Digital Marketing Tips for the Christmas Season
The holidays present a unique opportunity to your business because people are shopping with a strong intent to purchase. Your customers are already primed to buy during the festive season and all you have to do is set up the right strategy to turn their interest into a sale. Use your marketing strategy to help guide their decision making process, build consumer awareness and let your customers know what they should be spending their money on this Christmas.
In this blog post, we break down how to use social media, paid advertising and eDMs to market your business and generate sales this Christmas holiday season.
social media
Social Media is a powerful, free tool to organically increase brand awareness, boost conversions and generate leads. During holiday seasons, users start to use social media to look for inspiration and exclusive deals. By actively creating campaigns during holiday periods (especially for e-commerce brands), you will gain more attention than at other periods of the year. This will help you to generate the maximum number of conversions and build awareness for your brand overall.
Which platforms to use:
When considering what platforms to share your content on, you must consider the needs of your target audience and where they tend to spend their most time. Whilst we highly recommend that all businesses use both Instagram and Facebook, you may like to consider other platforms such as TikTok and Pinterest. In our other blogs, we cover how to market your business on Pinterest, and Instagram, as well as how your brand can benefit from TikTok.
If you’re planning on running a Christmas giveaway, check out our guide on how to run a social media competition.
Shoppable Features:
If you have an e-commerce store, try utilising the shoppable post features on Facebook and Instagram. Clicking the tagged products leads you to the product page and a short description of it, providing an easy way for consumers to quickly access and purchase your products.
Hashtags:
Using the right hashtags can boost your reach significantly, enable you to join the conversation on trending topics and create a sense of community within your existing audience. We’ve compiled the best hashtags for this Christmas to make sure your social media campaign is a hit! Don’t forget to also include branded hashtags such as #milkbottleprojects to help build a sense of community around your brand.
#christmasday #christmaseve #xmas[insertyear] #xmascelebration #xmasparty #xmaswithfamily #winterwonderland #summerchristmas #australianxmas #boxingday #shoppingday
eDm
Electronic Direct Marketing (eDMs), also known as email marketing, is a valuable, online marketing tool that enables you to communicate with existing and prospective customers, and reinforce campaign messaging. In fact, for every $1 spent on email marketing, companies receive an average of $42 in return, making it one of the most powerful channels available to the modern marketer.
Build your email list by creating a signup form on your website and drive sign ups through social media. Once you have your email marketing list, we recommend segmenting your list by using the data to group your audience into different categories, whether it be by age, gender, or interests. This allows you to create more personalised campaigns, which in turn will increase your conversions and ROI. To find out more about creating a strong eDM strategy, check out our blog on what to know about email marketing.
Content Ideas
- Gift Guides: Gift guides are a great way to help existing and prospective customers find the best gift options for their loved ones, as quickly and easily as possible. They allow you to showcase your products, inspire shoppers, and stay top of mind throughout the holiday gifting season. You may even like to curate unique gift guides for your different customer segments such as Gifts For Him, Gifts For Tech-Lovers or Best Gifts Under $50.
- Promotional Deals: There’s no denying that modern consumers love sales and discounts! Drive a sense of urgency with a limited-time offer to nudge consumers to make a quick decision about their potential purchase. Not only do discounts and coupons significantly increase conversions, they encourage customers to spend more which in turn creates more sales for your business.
- Show appreciation: Email marketing is all about building relationships, so why not thank your customers for their support this year with an email. A simple thank you email, with ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Happy New Year’ wishes can go a long way in how your customers will perceive you. The more personal your email message is, the closer your email subscribers will feel to your business. You may even want to consider offering them a gift or deal to show how much you appreciate them for their loyalty.
Create a call-to-action
An email marketing call-to-action is a button or hyperlink that directs a subscriber to another website. Incorporate buttons on your eDM such as “shop now”, “book now” or “learn more” to encourage your consumers to action and convert. If you are featuring products in gift guides or other emails, ensure each product is linked directly to a landing page on your website so that your audience can easily and quickly navigate your store.
PAID ADVERTISING
Paid advertising is a great way to supercharge your growth, engagement and conversions so that you no longer have to wait for your consumers to find you organically. It can benefit your growth strategy by enabling you to create highly targeted campaigns, build brand awareness, encourage customer engagement, and also gives you the ability to measure and optimize your campaigns for future marketing endeavours.
Facebook Advertising
If you’re new to paid advertising, Facebook advertising is a great place for your business to get started. Facebook has over 2.7 billion monthly active users and it’s advertising services enable you to create ads targeted to users based on their location, demographic, interests and other profile information.
Facebook offers several ad objectives for your campaign, which refers to what you want people to do when they see your ads. If you are a relatively new or unknown business, your first ad campaigns may utilise ‘awareness’ objectives to generate interest in what you offer and acquire new customers. As the holiday season approaches, focus your campaign goals on ‘conversion’ objectives to drive purchases and visits to your store.
Paid Ad Ideas:
- Gift Ideas: Showcase your best products to inspire your audience to make a purchase this gift-giving season. Use Facebook’s targeting tools to narrow down specific demographics and interests of your audience to ensure your gift ideas are reaching your ideal target audience.
- Multi-Product Carousel Ads: Facebook now allows you to choose a multi-product carousel advert. This will allow you to showcase more of your product range, which has been proven to increase click-through-rate whilst decreasing your costs.
- Discounts: Customers are inundated with marketing messaging during the Christmas season. If you can distinguish your business with a generous discount or special offer, you’re already a step ahead in winning the vote of your customers.
- Retargeting campaigns: These advertisements connect with people who are already familiar with your business, whether it be through organic social media platforms or your website. Retargeting ad campaigns can give a friendly reminder to those who have interacted with your brand to come back and convert, often resulting in a high conversion rate.
PLAN FOR THE NEW YEAR
Have you received lots of new customers after your holiday campaign? Don’t wait until the next holiday season to interact with them! Turn these consumers into loyal, repeat buyers by utilising a strong, year-round strategy and keeping them engaged. Many businesses fall into the trap of relaxing after a holiday period, so stay ahead of the competition with a strong marketing content plan. Take a few hours to plan out your next move to ensure your content is engaging and aligning with your business goals.