How to Deliver Your Holiday Greetings Without the December Dash

[00:00:00] Jessi Bruton: So there’s a phrase that has come up over the course of my career: “When it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s nobody’s responsibility.”

[00:00:13] Announcer: Welcome to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink, where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let’s get started with the show.

[00:00:30] Michelle Calcote King: Hi, everyone. I’m Michelle Calcote King. I’m your host, and I’m the principal and president of Reputation Ink. So in this episode, I’m really excited because we’re going to talk about holiday greetings and the process of getting them to your clients. It starts out simple enough. Somebody brings it up in a meeting. Everyone agrees, “Yeah, we should do a card. We should do something thoughtful.” And then it’s November and no one can agree on anything. So we thought we’d bring in our resident expert, Jessi Bruton, our group creative director here at Reputation Ink, about how firms can trade that annual scramble for a plan that works. So Jessi, thanks for coming on.

[00:01:11] Jessi Bruton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:14] Michelle Calcote King: And just for the audience, tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

[00:01:18] Jessi Bruton: Absolutely. I am group creative director here at Reputation Ink. I’ve been with the team for a little over two years, but that’s just a small part of my overall experience. I bring more than two decades of experience when it comes to design, production and creative work. So I oversee all of the beautiful items that we put out for our clients each day.

[00:01:41] Michelle Calcote King: Great. Well, I’m excited to talk to you about this. So it seems like every year the holiday campaign sneaks up on marketing teams. Why do you think this keeps happening, and when should firms actually start thinking about their holiday card plans?

[00:01:59] Jessi Bruton: This happens to everyone across all industries all of the time, and there are two factors to it. One is that the deadline we mentally set for ourselves is much shorter than we imagine. We think, “Oh, Christmas is Dec. 25. That’s how calendars work.” But the fact is, most of the people we are sending things to aren’t in their office on Dec. 25. They’re maybe leaving for PTO the week beforehand or a couple of weeks beforehand. So our deadline is earlier than we think. Also, production takes time, and the Thanksgiving holiday eats into our production timeline.

So how do we navigate these things? What I like to say is, start thinking about your holiday marketing in September. You don’t need to do anything but begin to have the ideas percolating as to what this might look like. Do we want to do a mailed card, a digital card, something festive and celebratory that highlights a key moment in your company’s past year, something that evokes your core values? Just start thinking about the general direction and vibe. In October, you want to see something. You want to see a couple of first designs, first layouts, so you have something to respond to and refine, so that in November you’re approving and then you’re going right into production. So you’re receiving and sending things out in December, rather than having this December dash where you’re trying to still refine your list and get approvals while people are actively going out of the office.

[00:03:39] Michelle Calcote King: Love that. For those of us in southern U.S. states, starting to think about the holidays in September always feels early, but it’s not. It’s the time to start putting those plans together. We work with a lot of professional services firms. That means there are often committees involved in everything, and often it ends up being kind of a group project. And you’ve talked about the importance of really having one person who owns this process. Why is that important?

[00:04:12] Jessi Bruton: Absolutely. There’s a phrase that has come up over the course of my career, and that is, “When it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s nobody’s responsibility.” So the first thing I always recommend is, name your Rudolph. You have all of the other reindeer powering this, but who’s your one person who’s really going to own it, lead it, take accountability for it, so that you know that everything’s happening and not falling through the cracks? Then, of course, that person may be leading the project. That doesn’t mean they need to do all of the project. They just need to make sure that things are happening. So you may want to also name stakeholders for approvals or decision-makers, reviewers, maybe somebody who has a very fine eye for proofreading in addition to your managing partner who needs to approve the overall creative. So assemble your team, but keep your team really tight because, one of my favorite phrases is, “A camel is just a horse that was designed by committee.” You want to make sure that you have the right people adding value at every step of the approval process, but not so many that they begin to conflict with each other.

[00:05:28] Michelle Calcote King: Love that. I’m not going to look at camels the same way after that. So let’s talk about format. Obviously in ye olden days, it would always be a printed card, but nowadays a lot of people do video or some sort of graphic type of format. What questions should firms ask themselves in terms of figuring out what format works for them?

[00:05:55] Jessi Bruton: I get asked this all of the time: What is the right format? And the fact is, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s what is right for your brand, your core values, what you’re trying to communicate and the type of relationship that you have with your clients, prospects, your general audience. By that I mean print still has a really, really nice tactile, high-touch quality. Now, it does have the drawback that it takes longer to get to a recipient because it has to mail. It’s not instant in your inbox. But it’s nice for companies that want to have the opportunity for a handwritten personalization. And it has a little bit of staying power because someone can take that and place it on their mantle, place it in the kitchen or the meeting room of the office. So it can have a little bit of resonation power. But digital has a lot of exciting additional capabilities. Firstly, of course, you don’t have to worry about postage, the cost of postage, and also the time that it takes to get to someone. It additionally has opportunities. You can just send a simple JPEG that’s a happy wish, and you’ve accomplished the task. But it also gives you the opportunity to have a call to action that clicks through to a landing page. So, for example, you can have a card that says, “Season’s greetings,” and perhaps you’re doing something this year because a core value of your company is community or family. So for this holiday season, your company has chosen to make a donation to a nonprofit that aligns with your industry or your values. So you send the card: “Season’s greetings. These are the reasons why we’ve chosen to donate to this particular nonprofit. Click here to learn a little bit more about our corporate responsibility initiatives.”

So it’s a nice way to have more touch points and tie back not just the warm message of, “We thought of you, we value our relationship with you,” but also a little bit about us and our culture. At the end of the day, holiday cards are really a pure brand marketing piece. It’s a way to communicate to your recipients, whether that’s your clients, your prospects, your vendors, your employees, “We value you, and this is how we’re showing our core values rather than simply telling.”

[00:08:34] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Well, the other thing I was thinking about is that in the past, sending them to a physical address was easy. We all had those physical addresses. Maybe it was in the system from billing. But then COVID came along. People are dispersed in different locations. But even if you’re sending a digital card, that list cleanup is so important, right? A lot of teams don’t think about that. They’re walking around to their lawyers, their architects at the last minute to get that list cleaned up. So that’s another thing I would add in there: Get that moving early on. Get your attorneys, get your architects, your engineers, your project managers to start verifying. If you’re sending it physically, get those street addresses. If you’re sending it digitally, get those email addresses updated. So that can also throw a wrench in there. But let’s go back to creative. What are some ways firms give helpful and unhelpful direction? What’s the best way they should be briefing somebody like you?

[00:09:44] Jessi Bruton: Creative direction is such a fun and mystical kind of process, and what I really want to do is demystify it. So what a lot of people tend to do is they want to be very helpful. “We like candy canes, we don’t like Santa Claus. We like snowflakes, we don’t like reindeer.” That is really kind of tactical, and while it’s intended in the spirit of helpfulness, it ends up really limiting the creative process and the ideas that can come to the table. What’s much more important is to convey the tone. We want to have a tone of festivity, celebration, joy, or we want to have a tone of elegance, reflection, gratitude. Those types of words set a vibe, if you will, and really allow your designer to come to the table with unexpected ideas, creative ideas that meet your brand in unexpected ways. Because I’ve spent a lot of time looking at various stock resources, like photography, illustrations, icons and so on, and the exact same subject matter can be drawn in ways that are very modern, very traditional, very funny and silly or very elegant. It’s the exact same subject matter, but the way in which it’s rendered evokes a different sense. So it may make very, very much sense for a very sophisticated, fashion-forward, innovative firm, but not as much sense for a firm that’s more rooted in core values of tradition and stability.

[00:11:37] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. So what I heard there was, keep it high level. Don’t get into this particular color or this reindeer. It’s very high level: This is our brand, this is what we want to communicate, not the pixels on the screen. So that’s great advice.

[00:12:01] Jessi Bruton: 100%. And even adding to that, because we are talking about the winter holidays, there are a lot of winter holidays, and there are different ways of approaching Christmas, which is, do we want to go full Santa Claus red and green but still have our messaging be “Happy holidays”? Do we want to go full Christmas? Do we want to simply do “Happy holidays” and use imagery that’s of winter: snow-draped branches, red birds in the snow, glimmer and glitter? We can do that, knowing what your sensitivity is to how literal or how restrained we want to be. There are also a lot of wintertime holidays. We have clients that celebrate New Year’s Eve, which has no religious affiliation, so it’s a little bit easier and has great stories in terms of new year, new leaf. I’ve also had clients who have done Thanksgiving marketing, which is just infused with opportunities of gratitude and giving back.

[00:13:11] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Let’s talk about feedback. So the firm gets that first draft after they’ve briefed you from a high level. Tell me about how to make that feedback process less messy and get to the heart of what you need to understand in order to incorporate their thoughts.

[00:13:37] Jessi Bruton: Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully we have named our reindeer, so we know that we’re not dealing with too many voices with too many conflicting opinions. But regardless, the most important thing to me about feedback is less “change this” and more “change this because.” Because I have such an extensive background in design, I have a lot of tools and tricks in my toolbox that I know how to affect things that somebody who isn’t a dedicated designer might not. So when I know the why, what you’re trying to get to, I hear the problem, I hear “this isn’t working,” so do we perhaps address it in this way or this way or this way or this other way? It gives me more freedom to deliver a great work product rather than just thinking, “Okay, we’re checking this box.”

[00:14:38] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. So again, high level. Give you the understanding of what we’re trying to achieve. Don’t get too far into the weeds. What do firms get wrong about the logistics side of the campaign? I know that’s not quite your area, but tell me about what you often see that could be improved.

[00:15:05] Jessi Bruton: Well, you already mentioned this earlier, which is our mailing list. Not a year goes by that I don’t hear, “Oh, we sent out the Christmas card, the eCard for a client, and then we needed to do three additional sends because somebody got their list in late.” So I would really encourage thinking about that ahead of time and starting to clean that list and collect those addresses sooner than you think is necessary, because there are going to be people who are going to be working on their own timelines to get that to you.

Another thing is, once a piece of design is approved, it’s not necessarily ready to go. Whether you’re printing something, an approved piece of design needs to then go to the printer, be printed, be trimmed, be stuffed in envelopes, addressed and stamped and mailed. Or even with digital, that beautiful design needs to be added into your CRM, formatted into your email newsletter template. Your list needs to be input. So just make sure that you’re adding in that time for production between when you approve a piece and when the rubber meets the road.

[00:16:22] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. Those are really good points. So, okay, we’re done with the card. We’ve gotten it out. What can a firm do at the very end, when they’ve gotten that card out, to make next year’s campaign go easier?

[00:16:38] Jessi Bruton: Write a note to self and put it on the calendar for about a month before you think you need it. Here is one of my favorite stories of Christmas, and this isn’t professional, this is personal. Two years ago, I was opening up a box of Christmas lights, as one does, and there was a giant piece of paper right on top that said, “Dear future Jessi, three of the light strands are burned out, so we threw them away. You need to buy lights before you start hanging things.” And I was like, “Thank goodness,” because I had completely forgotten about that, and what would have happened is we would have learned that we were three light strands short while my husband’s up on the ladder, and it was a whole mess. We saved ourselves so much hassle by simply documenting while it was fresh in our minds and then putting it in a highly visible place. So do that professionally. Be kind to your future self.

[00:17:33] Michelle Calcote King: That’s great. Any forecasting in terms of where holiday greetings, holiday marketing is heading in the next few years?

[00:17:45] Jessi Bruton: Oh, yeah, absolutely. We live in a digital world. Anybody who has existed on the internet knows content is going less still and more motion graphics, more reels, more video. So I see a lot of holiday greetings that traditionally have been sent as digital emails that are single cards in emails, maybe a JPEG, becoming either animated in some way or even being recorded as a video. I also see smart marketing directors using this opportunity to go from, “Okay, it’s just an email that hits an inbox,” to something that clicks through to a landing page that allows people to have an additional touchpoint with your company. Again, this is a brand awareness-level marketing piece, so the more that you can get that kind of tactile engagement to cultivate positive sentiment for your brand, that’s an opportunity that is just ripe for the grasping.

[00:18:47] Michelle Calcote King: Yeah. I think those are great. And I would also add, in the age of AI, more human. It’s an opportunity to show your people and to make your people more personal to your audience. So those are great forecasting. We’ve been talking with Jessi Bruton, group creative director here at Reputation Ink, and thank you so much for joining us. It was really great to have you on.

[00:19:14] Jessi Bruton: It’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[00:19:20] Announcer: Thanks for listening to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.