In the US, Thanksgiving represents the start of the holiday season. Celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November, it’s immediately followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday–the year’s biggest shopping days.
Incorporating Thanksgiving messaging in your marketing is an ideal way to embrace the holiday spirit, tap into consumers’ excitement about the season, and get people primed to buy from you over the coming months.
But how do you get into the Thanksgiving mood? If you’re looking for help getting your holiday marketing plan off the ground, we’ve got a roundup of the best Thanksgiving slogans and–most importantly–tips on using them.
How to use Thanksgiving slogans (or slogans for any holiday!)
We all love a clever ad that makes us smile, creates connection, or tugs at our heartstrings. A compelling Thanksgiving slogan can create an emotional resonance for your audience, which is excellent. But you need to give people the feels for a reason.
The FRIENDS Experience planned to capitalize on Friendsgiving to promote its locations in NY and San Francisco.
That’s why any great marketing campaign starts with a well-conceived plan. Coming up with clever Thanksgiving slogans should happen after you decide what you hope to achieve with your marketing. Here’s how you create an underlying strategy for your Thanksgiving slogans.
👋Here it is! Your free and complete guide to happy holiday marketing. Give yourself the gift of easy and delightful holiday marketing planning.
1. Start with a goal
Begin by asking yourself what you want to get from your holiday marketing. The answer to this question will be unique to your business. A restaurant owner might want to see increased reservations for holiday dinners. A retailer might set an ambitious sales target for Black Friday.
Whatever goal you’re driving toward, make it a SMART one (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).
Using the SMART goal framework, the restaurant owner might say they want a 10% increase in bookings between Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Eve.
With specific objectives defined, you can build a marketing campaign to support them. If you’re trying to increase reservations, what marketing tactics can you use to drive your audience to take action?
2. Create your detailed marketing plan
Let’s stick with the restaurant example. So, you want to encourage your audience to book holiday dinners with you. What marketing levers can you pull to get them to do that? You might:
- Send regular emails promoting your holiday pre-fixe menu. (Try these Thanksgiving email templates to help you get started!)
- Film social media content that shows your team decorating your dining room with festive holiday trimmings.
- Adjust your website copy for the season to highlight all the reasons your audience should celebrate with you.
- Add updates to your local listings profiles (Google Business, Yelp, etc.) to promote your seasonal specials.
Think through all of the tactics you can employ to support your SMART goal and identify the marketing channels you’ll need to engage to execute your plan. Create a calendar that details when you’ll start your holiday marketing, and make sure your team knows what role they’ll play in the process.
Once you have the who, what, when, where, and how of your holiday marketing push sketched out, you can begin the creative process.
3. Invest in creative
Here’s where the Thanksgiving slogans come in. Creating holiday marketing slogans is a way to break out of your usual marketing patterns, get creative, show off your brand’s personality, and have a little fun.
At this stage, think through all the pieces you’ll need to make your campaign come together. This is where you write copy, take photos, film videos, and design graphics.
If you have different team members working on the campaign, establish regular meetings to compare notes and ensure the campaign is cohesive. Consider using a project management tool, so your team can easily collaborate and see each other’s work.
4. Stay consistent and follow through
Once you’ve created all of the assets you need, it’s all about the follow-through.
The holidays can be a busy time, personally and professionally, but don’t let the realities of the season derail your beautiful plan.
Schedule your holiday posts in advance so you’re not on Instagram duty on Thanksgiving morning.
Creating a shared campaign calendar for your team, divvying up tasks related to execution, and using marketing tools to schedule content publishing are all tricks to keep you on track.
5. Measure results
When your Thanksgiving marketing campaign is over, there’s still more work to do. One of the greatest things about digital marketing? It collects data on your efforts to see if you actually achieved the SMART goal you set for yourself.
To return to our restaurant example, check your reservation numbers for this year against last year’s. Did you see that 10% increase in bookings over the holiday period?
Even better, can you attribute it to your marketing? There are dozens of ways to track this. For example, you can check click-through rates on email calls to action (CTAs). Or, you can measure the correlation between promotional social content clicks on your Instagram link to your reservations platform.
How do your campaign outcomes compare to your goal? What tactics worked well? Which ones weren’t as successful? And what can you do next time to make your future holiday campaigns even better? Reviewing your marketing data can help you answer these questions.
Thanksgiving slogans and marketing ideas
Now that you understand the basics of creating a successful holiday marketing campaign, let’s dive into some Thanksgiving specifics. What types of campaigns suit the Thanksgiving holiday? And how can you create Thanksgiving slogans in service of those campaigns?
Let’s start by thinking about themes and events associated with Thanksgiving:
- Gratitude/giving thanks
- Building community
- Spending time with family and friends
- Celebrating with a feast
- Beginning the winter holiday season
- Thanksgiving Day parade
- Football season
- Black Friday/Cyber Monday/Small Business Saturday
- Giving Tuesday (and charitable giving, more broadly)
Not only can these themes help you create clever, related slogans; they can also inspire your underlying campaign ideas. Here are some marketing tactics to try during the Thanksgiving holiday season.
1. Share holiday hosting tips
This is a great one for retailers and those in food and hospitality. If you sell hosting essentials or know how to put on a great event, why not share that expertise with others?
You can share hosting tips in a variety of formats: email newsletters, video tutorials on YouTube or TikTok, or carousel posts on Instagram, to name a few.
Here are some Thanksgiving slogans you can employ to share your holiday hosting tips:
- (Pumpkin) spice up your holiday hosting
- Eat, drink, and be thankful
- Easy as pie Thanksgiving recipes
- Sugar and spice make Thanksgiving nice
- Gather ‘round for these hosting tips
- A cornucopia of Thanksgiving dinner ideas
- Grateful for easy Thanksgiving recipes
- Feast on these Thanksgiving hosting tips
🛑 Organic social posts are just one way to build brand awareness and get new customers. This big list of ways to promote your business (with or without money) offers a whole bunch more.
2. Give back to your community
Giving back is a great way to show your gratitude. It’s a nice thing to do, and it makes your customers feel good about doing business with you.
How you give back during the holidays is up to you! You may organize a volunteer day for your team, give a percentage of your profits to charity, or host a donation drive for a local food pantry at your store.
If you’re looking for Thanksgiving slogans to spread the word about your charitable efforts, try one of these:
- Giving thanks by giving back
- Gratitude in action
- What it means to be thankful
- Embracing the true holiday spirit
- Announcing our Thanksgiving donation drive
- What we’re doing for Giving Tuesday
3. Host a seasonal event at your location
The Thanksgiving holiday is about gathering with those you care about. Why not host an event that brings your customers and community together?
There are dozens of holiday-themed ideas to choose from. A fitness studio might host a Turkey Trot race on Thanksgiving morning. A bakery might hold a pie-making class. A stationary store could create a gratitude journaling event.
Whatever type of community-building event you choose to host at your brick-and-mortar location, these Thanksgiving slogans can help you promote it:
- Join us for a Friendsgiving event
- Turkey trot on over to our store
- Gather and give thanks
- Thankful for your presence at [event name]
- Attitude of gratitude event
4. Get involved in a local event
Not ready to host an event at your place? That’s okay, there are plenty of other ways to get involved in the community during the holiday season.
Consider participating in a Thanksgiving event that’s hosted by someone else. How you choose to do this is up to you. Perhaps you partner with another local business owner and you host a joint event at their location where you both promote your offerings. If there’s a community event, you might sign on as a sponsor or vendor.
No matter how you do it, contributing to a local event can introduce your business to new members of the community.
Here are some slogans to promote your participation in a local Thanksgiving event:
- Turkey trot on over to see us at [event name]
- Local businesses on parade! join us at [event name]
- We’re spicing up [event name]
- The ultimate Friendsgiving: Join us at [event name]
- Talking shop and talking turkey at [event name]
- Come get a slice of the action at [event name]
5. Run a holiday sale or promotion
We all know that Thanksgiving kicks off the holiday season. Why not get a head start on Black Friday revenues by running a promotion ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday?
With the expansion of sales events from Black Friday into Cyber Monday and Small Business Saturday, many brands are also moving the season ahead and offering holiday deals in October and November.
This is also a time for you to promote any Thanksgiving-specific sales or promotions you’re offering. For example, a home goods store might offer bundle deals on cookware essentials consumers need for Thanksgiving meal prep!
No matter what your sale or promotion looks like, these Thanksgiving slogans can help you promote it:
- Gobble, gobble! we’ve got Thanksgiving deals
- Black Friday’s here early
- Bringing big deals to the table
- Get a head-start on holiday shopping
- Bountiful bargains await in-store!
- Our store is stuffed with pre-holiday deals
- Gobble up these special Thanksgiving offers
- Feast your eyes on these deals
6. Create a Thanksgiving giveaway or contest
A social media contest or giveaway is always a clever way to draw attention to your brand. And during the holidays, a giveaway can be a way to say thanks to your loyal followers!
This produce brand invites people to “Celery-brate” with them–a wonderful, brand-specific pun!
Here are some Thanksgiving slogans you can use to promote your social media giveaway:
- Jump on the gravy train
- Come together for our giveaway
- Grateful-for-you giveaway
- Sharing is caring
- Share thanks, enter to win
- Eat, nap, enter to win
- All the fixings giveaway
Gobble up Thanksgiving marketing opportunities
Any holiday represents a wonderful opportunity for you to create themed marketing messages. Thanksgiving, with its position at the start of the holiday season, is an especially fruitful time to use holiday marketing tactics. Start thinking about your holiday marketing strategy and Thanksgiving slogans now–you’ll be grateful you did.
And to recap, here are six themes to guide your Thanksgiving slogans:
- Share holiday hosting tips
- Give back to your community
- Host a seasonal event at your location
- Get involved in a local event
- Run a holiday sale or promotion
- Create a Thanksgiving giveaway or contest
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