’s holiday season on Aug. 28. Kmart has joined Walmart in their efforts to prepare for early shoppers with a bigger, better layaway program. These layaway programs are going to get shoppers out and about earlier this season.

Holiday Creep

So as you can see, the holiday season is nearly upon us. So much, that we’ve created a new term called, “The Holiday Creep,” which is the early merchandising for the holiday season. So again, if your digital marketing plan isn’t already up and running. It’s time to get it going and join in on the madness.