The holidays are approaching, and now is a great time to revisit your marketing strategy. This is a great time of year to attract new customers to your business. It’s also a fantastic time to bring back existing customers. You can do all this through an effective holiday marketing strategy.
So how do you leverage your marketing strategy for the holidays? Let’s dive in!
Why is Holiday Marketing Important?
Adjusting your marketing strategy for the holidays is important because it’s a time of year when consumers are actively seeking brands and deals that align with their interests and wants. Most brands implement some sort of specialized holiday marketing strategy. If you want to be seen and heard during this all-important season, you’ll have to adjust your approach, too.
Higher visibility during the holidays ultimately leads to higher earning. It’s the one time of year when customers are exceptionally willing to part with their hard-earned money. They might be buying for themselves or gifting to others. Either way, they’re ready to shop. You just need to get yourself in front of them.
The holidays are also a time when brands are more creatively free to experiment with their marketing strategies. Holiday marketing allows for a company to try new and different approaches to their typical strategies. Maybe you want to experiment with a more emotional approach to marketing, or maybe you’d like to adjust your overall brand tone. Experimenting with these changes during the holiday season can tell you a lot about what methods work best for your brand.
Top Holiday Marketing Tips
1. Offer Deep Discounts
Holiday marketing usually involves offering deep discounts on valuable products and services. Often, those products and services you’re discounting are popular and in-demand. Consider Black Friday sales: people are willing to, literally, trample one another in on-site sales for a chance to get their hands on items that only go on sale once or twice a year.
This holiday season, do you have a product or service that you could discount to broaden your reach in your target market? If so, now is the time to decide what you’re going to offer.
2. Inspire Feelings of Nostalgia
The holidays tend to stir feelings of nostalgia in many people–in particular, the winter holidays. Lean into the idea of making your holiday marketing feel a bit nostalgic and familiar. People of all ages and backgrounds want to tap into that same excitement they felt when their favorite holiday film played on television once a year, or in repeating family traditions.
Like celebrations, holiday shopping becomes a ritual in its own right. It plays a hand in sparking the memory of past holidays. Your audience is actively trying to tap into that nostalgic feeling. Consider who your ideal customer is, and craft a marketing strategy around traditions and holiday-centric pop culture that may appeal to him or her. You can use language, imagery, and music to help inspire those nostalgic memories.
3. Develop Clear Holiday Marketing Goals
As you’re building out your holiday marketing strategy, detail specific, clear goals and a road map to each. You need to know where you want to end up, in order to get there. Knowing your goals for the season will help you stay focused on implementing your strategy.
4. Create a “Holiday Appeal” Strategy
If you want to appeal to your target audience this holiday season, create holiday appeal around your top-performing products. By presenting your products as festive, seasonal, and cheerful, you can attract holiday shoppers to your offer. You can create holiday appeal by:
- Staging product images with holiday decor
- Using seasonal or holiday-centric filters and graphics
- Adding holiday music and filters to video content
- Using language in your copy that creates a nostalgic or seasonal vibe
- Angling your product offers to fit holiday-specific needs (gift giving or “treat yourself,” for example)
5. Delegate Marketing Tasks
During the holidays, people tend to be busier than usual. Don’t forget to delegate tasks to take a load off your plate. Delegate the tasks you can automate to software tools such as ads, social media, and email automation tools. Consider hiring an assistant to help you with the tasks you can’t automate.
A tightly managed holiday marketing automation campaign can be incredibly powerful for time-sensitive holiday shopping promotions. It can also help you stay on top of your workload by publishing content and advertising for you, so you can focus on other tasks that require your direct attention. Remember, automation doesn’t necessarily mean “set it and forget it”. Instead, it helps you utilize technology to manage the process while letting the process do the work.
6. Adjust Your Ad Copy
Adjusting ad copy to fit the holiday season will help you catch shoppers’ attention. As a result, users who are specifically looking for special holiday offers will come to you. So rather than peppering in one-off offers alongside your usual ad copy, give your ads an overhaul so they fit the season. Be sure to keep your special offers in a holiday context.
7. Create a Sense of Excitement and Urgency
The holidays are an exciting time for many shoppers. There’s a certain thrill that comes along with snagging that special holiday deal or buying the perfect gift for a loved one. So leverage the excitement of gift-buying and the time-sensitive urgency of the season.
Consider using countdown timers and limited-time discount codes on your website and in your social media and email holiday marketing. These tools will help encourage customers to complete their purchases. You could also consider adding a cart abandonment email to your e-commerce automation that alerts customers when they’ve left an item in their cart.
Avoid creating a sense of despair by using copy that implies a “last chance” or “final opportunity” unless you’re really ready to shut down the special. You want to avoid alienating customers by claiming that a special is about to end, only to offer a better promotion the next week.
8. Research Holiday-Centric SEO Keywords
Consider researching holiday-centric SEO keywords for your holiday marketing campaigns. Researching the season’s trends will help you keep your ads and copy relevant to current search trends. Keywords can shift from year to year, so do your due diligence to ensure they’re up-to-date.
Wrapping Up
Your holiday marketing strategy could significantly boost your sales and conversion rates this holiday season. Therefore, it’s critical to develop a strategy that works for your brand and draws in customers.
Let’s quickly recap our holiday marketing tips:
- Consider deeply discounting popular products and services
- Weave nostalgic language, imagery, and music into your campaign
- Develop clear goals for your holiday marketing strategy
- Create “holiday appeal” around your products and offerings
- Delegate marketing tasks where you can
- Adjust your copy to reflect the season
- Create a sense of excited urgency around your holiday specials
- Refresh your SEO keywords for the season
Have you developed your holiday marketing strategy yet? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.
Featured image via ya_blue_ko / shutterstock.com
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