Black Friday and Cyber Monday have turned the weeks following Thanksgiving and into Christmas into the highest-volume shopping days of the entire year. They also mark the beginning of the e-commerce holiday season—and the months with the highest potential for increased traffic, clicks, and ROI. Businesses everywhere have been forced to become increasingly creative in order to get conversions and gain consumer support.
For these reasons, holiday marketing campaigns can be incredibly effective for increasing your PPC, SEO, SEM, and overall ROI. After tapping into the e-commerce holiday season and making it a winning aspect of your business, holiday marketing campaigns will forever become a part of your holiday strategy moving forward.
How Do I Plan for a Holiday Campaign?
By using our holiday marketing tips below, you’ll have your business ready for an awesome holiday marketing campaign in no time:
Do Your Homework
Have you run a holiday marketing campaign before? Take a peek through the yearbook and examine your campaigns from years past. What worked? What didn’t? By knowing what holiday SEO and PPC strategies worked in the past, you can tap into those same characteristics to help plan a more successful campaign.
Remember Your Audience
If your business or services cater to a specific consumer base, you know exactly how to market to your biggest customers. Plan your campaign around what attracts your customers to optimize your visibility and traffic.
Set Tangible Goals
In order to run a productive campaign, clear goals must be set before the campaign runs—and re-examined after its completion—to measure success. We recommend making your goals as clear as possible, but feel free to dream big! For example, statements like, “our goal for this campaign is to increase our Instagram followers by 2,000 people” or, “we want this campaign to bring in an extra ten calls or website visits per day” are easy to measure. Plus, making goals and watching your campaigns reach or exceed them is incredibly gratifying.
How Do I Know What Kind of Campaign is Best for My Business?
The type of campaign you should run is entirely dependent on the type of business you have. For example, if your business usually gets the highest SEO and PPC return from social efforts, running a phone campaign would not be useful. Check out a few types of holiday digital marketing campaigns below—as well as what type of business might benefit most from each of the options.
Giveaways and Promos
Utilize social media as a way to build community and increase engagement—and consider offering “holiday specials” that aren’t available during other times of the year. Some of our favorite options include offering a free gift with every product purchase, hosting an online raffle-style giveaway (every comment/tag is an entry), or encouraging followers to post using a hashtag you provide, with a few lucky participants winning a prize.
People love to win free stuff, and spreading good cheer around the holidays is a wonderful way for the community to get more involved with your business and the causes you support. If you decide a giveaway or promo is the best campaign for you, check out our tips on the best way to host an event like this.
Targeted PPC Ads
Holiday PPC ads have the potential to be even more powerful than those used the rest of the year. By optimizing your text and Google Ads for the holiday season, you can ensure that your ads are being posted at the right time, drawing traffic where you want it, and driving clicks where they count. Implementing a PPC campaign during the e-commerce holiday season is a wise move because of the engagement good PPC ads encourage. They are highly shareable, can be specifically targeted, and are powerful due to their easily expansive nature.
SEO Articles and Content Blogs
Writing strong blog content and SEO articles is most important around the holiday marketing season. As website browsing and online shopping reach a year-round high, your content needs to be a cut above the rest to get clicks. By optimizing your content and strengthening your SEO holiday strategy, you are fortifying your online presence, increasing the accessibility of your website, and working towards higher ROI.
Who Can Help Me With Holiday Digital Marketing?
Running a successful holiday marketing campaign takes an experienced team of digital professionals. Media, social, marketing, and content all play crucial roles in a solid campaign. If your hope is to launch a holiday marketing campaign this 2018 e-commerce season, the sooner you can start planning, the better. If this process sounds overwhelming, contact Snap today. Our team would love to sit down with you and brainstorm your next holiday marketing campaign.