Successful Holiday Marketing Strategies
In general, the holiday season is unlike any other in terms of consumer behavior. For businesses, it brings a tremendous opportunity for increased sales and customer traffic. This makes it crucial to have digital marketing strategies with relevant and active campaigns to keep your company and products at the top of search engines during this time of year.
According to eMarketer, U.S. holiday retail sales are predicted to increase 2.7% this year. Putting it at $1.093 trillion, with e-commerce accounting for a staggering 18.9% of all the retail sales this holiday season. Running holiday campaigns through social media marketing, email marketing, digital ads, and via your website can benefit your company by drawing in customers with exclusive discounts and promotions.
Tips for Holiday Marketing:
Now that you see how important seasonal promotions are, let’s discuss marketing ideas to improve your holiday marketing strategy.
Use Emotion: The holidays are, to a majority of people, about spending quality time with the ones you love. By using emotion to pull at your audience’s heartstrings, you’ll create a connection on a deeper level with your audience resulting in loyal customers.
Take Advantage of All Marketing Channels: It’s safe to say that we are all probably online a little more than we would like to admit. There’s a good chance that we’re on different platforms and channels than the person sitting next to us, and that’s OK. With that, it’s important to utilize all marketing avenues to ensure that none of your customers miss out on what it is you are offering. One thing you can’t forget to check is the usability of your website. By doing this, you can rest assured that users will easily brows your site and find what they’re looking for.
Produce a Plan and Timeline: It’s always good to have a plan or “marketing strategy.” Be sure to set up reasonable goals you’d like to accomplish within this plan. It’s also important to allow time to conduct research of past strategies that may or may not have worked. There are shoppers who do their holiday shopping early and take time to research what company to buy from, and there are those who do it completely last-minute. Verify that your plan includes promotions for those early birds as well as the shoppers who may be a little behind.
Know Your Audience: Because emotion is a great option for campaigns, it’s necessary to take into consideration the holiday, your audience, and other factors to base the tone of your campaign off of. For example, if your audience reacts well to comedy, during a holiday such as Halloween it would make more sense to incorporate humor into your campaign.
Be Creative: Let your creative juices flow! Nothing beats a completely original campaign. While it’s a good idea to look at competitor campaigns for inspiration, it’s critical that you create a campaign that is tailored to your brand and target audience.
Examples That Worked:
Personalize It!
Oreo did a fantastic job with their “Oreo Colorfilled” campaign in providing a fun way to personalize a gift. This personalized packaging for the holidays is the perfect way for customers to add their own touch.
Collaborate with Another Organization!
Macy’s collaborated with Make-A-Wish Foundation in a campaign that encouraged children to write a letter to Santa. This approach was a great way to engage their customers, but it also provided them with a way to give back to the community. Although this campaign was not expressly designed to increase sales, they did have a promotional holiday gift guide campaign that ran at the same time.
Image Source
Offer Discounts!
Chipotle should win an award for this one. Their Halloween promotion was simple: Offer a discount on burritos. People love discounts. And burritos. The only catch was that customers had to wear their Halloween costume to receive this promotion. I’m sure you can imagine how long the lines were that day.
Image Source