5 Brilliant Holiday Marketing Ideas Any Business Can Use
Just as the holiday season kicked off this year, Australians spent $200 million online in Black Friday sales.
Holidays are a great time to shop, and, therefore, to sell! But even if you’re not ready to start selling right away, you can use this time to take some giant leaps that would help you market your business online in 2018. Here are 5 brilliant holiday marketing ideas that even small businesses can use:
1. Run an Email Campaign
It’s an excellent opportunity for you to write a small email sequence and send it to customers on your mailing list. Statistics prove that the average order value of an email is at least three times greater than social media.
- Make the tone of your emails festive and fun
- Try to centre your emails on holiday themes
- Make a special Christmas or New Year offer
- Give people incentive for visiting your website or store, like a free gift or discount
- Promote products your customers would need during holidays
If you haven’t tried email marketing before, you should start it during the holidays. You can start by creating a list of your existing customers in MailChimp. It is a marketing automation platform and an email marketing service tool.
2. Create a Marketing Video
According to WordStream, 87% of online marketers use video content. Do you know why? Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. More than half of the marketers say the video has the highest ROI among all types of content that they use.
If you’ve been thinking to get into video marketing but never knew where to start, here are some simple tools that come with a free trial!
- Nutshell
- Magisto
- Animoto
- Videoshop
- iMovie
These are all beginner friendly tools that you can master within days. Take a quick look at the features and functionality of each one and start working with the one you like most. With a little bit of practice, you can start rolling out professional marketing videos, provided you already have the images and raw footage with you.
3. Prepare a Content Marketing Calendar
Use this time of the year to plan your content marketing for the next year? It’s really simple. Here’s how you can proceed.
- Select topics for your content. You can throw in a few Google searches with your focus keywords and see what comes up. Select the topics that have lesser competition, are unique, and are relevant to your business and target customers.
- Use Buzz Sumo or Epic Beat to research which topics are trending in your industry.
- Shortlist the topics that you’d like to focus on. Break down each topic into several titles for blog posts that you’d like to write or outsource. You’ll need 52 post titles if you want to blog once a week.
- Select a frequency for updating your social media channels. Later on, you can repurpose your blog posts for social media, email and other channels.
- Arrange everything into a content calendar. You can prepare it for the whole year or the next quarter. You can download some free templates from HubSpot and use one of them for creating your content marketing calendar.
Make sure you read these common content marketing mistakes before getting started.
4. Offer a Free Holiday Giveaway on Social
With the free time that your customers have during holidays, they’ll be glued on to Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and other social media channels. This gives you the opportunity to get your business noticed. And what can attract your customers more than a free gift or giveaway? Here’s what you can do.
- Get into the holiday mood by offering a big discount, a free add-on with an order or just something completely for free.
- Ask your users to follow you, like, share or comment on your post in order to claim the free gift.
- This way you can increase your social media followers as well as your store traffic during the holiday season.
5. Create Seasonal AdWords Campaigns
Image Source: WordStream
Nothing happens without advertising. And there’s no better time to advertise than holidays. Leverage this time and use Adwords to maximize your visibility. According to KissMetrics, ad impressions typically increase 50% during the holiday season. Click-through rates rise 100%, direct traffic increases 150%, the average order value grows by 30%, and conversion rates go up 60%.
Facebook Advertising: You can promote your page, an offer, a video, a post, or your website, among many other options. Facebook has also started offering Lead Ads, which allow you to capture leads through lead generation forms. In order to access the advertising tools, click on the small arrow on top of your Facebook personal profile. Click on ‘Create Ads’ and follow the step-by-step instructions to create your first advertising campaign.
Google Advertising: Go to Google Adwords, find the “Get started now” button, and sign up for an AdWords account. Once you're logged in, click the “Create your first campaign” button. You’ll need to select your campaign name, type and target area. Choose your bid strategy and set your daily budget. Create your first Adgroup and write your first ad. Of course, you have to select your keywords before that. Enter your billing info and you’re all set.
But, remember creating ad campaigns require keyword research and regular monitoring. If you need assistance with that, you can reach out to us.
Conclusion
The above ideas should give you a good starting point, but there’s more to holidays marketing than we can cover in a single post (or even a series of posts). As you know, the devil is in the detail. So, get in touch with eMarket Experts if you get stuck anywhere. We can help you make this holiday season more productive (and profitable) than ever before with our digital marketing services. Reach out to us to discuss your project.
