This is in collaboration with Sindhu Biswal of BuzzLab. If you're getting ready for the festive season this year, you'll definitely want to go through this. There are a few things you can start planning now to make sure you're all set when the festive rush begins!
Every founder knows the festive season is when the money moves. Fewer founders know that by the time the lights go up on the homepage, the real work is already three weeks old, and by then, some of it can’t be undone.
That’s the warning at the heart of marketing strategist Sindhu Biswal’s new playbook for founders - a breakdown of what actually works across festive campaigns, performance creatives, founder-led branding, content, and influencer marketing.
The Reality Nobody Budgets For
CPMs don’t creep up during the festive season - they jump, often 30 to 60 per cent higher than a normal month. Impressions swing 3 to 5 times baseline as every brand in the country reaches for the same eyeballs at once.
It’s disorienting to say the least: the same budget that felt generous in August suddenly feels thin in October. Most founders still plan festive marketing the way they’d plan any other campaign - a few weeks out, a bit more budget, a brighter creative. But you need to have a six-week runway.
Fix the Landing Page Before the Budget
Nearly every founder’s instinct, when traffic gets expensive, is to spend more of it. She argues the opposite - fix the landing page first, because expensive traffic that doesn’t convert is just money burning, and that hurts. That means countdown timers that create real urgency, bestsellers above the fold, load times under 2.5 seconds, and one landing page per campaign angle instead of a single page trying to speak to everyone at once.
Delivery timelines, COD, and returns need to be visible, not because customers demand it, but because they’ve simply learnt, over enough festive seasons, to trust the brands who don’t make them ask.
Book Your Creator Bench Early
By the time a founder reaches out to creators, the good ones are usually already spoken for, and there’s a particular sting to realising that a few weeks too late. So the advice is to lock in the creator bench three to four weeks before the season starts, and to brief for urgency.
Some content should chase gifting occasions; some should chase deal-hunters. Asking one creator to do both usually leaves both undone.
Refresh Creatives Every Few Days
A Creative needs refreshing every three to four days.
Audiences who see the same ad through a week of frantic scrolling simply stop looking at it due to fatigue. So production needs to start four to six weeks out, budgets should scale in steady 20 to 30 per cent steps rather than overnight jumps, and every campaign deserves five to ten reserve creatives sitting on the bench, ready before anyone’s asking for them in a panic.
The Six-Week Timeline
Six to four weeks out is for production and creator locks. Four to two weeks out is for testing and landing page fixes. The final two weeks are for scaling budget gradually and watching performance daily. And sale week itself is for holding steady, not for last-minute changes that quietly undo six weeks of careful work.
The Takeaway
What’s useful here is the underlying discipline, and the permission it gives founders to slow down early so they don’t have to scramble later. Festive marketing can be rewarding if you treat the season as a system with a timeline, not a fire to be put out in real time. Get the six weeks right, and the sale week, for once, takes care of itself.
The full guide is available as a downloadable PDF with the complete week-by-week timeline, tips, and everything on performance creatives, founder-led branding, content strategy, and influencer marketing.
Heading into the festive season? Give this a read if you want to understand what happens beyond the orders and revenue numbers.
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