With Christmas now only 123 days away, Facebook has published a new Christmas Marketing Guide to help guide your strategic planning, and map out a more effective approach based on key shopping behaviors and events.

The 18-page guide is geared around what Facebook's calling its 'Discovery Commerce System', a process that utilizes Facebook's ad matching tools to optimize your marketing approach, based on four steps.

As explained by Facebook:

"The Facebook Discovery Commerce system can help you delight shoppers and anticipate their needs, helping products find people wherever they are through a series of sophisticated components and tools."

For each step, Facebook provides practical recommendations on how you can put it into action, and how that will then contribute to your broader marketing goals.

For example, in the first step - 'Personalization Engine' - Facebook provides a range of tips on how you can personalize your outreach by using tools like the Facebook Pixel and the Conversions API.

The guide essentially provides quick tips for each element, and links to read more about how you can enact them within your strategy.

Which, on one hand, is fairly basic, and doesn't provide a heap of guidance as to how, exactly, they can be implemented - but the idea here is not so much to map out a prescriptive framework as it is to get you thinking about your options, and considering how Facebook's various tools can be used in a broader, more strategic process to entice shoppers through a staged marketing approach.

Which is the key focus. Facebook says that brands should already be planting the seeds for their Christmas promotions, by implementing the first stages of the framework months out from the event.

That exact framework outlined above is a little confusing, as you'd ideally want to map out each element in sequence - so you likely wouldn't be looking to implement the conversion element in June, as indicated by this chart.

But even so, the idea is that you can utilize these processes, via Facebook's various tools, to build more effective, more resonant holiday campaigns, by starting off your outreach now, and building towards the key sales peaks.

There are some interesting considerations here, and the links to Facebook's various tools for each are helpful in understanding their practical application.

You can check out Facebook's Christmas Marketing Guide yourself here.