How to Prep Your Website & Marketing for the Holidays

The holiday season is almost here! And as a business owner, it’s important to make sure you and your business are prepared. Holiday shopping is also more deliberate than it used to be: according to Google’s Ipsos Holiday Shopping Study, 83% of early October holiday purchases in 2025 were researched before the buyer committed, up from 77% the year before. That makes a solid holiday marketing plan more important than ever.

It’s also important to note that holiday marketing isn’t just for retail and e-commerce based businesses. Lawyers, caterers, and dentists can also benefit from a holiday marketing strategy. Try these marketing tips to ensure your website and social media campaigns are ready for the upcoming holidays.

What Is Holiday Marketing?

Holiday marketing is a seasonal plan that updates your website, content, social media, email, and ads to capture demand between October and January. It works for service businesses as well as retail. The goal is to be visible while buyers are researching, not just when they are ready to purchase.

Your Holiday Marketing Calendar: When to Start

The most common holiday marketing mistake is timing. Campaigns get built the week of Black Friday, the website gets updated in December, and by the time everything is live the season is half over. Google’s research shows holiday shoppers are buying from October all the way through January, which means your holiday marketing has to be ready before that window opens.

Here is the holiday marketing calendar we recommend for most businesses:

September: Plan. Decide what your seasonal offer is, what content you need, and which channels you’re using. Audit last year’s results if you have them.

Early October: Launch. Website updates go live, seasonal content publishes, campaigns start running. Content needs time to get indexed and ads need time to gather data before you scale them.

Late October through Cyber Monday: Peak. This is when budgets ramp, your strongest offers run, and your deadlines get the most prominent placement on the site.

December through January: Stay on. Shipping and booking cutoffs shift buyers toward local pickup, gift cards, and services. Google reports that 84% of holiday shoppers use Google or YouTube to shop after December 25, so the businesses that go quiet on the 26th are handing that traffic to competitors.

Update Your Website

Your website is the online face of your business, making it extremely important for it to captivate and convert your visitors into paying customers. This is especially true for e-commerce websites. If you haven’t updated your website in a while, now is the time to update product photos, special offers, banners, and your homepage with holiday verbiage.

If your customers can buy directly through your website, run through your checkout process to see if it is customer friendly:

• How many steps must a customer make before they are able to purchase?
• Are their options for gift-wrapping and delivery by a certain date?
• Can people checkout as a guest?
• Can people buy through their smartphone or tablet?

A long and complicated checkout process is one of the easiest ways to frustrate potential buyers and have them leave your site without completing their transaction. Read E-Commerce Tips for Cyber Monday for more holiday e-commerce optimization help.

Not only should you update your checkout process, but also check the content of your site. Look for ways to freshen up the content on your product pages, and even your blog, homepage, and contact page.

Two more things worth checking before traffic picks up. First, page speed. Slow load times cost you the most during the period when you have the most visitors, so run your key pages through PageSpeed Insights and fix what comes back. Second, put your deadlines where people actually look. Shipping cutoffs, last-appointment dates, and booking deadlines belong above the fold and in the navigation, not buried in the footer where nobody scrolls during a busy season.

Write Holiday-Specific Content

Your blog is one of the best tools you have to driving holiday traffic to your website. While blog content like, “Holiday Gift Guide for Mom” helps e-commerce businesses, lawyers, realtors and caterers should get creative to do similar holiday-themed posts. Fun examples include:

• Catering / Event Planning – 5 Creative Holiday Party Ideas: Event planners and caterers should showcase their holiday decorating and party planning skills by providing tips on how to hold the best holiday party. Give tips on recipes, desserts, DIY decorations, games, and everything that would make a fun party. Make sure to include high resolutions images for Pinterest!
• Realtors– The Holiday Parade Is Downtown This Year!: There are so many family-friendly events in Raleigh during the holidays. Realtors should use the events, such as the Holiday Parade, to show how amazing living in Raleigh really is and why buying a home in the area is perfect for families.
• Lawyers – Why Writing A Will Should Be One of Your New Year’s Resolutions: This is the perfect opportunity for lawyers to explain why having a will is important. Explain the benefits and how not having a will can impact the family.

One shortcut worth taking: before you write anything new, look at the seasonal content you published last year. Updating a post that already has some search history and a few links will almost always outperform a brand-new post published in November, because the new one has no time left to earn rankings before the season ends.

Make Sure AI Search Can Find Your Holiday Content

Publishing the content is no longer the whole job. A growing share of holiday research now happens inside AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and other AI answer engines, where the buyer gets a recommendation before they ever see a list of links. If your business isn’t showing up in those answers, you’re invisible during the exact phase where 83% of purchases are being researched.

A few things make your holiday marketing content easier for AI search to use:

• Answer questions directly. A clear, self-contained paragraph that answers “when should I book holiday catering in Raleigh” is far more likely to get cited than the same information spread across five paragraphs of setup.
• Add structured data. Product, Service, FAQ, and LocalBusiness schema help machines understand what you offer and what it costs.
• Keep your Google Business Profile accurate. Holiday hours, seasonal offers, and current photos. This is the single most-overlooked holiday marketing task and it takes about ten minutes.
• Be specific about deadlines and availability. AI answers favor content with concrete details over vague marketing language.

Share on Social Media

After you update your website and create holiday-themed content, start sharing on social media. Post your products, deals, blogs, etc. on your platforms and engage with your followers. Remember that each platform is different and your posts should be customized to each network to truly see the benefits.

The holiday social media campaigns that work best are planned as a sequence rather than posted at random. Build a simple calendar covering the weeks from early November through New Year’s, mix promotional holiday social media posts with behind-the-scenes and customer content so the feed doesn’t read like an ad every day, and lean on reviews and customer photos. Proof from real customers does more during a competitive season than any amount of polished branding.

Use Pinterest

Pinterest still works as a discovery channel for holiday marketing, especially for anything visual: food, decor, home projects, gifts, and events. If your business produces that kind of imagery, a business account is worth setting up, and any seasonal blog post you write should include high-resolution vertical images that are easy to pin. For most service businesses, though, Pinterest is a secondary channel rather than a priority.

Holiday Email Marketing

Holiday email marketing is the highest-return channel most businesses underuse, because it reaches people who already know you. Your list is full of past customers, and past customers convert at a fraction of the cost of a stranger who clicked an ad.

Segment before you send. Past buyers, people who requested a quote and never booked, and people who have never purchased all need different messages. A “welcome back” offer to a past customer and a first-time incentive to a cold subscriber are not the same email.

Increase your cadence for the season, but tie every send to a real reason: an offer going live, a deadline approaching, a deadline about to pass. Subject lines built on actual dates outperform generic seasonal cheer, because they are specific and they are true.

Finally, set up automated follow-up. An abandoned cart email for e-commerce, or an abandoned quote follow-up for service businesses, catches people who were interested enough to start and got distracted by a busy season. Read our guide to email marketing automation workflows for how to build those.

Create Ads

Since holiday shopping will constantly be on everyone’s minds, ads are a great way to get your brand in front of more people. Where you run your ads, whether it’s Facebook, Google Ads, X, etc., all depends on where your customers are. If you do construction and you want people to know you could complete a kitchen remodel by Thanksgiving, then run pay per click ads with that message. If you offer a spa special on facials as the perfect holiday gift, then run Facebook ads for men to see as they browse their newsfeed.

Two rules keep holiday ad spend from getting away from you. Give campaigns time to gather data before you scale them, which is why an early October launch beats a Black Friday launch. And send that traffic to a dedicated landing page with the offer and the deadline on it, not to your homepage. For a deeper walkthrough of budgets, seasonal keywords, and ad assets, see our guide to converting holiday shoppers with Google Ads.

Holiday Marketing for Service Businesses

Most holiday marketing advice assumes you sell gifts. Plenty of businesses don’t, and they still see a real Q4 surge. It just comes from somewhere else.

Contractors and home service companies get demand from homeowners who want a project finished before guests arrive. Dental and medical practices see a rush from patients using benefits before they reset in January. Law firms handle year-end filings, estate planning, and business formations timed to a January 1 start. Manufacturers and B2B companies field buyers spending down capital or marketing budgets that expire on December 31.

The playbook doesn’t change, only the offer does. Your deadline isn’t a shipping cutoff, it’s “book before the end of the year,” “use your benefits before they expire,” or “start now to launch in January.” Your incentive might be a free consultation, priority scheduling, or next year’s rate locked in today. And your holiday marketing needs to run in October and November, when those decisions get made, not in December when the money is already committed.

Measuring Your Holiday Marketing

Before any of this goes live, confirm your tracking works. Every form, phone call, and checkout should fire a conversion, and the numbers in your ad platforms should roughly match what you see in Google Analytics 4. A tracking gap you discover in December is an entire season you can’t evaluate.

During the season, compare your cost per lead to your industry benchmark rather than to last month. Costs rise in Q4 for everyone. The real question is whether yours rose more than the market did.

Then in January, before you turn anything off, pull the reports. Which content earned traffic, which channels produced leads, which offers converted. That review is what makes next year’s holiday marketing strategy better than this year’s, and it is the step almost everyone skips.

Holiday Marketing FAQ

When should I start holiday marketing?

Plan in September and launch in early October. Google’s research shows holiday shoppers buy from October through January, so campaigns and content that go live in late November miss the front half of the season and give ads no time to optimize.

Does holiday marketing work for businesses that aren't retail?

Yes. Service businesses see year-end demand driven by expiring insurance benefits, expiring budgets, projects that need finishing before the holidays, and January start dates. The tactics are identical. Only the offer and the deadline change.

How much should I budget for holiday marketing?

There is no universal figure. Start from what your channels produced last Q4, then increase spend where you were leaving demand on the table rather than raising everything evenly. If you have no prior data, start modestly in early October and scale what converts.

Should I keep marketing after Christmas?

Yes. Google reports 84% of holiday shoppers use Google or YouTube to shop after December 25, driven by gift cards, returns, exchanges, and post-holiday sales. Reducing spend is reasonable. Stopping entirely is not.

Need help with your holiday marketing campaign?

Contact the Raleigh internet marketing and SEO experts at TheeDigital in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 919-341-8901, or schedule a consultation with one of our experts.

Tags: Digital Marketing • Web Design