The holiday season is well and truly upon us. But with so many companies competing for attention, how can you ensure your brand is top-of-mind for your target audience? This week, the Blueprint Film blog is focusing on simple holiday marketing tips that can apply to any business, big or small, from any industry.
Read on to receive 12 actionable tips to boost your company’s holiday marketing efforts in 2022.
83% of consumers plan to complete their holiday shopping during the first two weeks of December. So you want to try to get your key Christmas messaging out before mid-December. Then in the final run-up to Christmas, run campaigns targeting people looking for last-minute gifts and holiday services, or start a countdown to Christmas on your social media profiles.
The last thing you want to do this season is leave parts of your audience feeling left out or ignored. As such, your holiday marketing needs to be inclusive. What does this mean in practice? Be sure to recognise different cultural and religious holidays taking place this time of year. For instance, Hanukkah (a Jewish festival) takes place between the 29th of November and the 6th of December. Got an international audience? Include holidays celebrated abroad – such as Kwanzaa, a celebration of African-American culture held from 26th December to 1st January.
Another tip for your holiday marketing efforts is to research holiday trends in your industry.
Google Trends is a great tool for this. You can search up any keyword/topic and specify location and time range. Then you can see changes in interest over time and by region, related topics and related queries. You can even compare two keywords to see which attracts more interest.
Knowing what topics are popular in your industry during the holiday season can then help you effectively market your company. For instance, you can create a keyword strategy based on popular search terms and use these keywords to improve the SEO of your content.
The holiday season is undoubtedly a good opportunity for brands to get creative. But it can be easy for companies to get carried away with their holiday marketing. As a result, some companies end up drifting so far from their usual style of content that it becomes unrecognisable.
For each piece of holiday-themed content your company creates, ask two questions. First, does this piece of content relate to our company and what it does? Second, does the style/tone/imagery used here align with our brand?
You don't need to build your holiday marketing content from scratch each year. If you've got quality content from last year's festive season, consider how you could re-use it, saving you time (and sometimes money, too).
But what you don't want to do is just copy + paste the same holiday posts from last year. This can make your company come off as lazy or out-of-date. Assess if any updates can be made to make it more relevant to this year. Also, if you've changed your company branding at all since the last time you used this content, make sure these changes are reflected. And to keep your marketing fresh, be sure to mix in some brand new content, too.
Read our guides on repurposing content to learn more.
The holiday season provides a perfect time for companies to share their human side. After all, human connection is an important aspect of the holiday season. So if you want to make a strong and authentic connection with potential customers during this time of year, don't be afraid to show more of the people and culture behind your company.
This can be as simple as posting photographs of your company Christmas party, or asking team members to share pictures of them wearing some festive attire for Christmas Jumper Day (on Friday 10th December). You can also send personalised holiday greetings and messages of gratitude to your top customers and clients to make them feel truly appreciated by your team.
Throughout the holidays, consumers are on the lookout for special deals and treats from brands. This doesn't have to mean massive sales on your products/services – there are other ways to treat customers this season. Whatever promotion you choose to run, be sure to get the word out and promote it across your social media and marketing channels.
Here are some holiday promotional ideas for your company:
One overlooked tip for holiday marketing is retargeting. Retargeting means marketing and selling to consumers already familiar with your brand. Perhaps they’ve visited your website before or given you their contact details. Retargeting can help your brand to re-engage visitors, drive conversions, reduce cart abandonment, introduce new products and increase customer lifetime value.
Certainly, it is easier to sell to consumers who recognise your brand than to those yet to be introduced. And re-marketing to existing customers is even more effective. Fortunately, retargeting is an option on various paid online marketing platforms. This includes Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
If you are running holiday campaigns, create campaign-specific landing pages that you can direct people towards. Landing pages work better than directing people towards your homepage as you can design them to include media, copy, forms and links relevant to your campaign
Feel free to play around with holiday theming for these landing pages. But at the same time, any landing page needs to tie back in with the rest of your website design and branding. It should also be easy enough for users to navigate back to the main site from the page.
All these tips should ensure you get plenty of website traffic during the holiday season. But your website needs to be able to handle this traffic. Because a website that constantly crashes or takes forever to load is going to drive potential customers away. Get on top of this issue by checking your server capacity and website load times. Google PageSpeed Insights is an excellent tool for seeing how fast your webpage is, and finding ways to improve your performance.
Because it's such a busy time of year, many of us are choosing to do our Christmas shopping on the go. 75% of smartphone users agree that they are more likely to purchase from brands whose mobile app allows them to transact quickly. So in other words, you want to make sure your website is optimised for mobile.
You can test this out yourself by reviewing your website on a mobile device. But for a more thorough review, Google Search Console has a Mobile-Friendly Test to help website-owners test how easily visitors can use a webpage on a mobile device. Alternatively, if you want to test multiple URLs on your website at once, give Experte's Bulk Mobile Friendly Test a try.
The quality of your customer service can mean the difference between someone purchasing from you and someone choosing to go to your competitor instead. During this season, a lot of people will be interacting with your business online. So you want to ensure your customer service is up-to-scratch and capable of handling increased demand. Depending on your company/organisation, good customer service can include aspects such as:
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