Did you know that advertising budgets significantly increase during the holiday season? Not only that but website clicks and traffic increase from more shoppers browsing online for gifts during the holiday season. If you are a small business, you want to make sure you have a digital marketing strategy that stands out for holiday marketing! Not sure what to do? Keep reading for marketing strategy ideas that you can use!
1. Create a Gift Guide
If you have a website that also has a blog, this is a great opportunity to highlight some of your best products for your customers.
Creating a gift guide on your blog makes it easier for people to click through to see what they want to purchase rather than aimlessly browsing your website. By giving them something to click on, they are more likely going to click on those products, which gives you a better chance that it will generate sales.
The best part is that you do not have to limit this gift guide to just one. You can make multiple gift guides to make them more specific to your target audience.
For instance, your target audience may be college students in the Eastern U.S. But you can break that down further. Consider creating a gift guide for college students by breaking it into a few more gift guides such as:
- What to buy for your parents this season
- A gift guide for your girlfriend
- The best gifts under $50 this holiday season
There are so many options that you could go for to target your audience with different types of content that speak to them.
2. Use Email as a Marketing Strategy
It can be easy to let your email list fall by the wayside during the busy holiday season, but this would be a mistake.
You want to use your email marketing as a creative holiday marketing strategy that sets you apart from other businesses that you may be competing with.
However, you want your emails to stand out. If your email recipients are receiving hundreds of other emails around the holidays, they are most likely not going to want to spend one minute opening each one. That’s why you need them to open just yours.
To do this, you need to make your holiday marketing unique. The first thing that will jump out at your email recipients is your subject line.
If your email contains something about your products or services for the best vacation to gift your loved one, then you could make your email about that with a guide to getting the best gifts.
For instance, it could look something like this:
Surprise Your Loved One With a Trip to Bali this Year – and Get Everything You Need By Clicking Here
While this grabs their attention, it is not overly salesy, so it won’t immediately turn them off to the idea.
On top of that, you are giving them a reason to open your email to start clicking through!
3. Use Video Advertising Around the Holidays
About 86% of businesses say that at least one customer purchases their products or services from a video from their video advertising strategy. Doing this around the holidays will most likely make that number rise.
Evoking holiday emotions in your target audience is an important aspect of video advertising. You want them to feel so that they are moved to act.
Here are a few ideas to get started:
- Simply create a holiday theme around the products that you offer
- Personalize your call to action to a specific demographic about holiday shopping this season
- Evoke the emotions of spending time with family around the holidays
Video marketing is one of the more powerful marketing strategies, so if done right, this is a great way to stand out from your competition around the holidays.
4. Offer Gift-Wrapping Services
If a customer is ordering a ton of gifts online, you know that once they receive these gifts, they will have to spend a lot of time wrapping them before the holidays roll around.
As a business, you have the opportunity to offer gift-wrapping services to make their lives easier. By doing this, you are setting yourself apart during the holiday season and making customers’ lives easier. This means they have the potential to become a loyal customer since you have built trust and rapport with them!
However, when you do this, you don’t want to simply give it as an option when they are checking out online. You want to advertise that you have this service.
Why? Because you’ll attract more people who otherwise wouldn’t have been looking to shop on your site! But if you let them know you would be wrapping the gifts for them, this would be a reason they would choose your site over someone else’s that sells the same products!
5. Utilize Social Media Marketing
With billions of users on social media, if you are not utilizing a social media marketing strategy, then you are missing out. There are many ways you can go about this, and many different platforms that you can utilize as well.
So what can you do to make sure you stand out on social media marketing campaigns?
User-Generated Content
One way to create a campaign that other people are interested in is through user-generated content. This attracts the attention of potential customers because you involve them in the process.
For instance, if a customer were to buy something from you and post about it, you could repost it. Additionally, you can use a specific hashtag for them so that you can find it and then you can repost it to your own channels (this benefits you and the customer at the same time!).
This is great for holiday campaigns because it spreads a lot of joy.
Create a Hashtag to prompt engagement
Another great way to utilize social media marketing is to use hashtags that stand out for the holiday season. This could lead to a user-generated content campaign (first recommendation), or it could simply be a hashtag that customers will remember when thinking of your business.
Additionally, it could also be for a giveaway. To do this, anyone who buys a product or service from you could use a hashtag that you create. At the end of each week, you could choose one lucky winner to get a free gift for the holidays who used your hashtag. This could inspire more people to buy from you since they have a chance to win something!
Typical Social Media Marketing with a Holiday spin
While using hashtags or starting a user-generated campaign are both great ideas, you can also just use your social media to market as you normally would, but with more of a holiday twist.
To do this, you can focus on one platform or use a bunch of different ones to diversify the reach that you will get. For instance, you could post/advertise across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok when creating a content calendar.
You can run promotions on your social media pages, post about holiday deals and sales, and advertise with paid marketing ads about what you are offering for the holiday season.
Digital Marketing During the Holiday Season
If you want to make an impact with your digital marketing during this holiday season, you need to make sure you take advantage of these tips.
By making yourself stand out among your customers and your clients, you will garner more customers around the holidays.
Whether you choose to utilize all forms of social media to get the word out there about your promotions and holiday deals or choose to simply offer gift-wrapping services, you will want to make sure you start advertising early.
If you are ready to have a well-optimized digital marketing strategy for this holiday season, then you’ll want to contact us at Elite Digital. We make sure to listen to your goals, execute the process, and create ground-breaking campaigns!
