The 2020 holiday season approached faster than ever. But, will our memories of standing in long Black Friday lines, or searching through retail stores last-minute for that perfect gift be the same? Most likely not.
As a small business, you may have found that most of your holiday sales came from in-store traffic. With many stores limiting their in-store experiences, we can anticipate most consumer purchases to take place online. Below are 5 Tips to Gear Up Your Marketing For The Holiday Season.
Incentivize
Tis’ the Season of GIVING! Around the holidays, companies offer free shipping, discounts, free gifts and not to mention the doorbuster deals that many flock to take advantage of. The market gets very competitive, so it’s important to find an incentive that works for your brand and the customer. Don’t go crazy! Too many incentives can devalue your brand.
Create a Holiday Gift Guide
Even if you don’t offer enough products to fully create the holiday gift guide, the keyword is still highly searched. This means that by taking advantage of the high search volume, you have the potential to send traffic to your site. The more traffic, the higher your search engine ranking could be.
Aside from the benefit of added traffic, if you do offer a variety of products, this is an opportunity for you to boast about your best sellers, products that are unique, or those that are highly rated! Want to get really specific? If applicable, separate between a women’s and men’s gift guide.
Be Specific
While we’re on the topic of specificity, any campaign you launch should have specifically targeted ads. If you don’t normally put ad spend into marketing, NOW is the time to consider it. When targeting consumers on Facebook or Instagram, ensure that audience targeting matches up to the product/service you are offering in the ad. Take some time to build out multiple ad sets to ensure that every target audience is being served ads that correlate exactly to their behaviors and interests.
Be Smart With Your Budget
You don’t need thousands of dollars to build successful marketing campaigns this holiday season. Consumers are going to be shopping the internet like it’s nobody’s business (except ours 😉). And with the internet being so convenient, it’s become easier for consumers to compare pricing from different stores and companies. That behavior is reflected in your site’s bounce rate!
But, that bounce doesn’t have to be the last touchpoint, and it shouldn’t be! For businesses that have smaller ad spend budgets, we recommend two different campaigns: Traffic & Retargeting. Traffic Ads will do just that, send consumers to your site where they can browse, purchase or bounce. Retargeting ads will increase top-of-mind awareness and encourage the consumer to come back to your site to complete their purchase. If you need to choose just one, go with retargeting and focus on organic methods to initiate traffic to your site.
Automated Follow-Ups
We’ve all been there. We’re browsing an online store, add a few things to our cart – hesitate to go through with the purchase, and bounce off the site. As a business, we can’t help to think: WHY?! They were SO close. But, that potential customer is not lost forever!
Create automated emails that remind customers that they left products in their cart, or emails that recommend other products based on what they were looking at. Again, these emails help with top-of-mind awareness, and let’s be real: We all need a little reminder sometimes, our customers included!
Your marketing plan for the holiday season should be thought out! Don’t wait for the last second to throw together a few promotions and push ads out a week before your anticipated goal date. In fact, the earlier you start promoting, the better! Our Adapting Social team is creatively finding ways for our clients to market their business this holiday season.
Need a few ideas? Send us a message over Live Chat! We’d be happy to collaborate with you.
