The holidays are here! Year-end festivities are abuzz with gift-giving, gratitude, and generosity. For many businesses, this is the busiest time of the year. Sales, shipping, spending time with family and friends, supporting your community—there’s a lot going on at work and at home. To maintain a jolly balance before you take off work for celebrations, set your digital marketing ahead in the holiday spirit. Here are our top five tips to get your business trending this season:
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Watch Wishlists
Online customers are the kings of the holiday shopping season. They’ve spent all year making wishlists on Amazon, Pinterest, Instagram, and other apps and websites to share with their loved ones so they can get ahead in the competitive Christmas shopping season. Products from your business are probably on a good number of those lists!
Absolutely make note of whenever your products are saved or pinned, because those show that you’re highly desirable and in demand. Just like reviews, you can use your wishlist “nominations” for social media promotion. Share or post your customer’s wishlist, tag them, and even create a hashtag like #WishingFor[YourBusiness] or #WishlistWatch2019. By including your customers in your marketing, you’re doing two key things: showing that you value your business-customer relationship; and boosting your organic reach by directly involving the customers’ social media circle of influence.
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Special Sales for Faithful Followers
Caring about your customers isn’t just a lead generation strategy, it’s how you feel all the time, at all stages of the sales funnel! So don’t just show love to the customers of Christmas-future, but your present subscribers, followers, and customers proving their lifetime value.
Especially for businesses with an email marketing program, your established audience is an important tool for marketing your holiday sales and promos. Reward these tried-and-true customers with a discount code, shipping waiver, or contest entry. This can also work on your social media by putting special promotion content on your Story or at the end of a Live video. Making exclusive sales opportunities will not only keep your current customers locked in, but will entice potential leads to follow, subscribe, and buy from your business so that they can reap such rewards as well.
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Santa’s Little Helpers…Chatbots!
Like we said before, online shopping is the go-to for holiday purchasers. It’s more important than ever to make sure your website and mobile configurations are at their most optimal. Once your business is at peak user-friendliness for your customer, it’s time to make it easy on the backend too. If you haven’t integrated a chatbot into your sales strategy already, now is the time to start!
Chatbots can be a major help to guide your customer through the sales funnel, assisting them with questions and support along the way. The best part is that they can do it not only through your website, but also on apps like Facebook Messenger or even via virtual assistants like Alexa. This broadens your accessibility to a wider range of digital customers. Plus, without having to take the extra time to answer every customer query or walk them through the sale, your team can focus on getting more of your products out faster (always a nail-biting endeavor during the shipping-heavy holidays).
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Inclusivity in Advertising
One of the most important things to remember during the holidays is that your audience may come from many different backgrounds. Some may celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, or no holiday in particular. What a wonderful mixture of traditions and cultures to be grateful for this season!
A few ways you can advertise with inclusivity in mind are:
- Posting merry well-wishes on the day of each holiday on social media
- Using universal winter imagery instead of specifically Christmas-themed designs
- Showcasing your customers (or team!) engaging with their diverse winter traditions in video ads
Not only does promoting inclusivity in your advertising showcase your care for all your customers, but it improves your social media and SEO reach when you use each celebration’s keywords.
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Give Back
In a season flush with gift-giving, one of the best things you can do for both your business and for your community is to give back. There is no commerce without community, whether your business has a brick-and-mortar or is online-only. A few ways your business can support your community are:
- Volunteer your time to help the less fortunate. Highlight volunteering opportunities on your social media!
- Donate product or money to charity. Ask your customers if they’d like to contribute at the end-point of purchase!
- Partner with an aid organization. Promote a featured run of product benefitting them!
- Host an event to raise awareness for a cause. Invite your local followers to attend!
Your business could participate locally or globally, for a cause important to you, your team, your customers, or relevant to your products. Besides generating authentic content to market with, making a difference never goes out of season.
These are just a few ways to get your business trending this busy holiday season. We hope they make your digital marketing efforts a little easier and full of joy. We know staying on top of all the holiday festivities is almost a full-time job itself! Your customers and your team are thankful for all the work you do. We are so thankful for you, too! For more digital marketing tips and services (year-round), contact us.
