Comments on: Holiday Marketing – Monthly Marketing Mix – October 2008

By: All Freelance Writing: Your Freelance Writing Resource: » Evaluation Time - Monthly Marketing Mix - November 2008

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 12:37:04 +0000

[...] Marketing – Our post last month mentioned that you should have started working on holiday marketing plans (you always should start on that early if you want enough visibility for it to matter closer [...]

By: Avid Writer

Avid Writer — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:10:34 +0000

Ah, you’ve made the light bulb come on for me. See, I don’t celebrate the holidays so I don’t think about them too much. I don’t watch a lot of TV and working from home so much don’t help. I just happen to be working on a reort right now, but a special promotion would be a great idea – thanks for that!

By: Leigh

Leigh — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 16:07:35 +0000

Oh man, another typo! I’m going to get my keyboard checked for sticky keys or something.

By: Leigh

Leigh — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:39:21 +0000

That’s a good idea. I haven’t worked with nonprofits, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to do in terms of the promotion. I might do what you suggested and make it a general discount promotion, where a percentage of the proceeds by toys.

By: Jennifer Mattern

Jennifer Mattern — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:15:23 +0000

lol I know the feeling – entirely forgiven. ;)

That’s one of the reasons I thought it was worth bringing this issue up – and touching on seasonal marketing issues at all actually. I don’t think freelance writers take advantage of as much as they can (myself included), and sometimes it just takes a little nudge to make us say “Oh yeah! Maybe I can make this work for me.” :)

As for the Toys for Tots thing, you could see if they list info on their site about partnering with them. If not, I’d reach out to their PR person first if you can find contact info. They’ll let you know if they allow partnership-style promotions, and they may even have press release templates or a specific boilerplate of their own they may want you to include if you do promote things.

Other than that, I’d leave out the organization name altogether. It’s actually common for them not to want to be associated with businesses and sites they’re not officially partnering with (I used to work in the nonprofit sector before going solo, and we always had to be careful about things like this). You see… if you say you’re going to donate, that’s great. But there’s nothing holding you to that commitment, and if you don’t come through, it can drag their name down too. It might be better to promote after-the-fact saying you’ve already donated $X to a specific charity.

That said, there’s no reason you couldn’t promote it earlier in a more general sense, such as “We’re going to be setting aside $20 from every paid project between Halloween and December 15th to buy toys for underprivileged children,” without mentioning an actual organization. That could mean toys for tots, that you’re going to personally distribute things within your particular community, donate them to a church group that’s collecting, etc.

By: Leigh

Leigh — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:32:50 +0000

Man, sorry about the typos in there. Only got two hours of sleep. :)

By: Leigh

Leigh — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 14:32:21 +0000

You know, I never really considered marketing writing services for the holidays. I always thought of holiday marketing and though, “huh, I don’t sell cookies/gift items/et.” so I never did anything with it.

I’m thinking of doing a discount promotion where $20 from every paid project between Halloween and December 15 is used to buy a toy for Toys for Tots. Jenn, how would you recommend contacting Toys for Tots to let them know (I don’t want to just start promoting, as a friend of mine decided to donate 100% of his ad revenue to Make-A-Wish one year and he got an e-mail from them telling him to pull his promotion of the donation)?