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Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing

A person presenting a gift with holiday themed wrapping.

The holidays are always a busy season, and not just because of all the family occasions. The holiday season is also important for every business as eager shoppers and clients look to check friends and family members off their lists (plus a little for themselves). To get ahead, businesses need to carefully plan and execute on their digital marketing. However, that takes a lot of attention, energy, and effort while other parts of a business are also demanding more attention for the busy season. You also can’t just abandon that marketing either. We explain why holiday marketing is important in 2025 and why you should leave DIY to festive crafts

The Importance of Marketing in Holidays 2025

Holiday marketing should always be a key part of a business’ annual strategy, but that’s even more true for the holiday season in 2025. It’s relatively obvious that this year has had some economic constraints, which has led to many customers and clients being a little more mindful with their spending. That will be the same going into the holiday season, where Canadians are projected to spend an average  $1,675 on gifts, entertainment, and travel. While an increase from 2023, this is notably 10% less than last year and 81% of Canadians said they were cutting back to save money.

This means that businesses need to be focusing their effort to convince customers and clients that they are worth their dollars. That can only be accomplished with sound marketing that reaches those potential clients and customers. Marketing of this kind takes strategy, creative asset creation, and digital account management, which in turn takes a lot of effort and expertise.

Don’t DIY Your Holiday Marketing – The Benefits of Outsourcing

All that effort and expertise, and the importance of holiday marketing in 2025 is exactly why businesses should outsource their marketing to an agency. There are numerous benefits this yields for a business, especially during this busy season:

  • Expertise: Outsourcing to a marketing team means getting access for a full team of marketing experts rather than needing to hire your own staff. This ultimately saves costs while ensuring you receive a team of knowledgeable experts that are effective for your holiday marketing.
  • A clear digital strategy: All those experts specialize in specific marketing channels. Together they can create a comprehensive and clear marketing strategy for the holidays which they know will work for your business and audience much more efficiently than non-experts trying to devise something that might work.
  • Active social media and reaching inboxes: Social media management is yet another huge responsibility. Between answering a flood of messages and comments and finding the time to network and connect with other accounts, it consumes valuable time that could be spent on other aspects of your business. However, those connections are a vital part of social media marketing. Similarly, email newsletters are a great way to maintain customer connection, but they can take a lot of time and energy to create. By outsourcing to an agency, you allow an expert team to manage these and keep your digital marketing active.
  • Focus on your business: This is one of the biggest ones. Outsourcing to an agency always helps a business with capacity concerns. Rather than dedicating team members to marketing efforts, a business gets the more efficient time and energy of a team of marketing experts who will accomplish more in less time. That is even more important during the holidays when you and your team need to focus on the business and your clients. Plus, you can all get time to enjoy the holidays with friends and families!
  • Retention Post-Holiday Sales: The holiday season generates an enormous volume of new leads and first-time customers, but this is where many businesses slip back into DIY marketing mode, treating it as a one-and-done event. An expert marketing agency views the 2025 holiday marketing period not just as a sales blitz, but as a long-term customer acquisition strategy. They implement a robust post-holiday strategy designed to convert those one-time shoppers and gift recipients into loyal, year-round clients. This crucial next step involves sophisticated audience segmentation, timely email campaigns (since email remains a high-ROI channel), and targeted social retargeting to maximize the long-term value of every customer acquired. By choosing to outsource marketing, you ensure that your business avoids the January slump and capitalizes on your biggest sales period, making your marketing Christmas investment truly pay off.

Leave DIY to the Christmas and Holiday Crafts

You should now have a sense of the general benefits of outsourcing your marketing agency along with the particular benefits for the upcoming holiday season. It isn’t too late to start strategizing and getting your marketing going, whether it’s your social media, email, ads, or any other digital marketing. Just like your holiday shopping, you shouldn’t leave it to the last minute. So contact the experts at Rosewood Marketing.

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Meta Ads for Lead Generation: Building a High-Quality Email List

A woman working on her laptop doing lead generation

Social media, and particularly the omnipresence of Meta and its platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and Threads – are still some of the best places for small businesses to get the attention of potential clients and customers. This makes the platforms excellent for lead generation, especially for email newsletters. We’ll explain the why and how of leveraging Meta ads to start communicating directly with your audience through email.

Why Email?

Social media including Meta’s platforms are excellent ways to update and interact with your audience. Yet, email has stood fast as one of the best ways for businesses to communicate directly with their audience. It’s the channel where a business has the most control in their messaging and content, and they’re able to send it directly to the inbox of their subscribers. This can be a key difference where social media content might be missed in a follower’s feed. With this stable communication, email is effective at helping to retain and maintain returning customers or clients. This is why it’s important to grow your email following with a high-quality list.

Benefits of Meta Ads for Lead Generation

There are numerous reasons why Meta is effective for lead generation when building a high-quality email following. One is simply the scale of reach, over 3.3 billion people use Meta daily and over half the population of Canada actively uses Facebook and Instagram. Meta simply provides a staggering advertising network for lead generation. Furthermore, Meta also has built in advertising specifications for lead generation. Their tools and templates help you design ads specifically honed to growing a dedicated following on your website and email newsletters.

Using Meta Ads to Build a Quality Audience

When it comes to building an email audience, quality always beats quantity. A quality audience is engaged with your emails, regularly opening them and clicking on the contents in genuine interest. A disengaged audience doesn’t open emails and may even begin to negatively impact your sender reputation. This is another benefit of Meta ads for lead generation. Meta possesses a rich swath of data about its users such as location, age, and interests. Meta uses these to create profiles which your business can then target in its lead generation ads. This helps to attract the right potential audience to your email content, helping to create an email audience that is great in both quantity and quality.

How Lead Generation Works in Meta Ads

For brevity, we’ll need to assume you have some familiarity with Meta and Facebook ads. When creating Meta ads for email lead generation, you have two main methods for this: collecting the emails directly through the ad or redirecting users to a landing page on your website.

Collecting Emails through Meta

With its built-in lead generation functionality, Meta can have users directly subscribe to your emails with a simple “Subscribe” button on the ad. When users click this, it will verify they want to share their email and any other personal information the ad requests, such as their name. If they approve, they will then be added to your business’ email audience. For this functionality, you will need to set up the Meta integration on your email marketing platform.

This is extremely convenient and fast for users looking for a one-step sign-up. However, users are not necessarily willing to provide their information through such a quick email sign-up. The easy process may raise concerns of legitimacy or safety. On the other side, the simple sign-up could also make it easier for bots to subscribe to your newsletter, bloating and reducing the quality of your audience.

Directing Users to a Landing Page

This is where the strengths of directing users to a landing page start to shine. First, users are instead taken to your website to subscribe. Here they can provide the information they want rather than what is specified in the Meta ad. Second, the landing page will help establish your business’ credibility and legitimacy. The landing page can provide more information about your business, establish a value proposition, and will allow prospective subscribers to browse the website and learn more. Overall, while the landing page might not be as simple, it can be much more effective at conversion.

Motivating Subscriptions

Whether you choose to grow your email audience through Meta lead generation ads or converting users through a landing page (or a mixture of both), there will still need to be some incentive to generate these leads. As we mentioned, a landing page will help establish the value proposition of your business and email list. However, users will still need to be enticed to click the ad. Creating effective lead generation ads will mean following good advertising practices such as captivating images and intriguing copy.

However, there are some other methods for motivating email subscriptions:

  • One-time discount: A tried-and-true tactic. Entice new subscribers with a one-time discount on their next purchase.
  • A Loyalty Program: Loyalty programs are great for customer retention and repeat business. They can also further the value proposition of your email newsletters to help motivate subscriptions.
  • Sneak peeks and Exclusive Benefits: As a direct method of communication, your email newsletter can provide subscribers with product or service updates before you publish updates on other channels. It can also provide practical benefits such as early pre-orders or access to exclusive subscriber discounts.

Beyond Meta with Lead Generation

You should have a much better idea of how Meta’s ads are great for lead generation on Facebook and Instagram to help build a high-quality email audience list. Social media like Meta’s Facebook and Instagram are incredibly potent tools for communication, but you should be leveraging that communication for conversion, directing users to other channels that you control. This can also work the other way. If you already have a substantial, high-quality email list, you can leverage your email to generate leads towards your social media channels.

If you’re looking to set up new Meta lead generation ads on Facebook or Instagram, be sure to contact Rosewood’s ads team. Our email marketing experts can also help you onboard this new audience and create captivating newsletters that keep your audience dedicated.

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Social Media Customer Service: Tips for Handling Feedback and Complaints

A woman holding a tablet and smiling as she oversees customer service on social media, handling feedback and complaints

One of the primary strengths of social media is that the platforms provide a direct channel for communicating and interacting with your audience, customers, and clients. This allows them to reach you in return. That communication will sometimes be positive, while other times customers may voice an issue or complaint. We’ll explain the importance of conducting customer service through social media and how you can handle that feedback and complaints.

The Importance of Customer Service on Social Media

Besides in-person and over the phone, most businesses offer customer service through their email and self-service portals. These are essential for any business that operates digitally. However, with the rising dominance of social media platforms, a growing portion of users have begun to seek customer service through social media channels. In a recent study, 1 in 4 users said they prefer to get customer service through social media, which was up from 1 in 5 just a year prior. The same study also found nearly a fifth had sent a customer service request in the past 3 months. This means it is essential for businesses to offer customer service through their social media.

Answering Questions

The primary customer service task boils down to answering questions. These can be about specificities of a service or product, the cost of shipping, the status of an order, etc. Such questions will often come as direct messages or comments on a specific post. In either instance, a business should answer the question promptly and accurately. If the question is too specific or requires confidential information, be sure to politely direct the communication to an alternative channel, such as email.

Gathering Feedback

Customer service isn’t just about answering questions. One of the things people love about social media is that it provides them with a voice. In fact, because social media makes this so easy, many prefer to provide their feedback on these platforms. This is no different for a business, where customers or clients might provide feedback on their products or services. You can also use social media to gather and survey feedback from your customers/clients. This feedback can take a few forms on social media. It can be comments, direct messages, polls or user-generated content about your business. Sometimes this feedback will be positive, praising your business. Other times it might be requests or suggestions. Be sure to respond and engage with this content, thanking them for the kind words or acknowledging the suggestions. This feedback can be highly informative, and your public responsiveness further helps to build your brand’s sincerity.

Handling Complaints in Social Media

Unfortunately, sometimes the feedback will be negative or even be a complaint. Occasionally these comments will just be abusive. With these follow the old internet adage, “Don’t feed the trolls.” Hide these comments, block their messages, and move on. Other times, these may be more sincere concerns or issues. Treat these earnestly and as an opportunity to demonstrate your care for your products/services and those who receive them. It should go without saying that you should not respond dismissively or, worse, with hostility.

If you begin to notice numerous comments or messages with complaints for the same issue, you should acknowledge you have a more serious concern. In these instances, direct the users to a collective communication channel such as a customer service email. You can also turn off comments on this post to prevent the issue from getting out of hand and create a post or story that directs anyone with the issue(s) to contact your more official channels. Coming up with a set number to make this call at is considered a good idea.

Taking It “Offline”

This brings us back to an important thing to remember about social media customer service. Overall, social media is a powerful and convenient communication tool, but it is highly public and subject to the control of the other platforms. It’s perfect for addressing simple and basic customer service occasions. However, if the service required is more specific or complicated, or the issue or complaint more severe, your social media team should direct that person to more official channels offered by your business. We’ve already mentioned email, but in certain instances you can also offer a phone call. If there is a serious complaint or issue, you can also consider allowing your social media team to direct the person directly to the business manager or owner through email, the phone, or even in person. This provides a direct access that they might appreciate.

Understanding that Customer Service on Social Media is Social

You should now have a better sense of how social media is useful for customer service. However, it isn’t a complete solution. Instead, it will often serve better to address simpler questions, gather feedback, or open a line of communication to another more specific and official channel. It’s still more social than it is official business. For this reason, you can consider using a chatbot to help address any simple questions or direct users to the official communication channels. Just remember that people always prefer dealing with a person for customer service. If you’re looking to incorporate your social media more into your customer service strategies or need help overseeing your social media channels, be sure to contact Rosewood’s social media marketing team.

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