How to market online during the holidays
Marketing during the holidays can be its own special kind of challenge. We’ve come up with a few tips to help you hit it off this season.
- Quality content is still king.
As with any marketing strategy, good content is critical. Try creating some content specifically for the day of the holiday. It’s important to make things that your customers can share and engage with.
Not all content is appropriate for a holiday, which leads us into our next point.
- Your customers are distracted.
People are typically online less the day of the holiday and the day after. If your business isn’t really related to the holiday, any “hard” marketing is going to be lost in the scuffle. If you can’t pin it to the holiday theme, go more for the indirect sell.
Just keeping your company visible and available will do the trick. You can push ads or promotions later, after the shopping, travel and vacations are over.
To stay relevant, you can try to ride trending topics. #MerryChristmas or #HappyHolidays fit nicely. Whatever can keep you in their feeds that works for your followers.
- Holidays and contests go well together.
Popularity contests are quite useful for the holidays. These are contests where customers can enter themselves, and they win based on how many friends they can get to vote for them online. This is typically done right on the social media site.
Try tying these in to holiday-specific ideas. Make a donation to a food bank, buy someone a Thanksgiving dinner, or give a Christmas shopping spree to the winner. You can take video or pictures of the winners and use them in the same contest year after year.
These contests succeed best when they are not too hard to find. Using an app where they can interact with the social media site right on your website is one suggestion.
- Buy promoted posts.
You can pay Facebook, Twitter, etc. to get an ad out to your customers. These are guaranteed to be seen. They are cheap, ranging from $5 to $20 for a single post. This is not a bad strategy for reaching out to new customers as well.
- Customer-generated content.
When you can get customers to put up their own content, it’s a double win for you. You don’t have to pay for the content and your customers are more invested in the posts. Ask them to post testimonials, their own photos and videos of their holiday, or their memories that include your company.
One good idea is to set out props or a location at your business that is selfie-friendly. If you have a Santa hat and props, people will probably take selfies on their own! Put up signs that give them instructions on the hashtags to use and the platforms to post them on.
- The timing will be different.
The time people are online shifts during holidays. You may notice your statistics on your sites drop. That’s ok! It’s par for the course.
Some rules of thumb are that things get back to normal around the 2nd week of January. People may make resolutions to get off of social media. But as we have seen time and again, they almost always come back by February at the latest.
- Be creative and festive!
Are you familiar with the movie Elf? There is one scene where Will Ferrell’s character sees a sign by a coffee shop that reads, “World’s Best Cup of Coffee.” He rushes inside to yell his congratulations.
It’s a funny scene, and if you run a coffee shop, why not use it? A simple meme with your café tied to it can make your customers laugh without being too pushy on a marketing message.
Simpler things can work, too. Updates on your office Christmas sweater party, an Elf Yourself video, or photos of your company’s holiday decorations are adequate.
- Remember, no one really cares about your business…
It might be hard to hear, but most of the public is not going to think about your business on a daily basis. It’s just not a big part of their lives.
Because of this, your business will need to stay in front of them. Put media out there where they will see it.
Much of what you put out isn’t going to be a straight promotion. It’s going to be informative, funny, educational, or entertaining. It won’t have too much to do with your business. But it keeps your name on something people will engage with, keeping them at the front of the brain.
As much as we are hardwired as humans to think, “Me, me, me!”, good marketing is focused on the customer.
There’s our advice for your holiday marketing plans! If you have any examples of good holiday marketing content, we’d love to hear about them!