Are you ready for the upcoming holiday shopping frenzy to begin? Do you have high sales goals to hit before the end of the year?
There’s no better time to start planning and running your holiday digital marketing campaigns. The season’s busiest shopping days are just a few short days ahead and it’s not too late to get a few Facebook or Google ad campaigns up and running. (Let us help you!)
The Christmas shopping season seems to formally begin with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also known as “Cyber Week.”
Here are a few fun cyber week stats…
So how can you capitalize on sales during this busy season? The last thing you want to do is miss out on running seasonal promotional opportunities and/or lose sales to competitors.
These holiday digital marketing tips will help you initiate, refine and run successful digital campaigns during the most profitable months of the year…
Analyze campaigns from last year
If you’ve run holiday campaigns in the past, start looking through those before you kick off ads for this season. Review your goals and evaluate what worked last year and what didn’t.
One of the quickest ways to determine the effectiveness of your inbound campaigns is to see if there was a growth trend of new users that came to your website. You’ll want to make sure your bounce rate is less than 30% and that users were on your web page for no less than 30 seconds.
You’ll also want to make sure you were converting prospects, meaning you connected the right messages to the right audience. Review conversion rates (purchases vs. traffic) during the holiday period verses other slow periods. If you didn’t see a higher conversion rate, it could be because your messaging is off, pricing is not competitive, or you simply didn’t drive traffic to your website through the correct channels. We can look through all of this for you and help determine a starting point for this year’s campaign(s).
Set goals for this year
The next thing you’ll want to do is set goals and brainstorm new offers for this year. Make sure these goals are measurable so you can review your campaign at the end of the holiday season.
Now is not the ideal time to test out new personas, especially if you’ve already tested and discovered effective messaging throughout the year. The reputation you’ve built throughout the year with your customers will keep them returning and shopping with you this holiday season, so stand by your customer experience and make sure it matches the experiences they’ve had with you in the past.
When it comes to being creative, think of offers and deals you want to promote over the next month and a half.
Here are a few ideas…
- Push free rewards or vouchers.
- Reprocess previous offers you know that worked. Update or enhance it for this season.
- Offer exclusive deals or discounts on certain dates or weeks.
- Use referral marketing to help promote your brand. Create something for your customers to share.
- Run a contest on Instagram or Facebook using a hashtag that relates to your campaign.
Create engaging content across all channels
Don’t just run digital ads to promote your sales. Push deals on all of your digital channels including your website, blogs, social media accounts, emails campaigns and more.
When using social media to promote your promo, use effective visuals. Make your posts stand out from the competition.
Use email campaigns to re-connect with customers you’ve lost and communicate exciting new offers to returning customers.
Create blog posts that are holiday-ready. Look for relevant keywords to inspire topics and schedule your posts ahead of time. This is an easy way to prime your website for these next couple of months.
Review SEO so your content and ads are easy to find. Make sure you cover general keywords in your campaigns and remember that holiday-specific keywords are seasonal (and you can expect a dip towards the end of the season). There are many ways we can be sure you are ranking high, so let us help with SEO before you run your seasonal ads and campaigns.
Are you ready to set up and run your holiday digital ad campaigns? Contact us today to get started!
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