The season to be merry is quickly coming closer, and it serves as the perfect time to build a brilliant marketing campaign. If you’re looking for actionable ideas for effective holiday marketing and holiday-specific ad campaigns for the season, you’re in the right place.
We’ll discuss five strategies to work into your campaigns that could take them to the next level before you can say “Ho ho ho!”
The holiday season is truly a great time for marketing campaigns. According to Criteo’s research, global ecommerce sales were 24% higher than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
And as indicated by a US survey, 60% of holiday shoppers explore more products during the festive season than they do the rest of the year.
Planning your holiday campaigns well in advance is always a good idea, so let’s get right into how you can do that.
1. Give Your Website Personality and Holiday Cheer
Ecommerce holiday sales for the 2021 festive season are expected to be even better than in 2020. Growth of between 11% and 15% is anticipated, and you should be ready to make the most of it.
Your website will be central to your holiday marketing campaign even if you don’t use strategies like Google Ads. It is, after all, where your customers go to learn more about your brand and do their shopping directly.
Holiday shoppers like to feel the spirit when they visit websites during their online shopping, so give yours all the bells and whistles they expect.
Of course, it should be on-brand, or you’ll confuse visitors.
Add a simplistic holiday theme and a few cheerful elements to give your pages a welcoming, holiday-inspired feel that could motivate visitors to perhaps even spend more than they planned to.
Here are a few basic ideas to inspire you:
- A straightforward but joyous messaging style
- Festive call to actions
- Personalized holiday greetings
- Eye-catching graphics
Update your homepage and checkout page with holiday themes for increased engagement and improved user experience. You don’t have to go all out if that’s not the right vibe for your website.
2. Take a Content-First Approach
Online shopping has significantly evolved in the past few years, and even when brands are trying to be creative during the holiday season, many consumers feel like they’ve seen it all.
As a result, they often skim over all the traditional marketing tactics. You need your campaign to stand out.
To do that, take a content-first approach. With focused content marketing, it could be easier to engage your audience and get them interested in what you’ve got to offer.
Your content needs to be top-notch and personalized to have the best success. This is actually true no matter what time of the year it is.
While you’re creating that personalized, engaging content, remember that it should also be SEO-friendly. Although keeping a good balance can be challenging, it’s not impossible. You’ll have to plan your content well, but that’s likely nothing new to you.
When creating high-quality, reliable content, you’re also showing your audience that you’re trustworthy.
Low-quality content with outlandish claims can feel “fake” among consumers, and that’s definitely to be avoided during the holiday season. People get bombarded with cheesy and scammy content already; your brand shouldn’t be associated with that.
3. Turn to Video Marketing
Video marketing is incredibly lucrative when done right. More than 85% of video marketers have recently reported that video has a positive return on income value. Back in 2015, only 33% of them felt this way.
When conveying a holiday message, it is hard to beat a well-produced video. You can market your products and your brand while making sure you get noticed by your audience.
You’ll find that video content works well on almost every social media platform, especially amongst heavy hitters like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
Video also tend to get a lot more engagement than static content, and engagement is where it’s at with digital marketing and capturing the attention of your customers.
There are many different kinds of videos you can create—your imagination is your limit. Festive and cheerful videos seem to perform better this time of the year, though, so keep that in mind.
Also, videos can add a great deal of value when it comes to remarketing. If you upload your video content to YouTube, it can be viewed long after your campaign has run its course. You can share directly with your customers whenever you need.
4. Reward Loyal Customers
A fantastic way to make sure your loyal customers (past and present) remain loyal is by rewarding them. You can use your holiday marketing to reach out to them and give them first crack at your holiday promotions.
The ways you can carry out this rewarding depends on you and your brand. Give them early access to exclusive content, offer them coupons or discounts, or automatically enter them into one of your giveaways.
If you lure in your loyal customers early, you’ll also be able to attract them before their wallets have been emptied by festive shopping later in the season.
You can also get these folks to promote your content to their friends and family by offering them double discounts when they refer a new customer.
While you’re targeting the customers you know will be interested in your brand, why not build some social media ads aimed specifically at them? You should have enough data gathered from their ongoing support to be capable of creating personalized and targeted ads.
5. People (Obviously) Like Freebies!
What could be better than getting something nice for free during the holiday season? Not much, so consider doing giveaways to boost conversions and increase sales.
Of course, every clever brand out there will be doing this, so think outside the box to ensure that your campaign stands out.
You can host specific and themed giveaways or promote particular products by offering a gift with every purchase. Or have a competition with different prize tiers. Have fun with it!
Not only will you make your audience happy and improve their moods, but you can also attract new buyers.
One of the very best ways to give away free stuff is by promoting the event/campaign on social media. You can even use your social media accounts to host the giveaways and reach a wider audience.
Get people to hashtag your brand to qualify, or ask them to like or share your posts and tag their friends. You can build a lot of hype around the competition if you run it on several social platforms simultaneously.
Spread Yuletide Spirit with Your Campaigns
The holiday season might be your busiest time of the year, and that will be a good thing. As you spread the cheer during this festive time, you can build your brand reputation and customer loyalty like never before.
Give your company a nice present by using these methods—and some of your own creative ideas—and build a campaign that will reap fantastic rewards.
If your campaigns need some TLC this holiday season—or even some new bows and ribbons—you can always contact our team for a fresh perspective. Our gift to you? No matter what type of campaign you are considering—from Google Ads and social media ads to content marketing and conversion rate optimization—we will give you a free analysis so you know where to begin.
Click here to send us an email or you can call our team directly at (818) 740-4774. Cheers to all of your ecommerce success this holiday season!