You may have spent this week taking down your Halloween decorations and sneaking a piece of your kids’ candy from their stash, which means the holiday season is just around the corner. Have you started planning your business’s holiday season marketing strategy? If not, now is the best time to start!
Here are some examples of how to spruce up your digital marketing strategy for the upcoming holiday season!
SEO
It’s easy for your website to get buried under pages and pages of search engine results, especially during the holiday season. Why not try to break through the holiday noise with a strategic SEO campaign? By utilizing keyword research tools to find useful keywords that people are searching for, you can create pages tailored around these keywords. You could even take this one step further and try incorporating paid ads and dedicated landing pages to gain even more attention and leads.
Content
Since it’s after Halloween, now is a great time to start rolling out holiday-themed messages through your email marketing, social media, and any other content efforts. From now until the Tuesday after Cyber Monday, focus the messaging around Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales or themed content. This messaging allows you to spread out the holiday-themed content, so you stay relevant with what’s currently on consumers’ minds.
It may be hard to prevent this, but try not to focus on sales. Instead, focus your content on getting people to recognize your brand and relating it to topics that matter to your target audience. Some topic examples include gift guides, 25 of something, holiday tips, or nostalgic posts.
Social Media
Social media might be your most crucial channel during the holiday season, as it is the quickest way to get the word out about announcements, sales, and news. Consider building out a social media calendar to coordinate your posts and ensure you’re spreading out your messages. That way you can offer some variety instead of posting the same thing day after day.
Along with posting your blogs and sales, encourage your followers to engage with your brand on social by offering them incentives ranging from free shipping to free stuff. Create contests (for example, a “sharing” contest where you randomly select a winner who shares a post) that spark engagement with your channels and give them a chance to have fun with you!
Website Edits
Your website’s appearance (and any other digital medium you use) can reinforce the holiday theme. There are tasteful ways to get into the holiday spirit while keeping your branding up front and center. If you have a WordPress website, one thing you can do is add a simple plugin to make it snow on your website.
You can also look into different WordPress themes that will get your website into the holiday spirit; just remember not to overdo it and remove these after the holiday season is over.
eCommerce
‘Tis the season for eCommerce websites and shopping cart abandonment! This holiday season, take advantage of creating a drip campaign centered around these abandonments by offering a special incentive to complete their purchase. Whether they’ll have 24 hours to utilize this special offer or shorter, include pictures of what they left in their cart, relevant information about the items, and related products.
To keep it in the holiday theme, design your emails to be festive and make the messaging light. There is a way to give a sense of urgency without sounding demanding, so A/B test these messages and see what works best.
Post-Holiday Efforts
When the trees and dreidels get put back in the attic, this is when your post-holiday marketing efforts begin. Your audience is looking forward to the new year, and the brands that can successfully give them what they need to kickoff 2018 on the right foot will see the benefits. That’s why this is the best time to show your ongoing support for your audience.
How do you do this? You can send them a Happy New Year email, have a pop-up on your website’s homepage, or even create a string of social posts that revolve around your products/services. You can get creative here, but as long as you can stay top of mind and relevant for your audience, you’re doing it right.
We wish your business the best of luck with your holiday marketing efforts, and we’re here to help you any way you need! Give us a holler, and we’ll get your brand in the holiday spirit in no time!