December is here and with it marks the official start of the holiday shopping season. With less than 30 business days left of the year, now is your final chance to boost sales numbers and revenue for 2020! Don’t let the 2020 holiday season slip away from you without heavily marketing your offerings.
What’s the best way to market going into the holiday season?
Below we’ll take a look at some of the top December marketing tips you should be thinking about as the holiday season cranks up.
1. Engage heavily on social media
You should make a point of spending more time than normal interacting with your audience and sharing offers and content on your social media channels. Everyone expects there to be a large number of great offers available as the holiday season kicks off, and you should be sure to share your special sales and offers with your audience.
Make sure your social media content looks good and doesn’t come across as spammy. It can be easy to get sloppy making social media posts, especially when you have a lot of planned social media content during the peak shopping season. Consumers do notice the visual quality of your content and will be quick to pick competitors if your offers aren’t that great or your page seems sloppy.
2. Get the Entire Team Involved
There should be “all hands” meetings focused on communicating company-wide strategy and letting employees know what you expect to be in high demand and answer any questions about holiday season operations and sales. You want to give your employees the information and resources they need to build relationships with customers and convert them when your competitors cant.
3. More Competition than ever Online
With the ongoing pandemic, restaurants, stores and businesses both small and large are turning more than ever to leveraging online platforms to continue operations of some kind. More businesses than ever have created online stores and tapped into social media marketing just to remain open and financially viable through what has been a tough year for many industries.
Remember that your competition online, as a result, has heightened significantly. You cannot slack off with your marketing campaigns or your competitors will be more hungry than ever to take your customers.
4. Make a Plan Fast
Make a plan using notes from your previous year’s marketing as well as your marketing content over the last few months as a basis with which to build your December marketing plan.
Include clear lists of offers, inventory volumes and a scheduled week by week look of marketing activities. Make it as foolproof as possible, especially with the on going covid19 pandemic, in case someone is out for illness, your marketing plan should be clear enough for someone else to execute.
All social media posts, paid media outlets, ad-buying, and digital paid PPC should be well documented. Another important aspect of clear documentation is the ability to look back next year at what aspects of your marketing plan worked well and what should continue to be tweaked.
Keep in mind marketing plans should be at times flexible, with the ability to quickly adatp to potential problems, or changing conditions or even unexpected moves by competitors.
5. Emails and more Emails
Email marketing is a MAJOR aspect of any holiday marketing campaign. You need to leverage every contact you have and build a segmented email marketing campaign that will hopefully have a high CTR and ROI for both old and new customers alike.
For many businesses, repeat business is the vast percentage of total sales, often representing up to 80% of total revenue, yet many businesses fail to clearly take advantage of their customer lists. Make prior customers a priority with company email communications. If possible highly customize your email lists based on your prior customer’s purchases and tailor the messages they receive. Presenting them with relevant content not only increases their chances of opening the email and making a purchase but also boosts your brand with them. Don’t spam them!
6. Hours and Shipping
Are you offering free shipping on larger orders? Well, you should strongly consider offering free shipping on order for example over $100, this is a very effective way to boost average order value, and is a great way to at least partially competing against the amazon effect of so many consumers expecting free shipping.
Offering free shipping on certain orders is always a way to make holiday sales special without simply more discounts as well.
Many times during the holidays, businesses are running at different hours than normal, often staying open later on many days to capture after-work shoppers.
7. Broadcast and Video Content
Fresh holiday-themed video ads that can be used on broadcast campaigns, social media, and digital paid advertising channels represent some of the highest ROI and more engaging content that can be used throughout the month. Videos take time to make, so get an early start on roughing out what type of ads you want to run. Work with your advertising partners well ahead of time to start crafting any broadcast ads and plan ad buying strategies.
Have questions about how to effectively utilize holiday video content? Let us know.
8. Special Packaging
Most marketers don’t think much about their holiday packaging or even consider making special packaging for use over the holidays, but the best brands certainly do. Depending on the audience you sell to, work with your packaging providers to craft holiday-themed packaging. This can be an extra tough to make your brand more memorable and personable to your customers without really costing much more.
9. An Effective Call to Action
A limited sale should be just that. Make sure your messaging clearly states why your audience should act now rather than later. This could be a focus on pricing that is only valid for a specific time period, a limit on when free shipping is available or even products that have a very limited inventory. You want to push your audience to act now rather than later and fear missing out on your sales offers.
10. Holiday Themed Branding and Content
Now is the time to create some holiday looking content! Just like you hopefully did with Halloween and Thanksgiving, creating winter and Christmas/Holiday themed ads is a great way to have unique looking, differentiated visual content. Work with your advertising partners to plan out what would work with your brand!
If you need help marketing your clinic, practice or healthcare-related business, give us a shout! We have worked with numerous healthcare industry clients both small and large to create a range of content and marketing plans. Volan Media is a top Knoxville Tennesse marketing and video production firm.
