The holiday season is undoubtedly the most exciting time of the year, but it can also be extremely stressful if you’re not prepared. Many companies spend far too much money on their holiday marketing campaigns without seeing any significant ROI, and it’s easy to understand why. The holiday season is extremely competitive, so you have to make sure that your brand stands out from the rest if you want your business to succeed over the next few months.
1) Generate ideas
As you brainstorm ideas, don’t make I have no idea an excuse for not taking action. You might not know exactly what you want to do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. Don’t worry about having a fully formed strategy or plan in place right now—it will be enough to start with some brainstorming and research. Just get your hands dirty. Start by writing down everything you could possibly think of related to your topic. If there are things on your list that seem too far-fetched, go ahead and scratch them off; otherwise, keep going until you run out of steam. Even if all you end up with is a long list of potential topics and angles, it’s better than nothing at all! Now that you have a bunch of ideas floating around in your head, how do you choose which ones to pursue? There are lots of ways to decide what will work best for your business: Talk to people: We’re social creatures, so we tend to like talking about ourselves. So why not use that as a tool?
2) Use Audience Insights
Having a strong understanding of your audience’s preferences, demographics and interests is key to developing an effective holiday marketing strategy. However, you can take your customer insight one step further by leveraging advanced metrics like conversion rates, user engagement and social media follower counts. This will allow you to quickly identify areas where optimization opportunities exist within your marketing campaign. As a result, you’ll be able to effectively align your advertising spending with how users interact with your content. By utilizing these strategies, brands are able to tailor their message and maximize ROI on their holiday campaigns in real-time.
3) Create content calendars
It’s not enough to just have a holiday marketing strategy, you need to actually create and implement it. This involves identifying what materials you need to create and when you need them by in order to reach your target audience before they buy from your competitors. It also means making sure that all of these pieces fit into your overall sales funnel, with corresponding calls-to-action (CTAs) for every piece. You should also set benchmarks so you can measure how well your campaign is performing at each stage. Create content calendars to help keep everything on track!
If you don’t plan ahead, it will be difficult to know exactly what kind of messaging or offers are most effective with your target audience. Creating an editorial calendar helps guide even high-level decisions about where and how often promotional messages appear across different channels so nothing falls through the cracks during your high-stakes shopping season.
4) Drive Traffic
If you’re running an e-commerce business, there’s a good chance that most of your revenue comes from holiday shopping. That means it’s time to roll out your 2017 holiday marketing strategy—and have a plan for keeping visitors engaged throughout Black Friday, Cyber Monday and beyond. The best way to do that is by creating a multi-channel campaign that drives traffic through search engines, social media and email. Here are five tips for creating an effective holiday marketing strategy #1: Think Outside The (Gift) Box: What if you could target customers with relevant ads based on their purchase history? If you sell clothing or other items that can be personalized, then lookalike audiences might be a good fit for your holiday marketing strategy. Facebook allows advertisers to create custom audiences based on people who already like their page or visit their website.
5) Measure ROI
According to research from Internet Retailer, holiday shoppers spent $37.4 billion on purchases made online in 2016. With all that money being spent, it’s critical to track your ROI (return on investment) and how your company is performing online throughout your holiday marketing strategy. There are many ways to measure your ROI, but one of the most important metrics you should be tracking is revenue per visit—the amount of revenue generated by each visitor who lands on a page of your website. If you know what kind of results you want for your holiday campaign, then tracking revenue per visit will help you determine whether or not you’re achieving those goals. The more data you have, the better equipped you’ll be to make adjustments as needed. So if your goal is to increase sales by 20 percent over last year, use Google Analytics or another analytics tool to track traffic coming into your site and conversions happening on pages with high-value offers like shopping carts.
