No matter your business, I’ll bet you’ve been forced to promote your fair share of holiday stuff. Whether it’s to celebrate New Years, Independence Day, Christmas, Thanksgiving, or Halloween — we humans love to buy stuff for holidays, so it makes good sense to promote stuff around those times.

Only. Only you can’t freaking stand promoting stuff around the holidays.

You’d rather cut off your right arm than promote Santa photos or Christmas-scented candles or Thanksgiving-themed paper products, which leaves you miserable when it comes to marketing. Buckle up, ’cause you’re in for a dollop of awesomeness.

Take a look at your marketing calendar.

(If you don’t have one, refer to this post and then come back, quick!)

Choose a single gap in your calendar that you’d like to fill with a Kick Ass Campaign, then decide which product or service you’ll be promoting for the length of your campaign. Yes, you’ll have to limit yourself to a single product or service.

Kick-ass marketing campaign maker #1: choose a length of time for your promotion.

24 hours, 48 hours, 3 days, 10 days, 2 weeks…

This adds urgency to your promo, meaning your peeps are more likely to act on the offer than to let it wallow until nine months from now.

Kick-ass marketing campaign maker #2: limit your promotion by number of spots or products available.

Only 10 available
Just 3 spots left
The first X people to book receive this…

This adds scarcity to your promo, meaning your peeps won’t wrongly assume there are 3,428 spots available.  If there are only 4 of something you have to buy it now, while if there are 490?  Eh.  You’ve got time…

Kick-ass marketing campaign maker #3: add a reason for your promotion!

Holiday
Vacation
Birthday
Tattoo fund
Tuesday!
Beyonce’s new album!

Any reason is a good reason, so don’t limit this to holidays or typical reasons to sell your wares!

The process of making up a promotion really is this simple. You can celebrate Tuesday, or the weekend, or a new album release by your favorite artist just as easily as you can celebrate Turkey Day. There’s no Promotion Police Patrol out to stop you from having fun with this!

Just make up an excuse to celebrate, plug a freshly-made campaign into your calendar, and voila — you’ve got yourself a short and sweet, effective promotion to plop into your marketing calendar.

P.S.  Keep going!  Check out how to hold a sale without breaking your brand and watch out for these 5 reasons your last promotion fell flat.