Holiday Season Content Marketing
The holiday season makes for some crazy busy days! During this time, there’s a LOT of purchasing activity and irrespective of your industry, you’re bound to notice a surge in the crowds.
The Christmas run up is a time where most businesses will benefit from shifting their marketing strategies over to a more festive approach. In so doing, savvy marketers will gear their campaigns to ride in the spirit of the holidays. With that in mind, here’s some killer tips to use just in time for the holidays :
Increase Your Momentum on Social Media
It will come as no surprise to many that people spend a lot of time on social media during the holidays. Most are in a festive mood spending time with family and friends with the social channels providing a great way of staying in touch.
From a marketing perspective, this time of year brings a prime opportunity for brands to ride this natural traffic surge and ramp up their social presence. Embracing this seasonal trend tactfully on social (it is christmas after all) can help grow organic reach and increase your local exposure.
Paid advertising opportunities abound on social, making it easy to target prospects most likely to be interested in your products or services. In essence, with a naturally surging trend, all you need do is show up with the right content and share in the festivities.
Like What you See? Never miss a beat and Follow the Blog!
Theme Your Content for the Holidays
Get into the spirit of the holidays by creating content specifically themed for the time of year. In the case of Christmas, crafting your overall marketing theme to reflect and integrate with this holiday can pay huge dividends. Examples of themed content include using relevant graphics and color schemes in your marketing materials. Keep an eye on trending topics during this time and mirror market the relevant ones.
When deployed correctly, successful brands can weave themselves seamlessly into the overall trend. Some key attributes of themed campaigns include a softened marketing approach. This in turn will bring higher retention rates along with a more favourable brand impression.
Including ambience in your holiday marketing, shows clients and prospects your brand identifies with them during the celebrations. A more human approach if you will. Ignore all the black friday hoopla for a second. Simply joining in trending conversations and increasing your outbound engagement is key here.
Optimize for Mobile
Let’s face it, during the holiday shopping season everyone is out and about on their mobiles. Your content marketing plan for the holidays will suffer a major blow if it’s not optimized for mobile. Your brand needs to show up where your audience is and during the holidays, that place is on mobile now more than ever.
In 2017, mobile optimization is mandatory with the number of mobile users now surpassing desktop users. Remember, mobile isn’t just about smart phones anymore, it includes tablets and other mobile devices including portable wear.
With everyone on their mobile devices during this time, we see a huge surge in mobile traffic. This again creates a not to be missed opportunity for exposure. Bear in mind too that Google only displays mobile friendly websites in mobile search results.
Think mobile first – you will need it if you want to win the holiday marketing game.
Celebrate Life
Most everyone is celebrating during the holidays and brand content marketing strategies need to embrace this fact.
A nice way to jump on board might be to share engaging themed posts & updates wishing your customers the best of the season. Showing empathy during this time tends to work very well – look at Apples’ Frankies Holiday ad from last year. Interesting to not see a single Apple product in the campaign and instead focusing on the sentiment – nice touch!
Many local radio stations will offer discounted mini time spots just for Seasons Greetings providing affordable, excellent local reach. This approach can also be applied in your CASL compliant newsletters out to your mailing list.
You can also make a video following this same strategy and share with your prospects online or on your mailing lists. Remember those awesome WestJet Christmas videos? Exactly!
Marketing Intel Direct To Your Inbox! Sign Me Up!
Give A Gift
During the holiday season people are primed for giving and receiving gifts. You can tailor your content marketing towards offering freebies to reward your loyal customers and thank them for their support. Use this same tactic to entice new customers and encourage referrals.
If you’re not in a position to offer a physical gift, why not create a relevant, comprehensive and useful guide to give away for free. For instance, creating a free guide on: How To Survive Holiday Shopping. If you get overwhelmed with holiday shopping (not to mention the crowds) a guide like this might be really helpful.
At the end of the day, it’s less about the gift and more about the thought behind it.
Thanks for reading!