Rebel, if your holiday campaign calendar still starts the week after Black Friday, this one’s for you. Paulina Folaron joined Fab to talk holiday campaign planning: the timing mistakes, the pressure to force a seasonal angle you don’t need, and a live reverse-engineering of three years of AMS’s own holiday campaigns.
Six To Eight Weeks Is Your Holiday Campaign Planning Minimum
- Work backwards from your real launch date: if you want sales landing before Christmas, that might mean launching 1 December, not 24 December.
- Six to eight weeks of runway before launch is Paulina’s baseline for founders and microbusinesses: bring it back from there and you’re looking at a mid-October start, latest.
- True creativity doesn’t work well under pressure. Give yourself room to brainstorm, not just execute.
Before You Force A Holiday Angle, Ask These Three Questions
Paulina’s biggest caution in this episode isn’t really about timing. It’s about whether your brand needs a holiday angle at all. Before you build anything seasonal, sit with three questions first.
Do you actually have evidence for how your audience behaves this time of year, or are you assuming it?
- Pull up what you already know. Did last year’s holiday offer genuinely outperform your usual ones, or did it just cost more to make and convert about the same?
- Paulina’s point is that assumption is where the trouble starts. A lot of brands build a whole campaign around a seasonal hook because it feels like the done thing, not because their own data backs it up.
- If you don’t know the answer, that’s the answer. Go find out before you build anything new.
Does a seasonal angle actually fit the ecosystem you’ve already built, or would it just be ticking a box?
- This is the same test Paulina applies to AMS’s own holiday history: the offer rarely needs to change, only the format does, and that’s only possible when the idea already belongs in your business.
- A “Christmas-ified” product bolted onto a brand that has nothing to do with the season reads as exactly that. Customers notice, even when they can’t say why.
Does your audience actually have the time and headspace to engage with you right now?
- This matters most for service providers rather than product sellers. If your clients are buried in school plays, family logistics and year-end wrap-up at work, a big push in early December can land on deaf ears no matter how good the offer is.
- Sometimes the more honest move is to hold your best offer until January, when the same audience actually has room to say yes.