Oh, the holidays. It’s everyone’s favorite time of year! For business owners, it’s a time where you can really thrive on the gift of giving. With all the traffic coming, is your online presence ready? We just passed the Thanksgiving weekend. You probably had specials for Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday or Giving Tuesday. If you didn’t market it strategically though, you might not have benefited much. Moving into the end of the year, you still have a chance to make sure you’re ready for the buying craze. Your holiday marketing is a great way to end out the year on a high note.

There are several questions you need to ask yourself before you start on a Holiday Marketing Campaign.

1. Who is your target audience?
   • Yes, yes, we’ve all heard this before. Whether you refer to it as “Client Profile”, “Customer Profile”, or “Audience Demographics”, it really means the same thing. Do you know who you are selling to? You’ll want to nail this down before moving on in your marketing campaign.
2. What problem does your product/service solve?
   • This should be easy, why should they buy from you this season?
3. Where is my target audience?
   • A well rounded marketing campaign is important, but you don’t want to put effort into where people aren’t going to be buying.

So now, we’ll cover our different methods for marketing before and during the holiday rush.

Holiday Marketing Campaign Checklist

• Social Media Campaign
• Pay Per Click Campaign
• Email Campaign
• Content Marketing Campaign
• Website and SEO Campaign

Social Media

Social media is an amazing tool for your marketing campaign year round, but maybe even more so during the holidays. This is where you’ll showcase majority of your products, testimonials, and the like. Consider posting more frequently during the holiday season, and really theme your posts to the season as well.

Some ideas for your social media campaign for holiday marketing are:

• Posting gift ideas
• Sharing favorite traditions
• Sharing testimonials/reviews
• Giveaways

Some other tips include:

• Put emphasis on graphics (these garner more interactions that plain text)
• Remember hashtags!
• Schedule your posts in advance.

Pay Per Click Advertising

If you’re looking to target people more directly, consider Pay Per Click Advertising for your Holiday Marketing campaign. You can make a highly targeted ad appear in front of your consumer and (if done right) get a sale from it. There are several options here:

• Google Ads
• Bing Advertising
• Etsy
• Amazon
• Social Media like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more.

If done with a strategy in mind, PPC ads is a great way to get new business during the holidays. It’s best to start these campaigns a couple of months in advance in order to fine tune things such as keywords and ad copy (the words). During the season, it’s important to mention holiday sales and categories like gift cards, gifts for her, gifts for them, gifts for him, etc.  Now it is important to note that “boosting” posts on social media is different than pay per click ads. While each has their own benefits, pay per click may be more profitable in terms of conversions. I’d only boost posts like giveaways and special deals. We recently wrote a post you might be interested in: Google Ads & How To Make Them Profitable

Email Marketing

Email marketing is great, if you’ve already built a list. (And it is never too late to start!) If you have already gathered followers, consider sending email blasts that are geared to holidays. Big companies like All Recipes and Betty Crocker send out emails about recipes to use at holiday get togethers. This a great way to put your deals in front of people who already want it. Some great tips for email marketing:

• Have a pretty template
  • When using a company like MailChimp you can design gorgeous emails that include images, structure, and more. Be sure to utilize these to increase conversions from your email marketing list.
• Link to your site
  • Link to blog posts, products, and more in your email to promote traffic to your site
• Personalize it.
  • Use the functions to personalize the emails. This will often include things like “Hello [subscriber]” which would display: “Hello Emily” in my email, or “Hello Ryder” in Ryder’s. This of course depends on the name entered when registering.

Content Marketing + SEO

Content Marketing is powerful, it’s the juice that gives your search engine ranking a boost. Blogging, web copy, product descriptions, gallery descriptions, and the like are all ways to use content for your holiday marketing. The most common is to produce quality blog posts consistently and with intention (check out our content creation post here). You’ll find doing keyword research is a wonderful way to blog with intention. To do this, you can simply google your industry and “holiday” and scroll to the very bottom of the search results. You’ll see “Related Searches” at the bottom with variations of most popular search terms. You can use these to target your blog post to those searches. There’s a more advanced tool called Google’s Keyword Planner where you can track traffic and search popularity for keywords and compare them. There are some major points to keep in mind when doing content marketing:

• Use keywords in the following places:
  • Title
  • Meta Description
  • Headings (You’ll see that I used “Holiday Marketing” in one of my headings, and in my title).
  • Image alt tags
• Use images (strive for one image every 150 or so words)
• Consistency is key; if you blog once a week, keep it at least once a week on the same day of the week.

SEO is search engine optimization and there is so much you can do to boost your rankings in search engines. We have some dedicated posts for you to read:

• Evergreen SEO 
• SEO: A Guide

Website

There are many things you can do on your website to market for the holiday rush. Making sure your website is built properly, functioning correctly, and is visually appealing is very important. Other things like using banners that mention the holidays, creating a specific category of products for the season on your e-commerce site (Amazon does “Cyber Monday Deals” for example), and blogging are all wonderful ways to get your website ready. There are other items as well such as making sure your site is secure (it has that lock in the address bar). This is definitely important if you take payments on your website. You’ll also want to make sure you don’t have any broken links on your site. Broken links are links to pages that don’t exist. They can be caused by typos in the link address or because a page was renamed. It’s important to check for your most important pages to be working.

So there’s your key to making your holiday marketing campaign shine this holiday season. Like what you read? Be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more tips and tricks. Don’t forget to like and follow us on our social media!