Christmas comes early in hospitality. In fact it never goes away. And for the purposes of this article please consider ‘Christmas’ to include NYE.
Daunting when you put it like that. But try not to think of it as some overwhelming make or break situation that you just can’t look at for fear of a panic attack. Instead let us help you with a handy, bite sized 12 month guide to how to smash your festive potential.
January
Throw a carefully planned and marketed NYE party of the century, wrap up any straggler events on Jan 2nd and sign off for a well earned quiet period.
Now’s the time to reward your hardworking staff, who missed out on all the fun with a generous ‘blow off steam’ party on you.
February
This is your chance to examine the data. How did you do? What worked, what didn’t? Where are the missed SpH opportunities? What challenges and opportunities does this year’s calendar present?
Now’s the time for a careful review of the season and to respond with a first draft business plan, including your intentional marketing budget for the festive season ahead.
“The earlier you secure supplier sponsorships and deals, the more likely you are to benefit from their budgets before they’ve spent them. “
March
As the darkness starts to lift and spring breathes new life into your energy reserves, take the opportunity to contact suppliers with your Christmas plans.
The earlier you secure supplier sponsorships and deals, the more likely you are to benefit from their budgets before they’ve spent them. The early bird secures the print budget for their venue marketing assets.
April
Time to revisit your business plan and nail down the details. By now you should have an idea of your Christmas offer and it’s target revenue and profitability.
Explore with as many partnership opportunities and suppliers as you can, and take consultation on multiple marketing strategies.
At this point knowledge is power. There’s no point planning with optimism, when you can define your spend, revenue, and profitability based on proven advice.
May
Content is king, create it early. You can always produce more tomorrow. but if you miss the boat now, you might find yourself taking blurry, panicked photos on your iPhone later.
By May you should be able to give your creative team the go ahead, explore pre-buying digital ad space before the price goes atomic, plan all of the digital and print, video and photography you’ll need - capture your perfect serve cocktails, dress your staff up in tinsel for lots of christmassy photos.
June
Well here we are again. Summer has just begun and it’s time to dust off the santa suit and pre launch early bird Christmas to corporates.
Hopefully you have a good database to work with, but at this point you need a good PR team behind you and ideally, targetted digital marketing support to help you secure those early sales and grow your first party data base.
July
Keep the corporate push running in the background, begin awareness marketing to the public, and start your recruitment and resourcing journery.
Even if the messages don’t hit the press yet, journalists have started making enquiries and you want to be one of the first they hear about from your press team.
Exactly when your promotional team pull the trigger depends on your product, but by now everyone needs to know what the offer is and have their plan in place.
August
Drop Christmas hard. Newsletters, go live on your website, digital marketing, PR, print materials.
Hopefully you have achieved a succesful pre-launch phase and towards the end of August you’ll move onto a less generous early bird offer. This is your chance to follow up and close warm leads.
September
Depending on your plan, this is a busy reservation and upsell phase. The Nudge love you, everyone is resharing your Instagram ads, your ticket partner is reporting record sales…
You are also on final stage interviews with staff and what a fine collection of ‘best in the market’ individuals they are too. Thank goodness you planned ahead.
October
If you haven’t sold the bulk of Christmas out within October that’s OK. But you should be making some serious headway.
Now’s the time to get tactical, return to bookings to upsell, revisit leads that have dropped off, review your digital marketing, refresh your content.
November
With Halloween out of they way your venue should be ready to miraculously switch on Christmas. Throwing open the mulled wine tap and singlehandedly reducing the productivity of the average UK worker by about 25% for the next two months.
Top tips: Check the performance of your tech early in the month, and there’s no harm in holding back an extra festive wow factor for December.
December
Your digital & PR campaign will be humming in the background to keep footfall coming in, and mop up any extra NYE sales whilst they’re at it.
You’ll be too busy serving satisfied customers, checking Google reviews and responding gladly to glowing Facebook feedback to focus on much else. After all you need to be ready for NYE and to do it all over again.
