There’s more to the holidays than just Halloween, Christmas and Thanksgiving. There are holidays all year round, and some of them will make more sense to run promotions for than others for your specific business.

The first step toward boosting holiday sales is figuring out what holidays you’d like to run promotions for. Then take some time to think about what those promotions should be (such as a coupon for 25% off, or buy 1 get 1 free, etc).

By planning out your holiday promotions ahead of time, you’ll be a lot more prepared than if you just fly by the seat of your pants, saving you a lot of time and hassle in the future.

Whether we’re talking about a 4th of July promotion or a Valentine’s Day promotion, any holiday promotion should start on your website itself. Start creating holiday assets for your website now so that you’ll be prepared when the time comes.

Start by creating banners for your website to promote the holiday. These can be used on multiple pages and even in other marketing materials to spread the word about your upcoming holiday promotions.

Most of the time, the banner will be all that you need to promote on your website, but in some cases, a landing page will also be necessary. Determine now if you’ll need a landing page, and if so, create one.

Website content alone won’t be enough to get the word out about your holiday promotion. Just like with any other sale, advertise your promotion on channels that are popular with your customer base, like Google, Facebook and Instagram.

Don’t wait. Get a head start. Write your ad copy and design all of your ads for the holiday promo now. Make sure to match your leaderboard banner design and/or landing page.

Create multiple versions of your holiday promo ads, and run them side by side to determine which version works best. Even small changes can impact your conversions and ultimate success.

While digital advertising campaigns can be an effective means of getting your holiday promotion in front of new customers, to get in front of your existing customers, email marketing is the way to go.

Start designing email templates now to build awareness for your holiday promotion. For best results, segment your email list. Write email marketing copy geared towards specific segments of your email list, and use personalizations to boost your success.

Just like your ads, it’s important to use the same design for your email marketing templates as you do for the banner of your website. This will help to reinforce your branding.

If you wait until it’s time to launch your ad campaign before really thinking about how much you want to spend, you’ll end up spending a lot more than you’d like and you’ll end up with less-than-ideal results.

Take some time to think about when you want your ads to run and how much you want to spend each day running ads.

Small business owners are some of the busiest people around. Many of them are working overtime every single week and don’t have a lot of time to devote to advertising holiday promotions.

If you don’t have the time to do it yourself, make it a point to choose someone who will be in charge of launching, monitoring and ending your campaign when it’s finished.

This is too important to leave it up to chance — or a free minute in your already packed schedule. Make sure it gets done by putting someone in charge of it.

Keep a close eye on how your holiday marketing campaign is performing. The data you gather from this year’s holiday campaign can be used to make next year’s that much better. Do more of what’s working and less of what’s not.

Also, save the assets you create this year. Some of them can be reused with just small tweaks in your holiday campaign next year.