3 Tips for Digital Marketing During the Holiday Season
Believe it or not, the holiday season is just around the corner. These next couple of months are jam-packed with gift buying, discount shopping, and splurging on our family and friends. With that being said, it is vital that your brand is ready to compete for the attention of holiday shoppers, or risk getting left behind by your competitors.
In this article, we will go over three tips for leveraging your digital marketing strategies during the holiday season. What your brand should be doing, how they should be doing it, and what to expect for upcoming trends.
TOC
Social Media Marketing
Paid Advertising
Email Marketing
Marketing your brand during the holiday season is all about maintaining multiple consumer touch points.
Without a doubt, you will see some changes in how brands go about attracting the attention of consumers. No matter what channels your marketing on, you can expect to see trends begin to shift here shortly. Here’s what you can do for each of the major platforms.
Social Media Marketing
Social media will undoubtedly play a vital role in marketing during this holiday season. As social media platforms become cluttered with discount offers, irrelevant promotions, and paid ads, your primary goal should be capturing and maintaining the attention of your ideal customers.
Don’t rely on social media just to promote your products, services, and brand. Use social media to share resources and helpful information with potential customers during this holiday season. Share lists of gift ideas, local community news, relevant events, and advice for holiday shopping.
Make sure to continually provide value to your social media audience, while also promoting your different product lines, sales offers, and referral programs. As the holiday season becomes busier, so should you with your marketing efforts. The less your audience hears from you, the less they’ll consider you for a holiday gift option.
Do not underestimate the power of social media during the holidays. Consumers are emotional, happier, and ready to buy. Your holiday social media strategy should emphasize why they should buy from you.
It’s important that your content stands out, so make sure to stay relevant with the trending topics and content among your ideal customers. Most importantly, make sure to use relevant distribution channels. If you audience is more engaged with stories than they are news feed posts, focus on posting to your story. If they engage more with videos than static images, post branded videos.
All this time, you should also be monitoring your competition to see what they are posting. Make sure you are not falling behind the curve with consistency, engagement, and trending content.
Similarly, pay attention to national brands. What are larger brands with similar products or services posting? Try and use these ideas to come up with something unique and different for your audience to engage with.
Obviously, promoting your discounts and sales offers are important during the holiday season as well, but don’t lost sight of the importance of mixing in a healthy dose of value as well.
Lastly, you can run a contest on social media. Every follow, like, and tagged friend gets a user an entry to win a free giveaway. This can be a desirable holiday gift, a treat yourself offer, or anything else that your ideal customers will find desirable. Contests are a very effective way to generate buzz right before the holiday season and get people talking about your brand.
Additionally, the more people that engage with your content, the more people that will find your brand organically. These people can be easily converted into email subscribers, purchases, or even just social media followers.
Paid Ads
Since social media channels become so cluttered during this time of year, it’s vital that you seek out ways to effectively promote your content and offers and ensure that they get seen. There’s no better or quicker way of doing this than by paying for ads. Ads can help guarantee that relevant users that are most likely to want your product or service will see your content.
Whether you are looking to sell products or generate leads, paying for ads can help guarantee that your content isn’t overshadowed by larger brands or competitors.
When paying for ads, you should keep in mind that budget is everything to start. If you saved up to run Facebook Ads or Google Ads for the holiday season and want to make sure you get the most bang for your buck, there are a few strategies you should follow.
Target people you know are relevant to your brand. This can be website visitors, engaged users, abandoned carts, or current customers. If these audiences aren’t large enough to target alone but you still have at least 1,000 users in each group, you can create lookalike audiences based on those users. Unless if your product is relevant enough to the average consumer that it can be efficiently targeted with Facebook’s basic interest and behavior-based characteristics, leveraging custom and lookalike audiences will help keep your costs down.
Most importantly, the type of content you promote is vital for your success. During the holiday seasons, promotional offers like free stuff and discounts are most popular. They are also the most commonly clicked. Try and create a unique way to promote your offers without blending in. If you can, leverage video ads to engage more users.
Your paid ads should promote an irresistible offer that either converts a user or gets a user to the next step of being converted. Don’t waste time promoting your website if you want to get sales, and don’t waste time promoting product lines when you are offering a limited time discount.
If you are promoting a product on an E-commerce site, Facebook Ads will most often be your best bet. Google Display Ads can be helpful as will, if you have the budget to cross-channel market. Even better, video ads for YouTube are very effective at converting users, especially for products or services that are harder to explain. Although it requires a significant budget size, video ads on YouTube can help convert high-value products and services.
Overall, stick to what you are most comfortable with. Target the right audiences, promote the right offers, and proofread everything before paying for your ads.
Email Marketing
Leveraging email marketing is the perfect way to generate organic sales and leads. Promote your offers among current customers, upsell different product lines, and introduce a referral program. For every friend your active customers refer, they get 10% off their next purchase.
You can also leverage email marketing to promote social media contests right before the holiday season. Encourage your contact list to share your contest with friends in order to receive an entry to win a desirable prize. Your prize can be anything from a free product to free spending money at your store for the holidays.
Most importantly, leverage email marketing to promote your holiday inventory. Let subscribers know what products you offer that would make great gift ideas. They can browse your inventory before you resort to offering a promotional offer.
Overall, email marketing during the holidays should be heavily used to encourage website traffic, content engagement, and to promote offers. You should also have an email campaign that targets abandoned carts, in order to increase your conversion rate.
If you leverage each of these channels simultaneously and efficiently, your brand should be the talk of your online community and the go-to place for your ideal customer to get their holiday shopping done.
