If you listen closely, you can almost hear the sleigh bells ringing. And that means one thing! The Christmas countdown has begun. With John Lewis announcing the opening of their online Christmas store, now is the perfect time to strategise your marketing plan for the festive period and if it hasn’t crossed your mind just yet with Halloween and Bonfire Night plans already underway, Christmas should be your next priority. Afterall, we only get the chance to take advantage of it once a year!
Getting your business as prepared as possible for the busiest season of the year is key – and now is the perfect time to start. With December on the horizon, we can help you to plan the perfect Christmas-themed digital marketing agency campaign that will be executed carefully to your target audience, helping to drive sales and leads during such a competitive time.
Christmas is coming! Whilst Christmas brings joy to many each year, it doesn’t happen without the marketing magic that happens behind the scenes, from the ads that you see on your TV screen, to those carefully crafted advertisements that follow you almost everywhere online. Like all major events, marketing your business this Christmas requires a plan – and now is the perfect time to start considering how to make such sparkle.
“Marketing” during the festive season isn’t just about decorating your office in red and green tinsel. It’s about creating a story that appeals to your target audience, taking advantage of everything they love during the holiday season such as being able to spend a prolonged amount of time with family, watching Christmassy films in elf-themed pyjamas and watching the snow fall from the sky. With data from Exterion showing that 15% of urban shoppers begin their Christmas shopping in October, here’s why now is that perfect time to invest.
Many think that it may still be a little early to start thinking about Christmas, but chances are some of you will have already started buying for your loved ones. Essentially, if you’re doing it, others are too! Halloween and Bonfire Night are fast approaching too, making now the perfect time to capture your audience and shed some light on what’s to come over the festive period for them using these two events as a trial run to help iron out any final adjustments to your marketing campaign. Using this hype, you can draw attention to any specials that you want your customers to focus on, encouraging them to do their Christmas shopping with you too.
As aforementioned, each year more and more customers are getting ahead of their Christmas shopping in order to avoid the “big rush” at the end of the year. With this in mind, you need to meet this expectation by activating your Christmas marketing efforts early, too.
Social media is where most Christmas shoppers get their inspiration from, so making sure that all of your social channels are up to date and looking and feeling festive is the perfect place to start.
Influencer marketing deals are at an all-time high during the festive season, encouraging shoppers to buy the best of. Getting started with your Christmas marketing campaign now means that you can be one of the first to offer such product, driving sales ahead of other businesses.
When it comes to getting your marketing strategy up straight for the festive season, there are numerous routes for you to choose from. We’re taking a closer look at some of the most impactful types of marketing, below:
SEO
When it comes to prepping your website for Christmas, it’s not just about updating its graphics. Ecommerce sites and local businesses can take advantage of SEO, helping to ensure they make the most of the festive season digitally. Before getting stuck in though, it’s important to make sure that your website is in perfect shape to accommodate the increased traffic expected from the Christmas rush.
In addition to making sure that your content is well-written, you need to ensure that each piece is targeting a specific keyword to make sure that it drives conversions.
Like at the start of any campaign, you need to do you keyword research to attract eager shoppers now and in a couple of months’ time when the big day starts to draw closer. As well as bidding and optimising each of your product and category pages, now is also the perfect time to create “informational” content to attract those “top of the funnel” shoppers. These are shoppers that haven’t quite decided what they want to buy yet, giving you the opportunity to build content to further target phrases such as “Best Christmas gifts for her”.
PPC
There are several ways you can also integrate the festive season into your PPC campaign, including by integrating Christmas keywords into your campaigns to put you on the top rankings of the SERPs. This will help to ensure that your PPC ads are ahead of your competitors during the seasonal searches, increasing the relevancy of your product or service.
A festive ad should always take users to a landing page – and a seasonal one at that. A Christmas-decorated landing page should reflect all the popular festivities, helping to capture the buyer’s attention and heighten their Christmas spirit, encouraging them to visit your website and purchase one or more of your products. You can also use this as an opportunity to highlight any promotional offers you may be running at the time, heightening your campaigns conversion rate.
Countdowns are also an excellent way to remind users of how long they have left to purchase your product at a particular price or how long they have left to order to receive the product next day. This will help to further enhance your PPC campaign, engaging your audience from the moment they lay eyes on your landing page from your ad.
Social Media
Social media is just one place where the hype over Christmas gets started early, enabling you to make the most of the festivities from the moment summer turns to autumn. There are numerous ways you can hype up the festive season on social, including on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and even LinkedIn. Depending on your business, you may consider starting your own hashtag to increase engagement and brand awareness during a key time of the year.
Other business, like us, may be helping others get the most out of their marketing strategy this December, and sharing your recent case studies and testimonials in a festive-themed way could be the perfect way to remind businesses that the mad Christmas rush is just around the corner.
In fact, it’s the busiest time of the year for us social junkies, with many reporting that December is social media’s busiest time of year. Facebook alone sees a 26% increase in posts uploaded over the period, with more than a billion people logging on each day! But, don’t just take our word for it, look at the stats! They recommend following 6 key messages:
Facebook IQ
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another way businesses can get creative ahead of the festive season, providing insight into what’s to come or even helpful recipes ahead of the big day. Of course, it’s all down to what the business has to offer itself, but there are 101 ways you can integrate some kind of festive sparkle into your content marketing strategy.
What’s more, you can use your blogs and articles on social media, helping to share the festive cheer – and even upload your own to your LinkedIn Personal Profile! By doing so, you’ll be enhancing your own brand as well as the businesses. Think about the different articles and blogs that you enjoy reading around that time of year and find some time to make them work in your businesses favour. Here’s some ideas to get you started:
Design
There’s no feeling like preparing for Christmas, and when it comes to your website and supporting assets, it is the perfect time of year to go all out. Whilst there’s a fine line between effective and overcomplicated design, there are numerous ways you can dust a little Christmas magic on your marketing campaign.
Many start by updating their social media profiles, ensuring that their cover image and even logo support the trend. Some will even create imagery ahead of new product launches and exclusive line rollouts in order to get the momentum going – all Christmas-themed of course. It’s the perfect selling opportunity for businesses, with everyone wanting to buy the very best presents for their friends and family.
It’s a marketing tactic that has, and will continue to, work undoubtedly again and again, with many being influenced by the fantastic deals that many stores roll out at the end of October. After all, design is all about capturing the user’s attention, making them want to purchase now rather than later.
To get users to stop scrolling, consider:
With Christmas just around the corner, now is the perfect time to get your finance marketing or adult SEO strategy up to scratch in time for the big rush.
