Plan seasonal and holiday campaigns

Kite builds your calendar from your business, not from a generic list of holidays. Most businesses have three or four dates that drive a large share of their year and many more that aren't worth a campaign. Kite proposes the ones worth planning for and explains why each one made the list.

The calendar usually draws on a few kinds of dates:

• Holidays your customers buy for, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, Valentine's Day, or Mother's Day.
• Seasons in your category, such as back to school, wedding season, or the spring rush for a landscaper.
• Deadlines your customers face, such as the tax filing deadline, Medicare's annual enrollment period, or the end of a fiscal year when budgets are spent or set.
• Dates of your own, such as your company's anniversary, an annual sale, or a conference you attend every year.

For each date, Kite checks when people actually start looking. Its built-in search data shows how searches for a term rise and fall month by month across the past year. Searches for "coffee gift subscription" might start climbing in early November and peak in mid-December. Searches for "tax preparer near me" might rise from late January. That timing tells Kite when your campaign needs to be visible, which is often weeks before the date itself.

You can add dates, remove them, or change their priority. Once you agree, Kite keeps the calendar in your team's knowledge base and uses it for every campaign that follows.

Kite plans each campaign from last year's results for the same weeks, because they're the most specific evidence you have about your own customers. It reads them from the tools where they live:

• Orders. With Shopify connected, Kite reads last year's orders for the season: when they started, which products sold, and who bought them.
• Email. With Mailchimp connected, Kite reads each holiday campaign's opens, clicks, unsubscribes, and the revenue it brought in when your store is connected.
• Ads. With Google Ads or Meta Ads connected, Kite reads spend and results for last year's seasonal campaigns, down to the individual ads.
• Website traffic. On a site Kite hosts, its built-in analytics show traffic and conversions for the same period last year. For a site measured elsewhere, Kite reads them through your connected analytics product.

Then it turns those numbers into decisions. Say you run a small coffee roaster. Kite might find that last year's Black Friday email earned most of its orders in the first six hours, that the gift subscription sold out by Saturday, and that a dozen customers wrote in asking whether orders would arrive by Christmas. This year's plan sends the first email earlier to the people who bought last year, gives the gift subscription more stock and its own page, and puts the shipping cutoff on the site before anyone has to ask.

If this is your first year, or your old results are hard to reach, Kite starts from research instead. It looks at what your competitors ran last season, the ads they're running now and when they started, and what customers in your category search for around the date.

Kite builds each campaign plan backward from the date, giving every piece the lead time it needs. A page meant to be found in search starts first. The offer, the email sequence, and the ad copy come next. Reminders and last-minute updates come last.

For the coffee roaster's holiday season, the plan might look like this:

• Late summer: publish a holiday gift guide and a gift subscription page, so they have time to be found in search before shoppers arrive.
• Six weeks out: decide the offer, set up the sale collection and discount codes in the store, and write the ad copy and images.
• Three weeks out: write and schedule the email sequence, starting with early access for last year's holiday buyers.
• Black Friday week: send the launch emails, post on social channels, and watch orders and stock each day.
• Mid-December: post the last-day-to-order notice on the site and in email, then switch the message to gift cards once shipping can't make it in time.

A deadline campaign follows the same logic with a different shape. An accounting firm's tax-season plan might start in January with a page answering "what do I need to file my taxes?", send reminder emails as the deadline gets closer, and end with a final push for extensions in the last week.

Kite turns the plan into an initiative on your team's initiatives board, with each task assigned to a start date. You can ask Kite to review the calendar on a schedule, such as the first Monday of every month, and bring you whatever needs to start in the next few weeks. A campaign that needs months of lead time doesn't sneak up on you.

Kite writes and builds the campaign pieces in your brand voice and ships them through the tools you've connected. It asks for your approval before it publishes a page, sends an email, or changes your store, and you approve in the conversation where the work began.

• Pages on your website. Kite writes and publishes gift guides, sale pages, and deadline pages. On a site it hosts, it publishes them directly. It can also update your site's shipping page, holiday hours, or a banner announcing the sale.
• Your store. With Shopify connected, Kite builds the sale collection, adds discount codes to a discount you've set up, issues gift cards, and tags last year's holiday buyers so your campaigns can reach them. It can also update your store's shipping page with this year's cutoff dates.
• Email. With Mailchimp connected, Kite builds the segments, writes each email, sends you a test, and schedules the sequence for the dates in the plan. After the launch email, it can resend to the people who didn't open it with a new subject line.
• Social posts. Kite drafts the posts with suggested timing and publishes them through your connected social accounts once you approve them.
• Ads. Kite writes the ad copy and makes the images and short vertical videos for Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and X, checking every line against each platform's limits. Your team launches the ads in Google Ads or Meta Ads Manager. With LinkedIn Ads connected, Kite can prepare the campaign as a draft for your team to launch.

After the season ends, Kite reads how the campaign performed and saves the results next to the calendar, so next year's plan starts with this year's numbers. It compares the orders, email results, ad results, and site traffic with the same weeks last year and with the goal you set at the start.

The summary covers what worked, what didn't, and what to change. It might say the early-access email beat last year's launch email, the gift guide brought in steady search traffic from mid-November, and the Meta ads stopped earning sales after the first weekend because the same people saw them too often. Kite records each lesson in your team's knowledge base with the date it applies to. When next year's season comes around on the calendar, those lessons are the first thing Kite reads.