It’s just seven weeks till Christmas, yet if you’re like us, it feels ages before you need to send Season’s Greetings to colleagues, clients and suppliers. However, at Napoleon Creative, we know you need to plan early to make a real impact. One of our regular clients is so ahead of the game we’ve already filmed and edited their annual Christmas video greeting!

With our experience of creating Christmas cards, videos and graphics, we’re going to help you with a week-by-week timeline with tips for sending out a brilliant and impactful Christmas greeting.

November 11: 7 Weeks before Christmas
This week’s challenge is to create a timeline to track your progress. We know that while the actual execution process can take a matter of days, creating a great video or graphic requires a lot of thinking time as well. We always create timelines for our clients, so they know what they should be doing when, so they hit their deadline. So the first task is to establish when that deadline will be!

Step 1: Set the ideal Delivery Date
Christmas Day falls on a Wednesday this year. That means as many businesses will not open on Christmas Eve, some people will take Monday off to have a lovely long lead up to Christmas Day. This leaves Friday as our delivery date, which is perfect as studies have shown that Friday 1pm – 3pm is the time when many start to get into weekend mode at work, but before the frantic push to tie things up between 3pm-6pm.

So if you’re planning something digital, your message must be complete and ready to send by Thursday 19 December.

If you’re doing something in print, you’ll need artwork signed off by Monday 9 December, to allow time to print and post.

 

Step 2: Start to get your Strategy together
The best ideas take a while to gestate, so Week 7 is all about thinking. Ask yourselves these questions:

– What’s your audience going to respond to? Humour or a relaxing Christmas image?
– Do you want to be corporate, branded and formal? Or irreverent, funny and playful?
– What kind of year has your business had? Did you reach key milestones in your business you want to share?
– What’s been going on in your industry this year? Has your company changed because of this?
– Do you have particular products to mention?
– How much budget do you have for this?
– What’s going to be your delivery method? Print and post? Video uploaded to your YouTube? A change to your Facebook company page?
– What current events are you inspired by?
– What have you seen creatively that you like?

Remember, ask others in your organisation. You don’t need to schedule a two hour meeting with biscuits and 37 slide PowerPoint deck, but an email asking for ideas, inspirations or messaging thoughts will help you.

Next week, we’re going to talk about the next step: Writing the brief.



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