The holidays are officially here, so retailers everywhere are launching holiday marketing campaigns. Practical Ecommerce predicts a slowing in holiday spending, so getting your digital marketing campaigns prepared will be critical for sustaining growth this year.
*Updated 9/27/2024
This article will share eight digital marketing tips to take full advantage of your holiday marketing campaigns and keep your business growing into the new year.
8 Digital Marketing for an Optimal Holiday Season of Sales
1. Start holiday sales promotions as early as possible
To capitalize on the spending habits of holiday shoppers, you’ll want to start early and ramp up sales promotions over time.
Promotional discounts and coupons should begin the first week of November at the latest.
However, your social media campaigns, and email marketing need to begin in September to increase awareness, and build momentum ahead of your promotional offers.
One way to build the suspense is to offer a new deal each week leading up to these last few weeks before the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend. You can make your promotions more effective by tailoring your offers to the increasing demand that occurs as December counts down.
An excellent example of how you can tailor promotions is to focus on selling mood-setting items, like holiday decorations, earlier in the season. Retailers like Target are infamous for dropping Christmas items as soon as Halloween is over, but this is a deliberate sales tactic.
After Thanksgiving, big-ticket items are great for promotions so that you can capitalize on shoppers with bigger wallets. Finally, closer to Christmas, you can discount other things that may not usually see sales.
2. Review results from previous holiday campaigns
When looking to run a new holiday marketing campaign, it’s best to start by reviewing campaigns from previous years.
If you’ve never made one, look at other brands’ seasonal marketing campaigns. Reviewing your past campaigns or those of others can help you understand what has worked and what has not.
You can also reflect on mistakes you’ve made before. Remember, analyzing how you performed in the past will give you a great place to start going forward. A holiday campaign can make or break your bottom line if you’re a small business, like an LLC.
You should review your data on past behavior. How did shoppers behave last year? Has the demographics of your customer base changed? Thinking about these things can make your target's mark.
3. Develop your holiday marketing campaign
Once you’ve reviewed the previous year's campaigns, you should begin developing your new holiday marketing campaign.
Your campaign should ensure that it reaches customers from every angle.
Your campaign should include social media, email newsletters, videos, search and online adverts, promos, giveaways, and in-store items.
Developing a marketing campaign plan is vital, regardless of your chosen approach. One way to ensure success is to build a campaign inspired by your products or brand.
For example, if you sell clothing, you can highlight fair trade practices and combating fast fashion. A tea company might run a campaign promoting an advent calendar of different teas and then count down each day towards Christmas with diverse flavors or accessories used for tea brewing.
4. Boost email marketing
Email marketing is key to success during the holidays. It’s an inexpensive and effective way of reaching shoppers.
Email is great for the holiday season because it takes the guesswork out of shopping for consumers. Rather than doing intense research, consumers can get all of your most incredible deals delivered straight to them.
Consumers can skim through their emails to find sales and products that interest them. Remember, more than 90% adults have smartphones, so they can read their emails from anywhere - even when shopping at another store.
A best practice for marketing is to send emails regularly to educate shoppers about new products and sales. Even if your business is seasonal, like a waterpark, you can still use the holidays to keep customers thinking about you.
5. Send out holiday greetings
One way to keep customers thinking about you year-round is to send a holiday greeting card. Your holiday card allows you to send a fun seasonal message to your customers or clients and can be reused in other parts of your marketing.
One way to personalize the card and make it more intimate is to include a photograph of your staff and employees or you can use an online photo card maker.
For example, after you’ve delivered your e-card to consumers, you can share a photo of the same message on your website. It will help your shopper build a human connection with your brand.
6. Leverage your social media channels
Similarly, these types of holiday greetings are perfect for social media.
Social media should be the bread and butter of your holiday campaign. It has the greatest potential to reach a wide audience and allows your followers to reshare your content.
Leveraging influencers and their audiences is a great way to feature your product. Combining your brand identity with influencers can give shoppers an unbiased look at your products. Furthermore, influencers will be able to speak on behalf of your brand.
Social media covers a lot of territories, so be sure to use all of it. Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are all great places to market your products.
You can connect shoppers to your socials using social media icons on your website. Remember to stay on top of the latest trends, like using short-format videos to maximize your exposure.
7. Utilize a “Webroom” to emphasize products
One aspect of this is webrooming. As more shoppers move online, retailers develop new ways to showcase their products. Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, shoppers can touch products. Retailers should utilize videos, product close-ups, and testimonials to validate consumer spending choices.
Influencers are a vital component of webrooming because they can try on clothing, for example, and give audiences an idea of how a product might fit.
Similarly, video demonstrations can highlight how easy a product is to use, clean up, or put away. The endless possibilities will help push sales in a way that simple images and web copy cannot.
8. Employ ad extensions
Ad extensions are targeted search results that display additional related products when shoppers search. They are essential because they help boost a business’ search engine rankings.
Ad extensions include site links, which will link to web pages; call extensions, which provide phone numbers for contact information; and review extensions, which bring shoppers to verified product reviews.
There are other ad extensions too, so which one you use is up to you.
The Bottom Line
For many businesses, the holiday season can make or break their bottom line.
But, if you start your digital marketing strategies early, utilize what you’ve learned in years past, and can tie it together with a good theme, you’ll be a holiday digital marketing guru in no time.
Remember to leverage social media and find unique, interesting ways to showcase your brand and products. Using these tips, you can take full advantage of this time of the year.
