3 Tips for Marketing This Holiday Season

For many businesses, the holiday season means the opportunity to gain considerable profits. This holiday season, unlike past ones, is different for various reasons. The most prominent reasons can be found in the global health crisis that we are currently experiencing. Although the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of many individuals, as well as businesses, life has to go on. This doesn’t mean that everything is performed as normal. Businesses are coming up with innovative ways to promote and sell their goods and services with their customers’ health and well-being in mind. This means that how goods are sold has changed in some ways. For some businesses, it has changed considerably. Businesses are optimizing their places of services (physical locations), their websites, social media platforms, and other relevant means of communicating and reaching customers to adapt to the current health crisis. For these significant reasons, the holiday season this year will be unlike any other we have experienced.

To better prepare you and assist you in gaining profits is perhaps the most commercially relevant period of the year for your business. Here are three important tips to consider when producing holiday marketing strategies.

1) Ramp Up Your Online Presence for Your Holiday Marketing

Having a considerable online presence can be of great benefit to your business. How exactly can you reinvigorate it for the success of your organization? For starters, consider updating your local listings? Whether you use Google My Business, Yelp, Bing, Facebook, or any other platform that can make your business visible among target audiences, it is essential to update your listings to improve your web presence. By doing so, you will be able to drive up traffic when you include important information such as your organization’s phone number, website, and physical address. You want to make sure this vital information is up to date or run the risk of losing potential customers. You don’t want to lose prospective customers because of a wrong phone number, right? So, update your local listings when possible. It will save you a ton of headaches.

— Checking Things Twice

You can also revamp your online presence this holiday season by preparing your website for the holidays. Why? Well, consider the fact that 75 percent of U.S. shoppers who plan to shop this season said they will shop online more for the holidays than they did in previous seasons. When revamping your website some things to consider include ensuring to optimize your website for mobile platforms, improving page speed, updating plugins, as well as checking up on your website’s security capabilities to ensure customer data is protected.

— Friendly Reminder

Lastly, think about the benefits of retargeting customers through social media and PPC tactics. What exactly is retargeting? Here is how this tactic works; When visitors leave a website (a website that typically sells a product or service), they usually never return. Get this: they never return 97 percent of the time. With retargeting, you can reach out to these potential buyers when they visit other websites using clickable advertisements, usually found in social media and other platforms. What’s great about retargeting strategies is that it helps with promotional duties for your businesses, especially when you are introducing new products. This is especially relevant during the holiday season. Therefore, retargeting customers is an excellent option if you are searching to build your organization’s online presence this holiday season.

2) Encourage Brand Loyalty During the Holidays

The next marketing tip that may be of great relevance to your business this holiday season is increasing and encouraging brand loyalty during this profitable time of the year. Did you know that 90 percent of customers enjoy receiving customized content with the consumer in mind from brands? This certainly includes holiday messages, and your brand can take advantage of this opportunity. This form of personalization makes consumers feel like they are being catered to without feeling gimmicky or feel like they are being pandered to. Consumers enjoy being valued, especially if it comes from their favorite brands. A customized holiday email is a perfect way to remind consumers of how valued they are. By doing so, you are increasing brand loyalty by creating a connection based on emotion, which is essential to form long-lasting relationships with your customer base.

— Consider Giving a Holiday Treat

Another way to encourage brand loyalty comes in the form of producing holiday contests with rewards. Creating a rewards program increases the probability of ensuring your customers return to purchase your organization’s products and services. Some of the ways in which you can create rewards programs include offering discounts and offering exclusive promotional opportunities only available to certain customers. It is a perfect way to ensure your base feels valued. This will provide you with an opportunity to retain your customer base and ensure growth through increased revenue for the upcoming holiday season. A win-win situation, if you ask us.

— Spread a Little Holiday Cheer

Lastly, one of the best ways to increase brand loyalty during this potentially profitable time of the year includes delivering a video holiday greeting produced by your organization. Producing video content is an excellent way to build brand loyalty. They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. We can’t imagine how valuable a video would be in this particular context. Video content tends to attract consumers’ attention and is able to ensure that the brand is maintained visible in the consciousness of your customer base. It is also able to build trust. Seeing video content produced by a brand can influence a customer’s impression of the brand, which builds trust in the long run. It’s an exceptional way to help customers understand your brand’s importance and how it can benefit their lives, especially during the holiday season.

3) Start Your Marketing Campaign Before the Holidays

Just like it’s never too early to start celebrating the holidays, it’s never too early to start planning and organizing for this important business period. Business leaders should consider making it a priority to produce a suitable marketing campaign for the holidays to build revenue. Don’t wait until the last two weeks of November to start your marketing campaign. The good news is that you don’t also have to begin holiday marketing planning in the Spring. There are several ways in which you can tackle this all-important task when you have time constraints. First, review past seasonal campaigns before you begin news ones. It is essential to consider what strategies functioned the last time you produced campaigns, but most importantly, you must evaluate what didn’t work. You don’t want to make the same mistake this year, especially considering that marketing efforts will differ because of the global health crisis that continues to affect daily life. Reviewing past campaigns can help you answer crucial questions. Am I using the right platforms to reach target audiences? Am I staying within budget? By reviewing past seasonal campaigns, you can reduce these potential risks because you know exactly what works for your organization. It’s that simple.

— S.M.A.R.T. Goals Save Campaigns!

Setting S.M.A.R.T goals, that is – setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based, are necessary for producing any campaign, including ones that are meant to increase revenue during the holiday season. No business leader does not want to gain profits. None. Otherwise, why are they in business? To increase the probability of having a profitable business, or at least having increased profits during a certain time of the year, like the holiday season, it is important to produce a campaign with these important objectives in mind. A marketing campaign without these objectives in mind is destined for failure. Don’t leave money on the table by running a campaign without a strategy in mind. You must know with precision who you are targeting, how much financial resources you are willing to allocate for your holiday campaign, and how long will it take you to produce the right tactics to ensure your campaign runs smoothly. These are just some of the elements you must consider before going forward with a marketing campaign. By setting up these objectives, you won’t be scrambling or stressing over how to produce a marketing campaign for the holiday season when time is of the essence.

— Timing is Crucial

Finally, one of the ways you can prepare for your marketing campaign for this holiday season is to ensure your ads are planned ahead of time, so they are ready to go once the time arrives for them to do so. If you have created S.M.A.R.T based research, creating an ad for the holiday season may not be an arduous challenge because you would know by now the audience you are trying to reach and your budget, for example. You can create quick and easy holiday ads using Google Ads or use social media platforms to disseminate advertisements. These advertisements should include incentives, possible rewards, discounts, or sales on your products and services. When it comes to ads, content is everything. Use the right words, the right typography, and visual elements to create remarkable advertisements. To make the best ads possible this holiday season, you need creativity, time, and company data to obtain desired results. So, for these relevant reasons, you must consider starting your campaign before the holidays begin, and yes, this includes Black Friday.

Let’s Close Out 2020 Remarkably!

Marketing for the holiday season may seem like a daunting task. With the right planning, you are better able to obtain the results you are searching for your organization for this wonderful time of the year. Your customers will appreciate the efforts. Trust us; you will experience their appreciation through increased sales. If you do have any more questions about how you can elevate your brand’s holiday marketing efforts, contact the dedicated professionals at b.iD to get started.