If you’re leaving your holiday marketing planning until Q4, you’ve already missed out. As an online retailer you need to create a holiday marketing plan that’s strong, attractive and aligns with your marketing goals that you’ve laid out, before Q3 is over.As holiday campaigns requires a lot of spending and attention, it’s important to have a plan in place NOW so that you’re ready for the holidays. To help you out, we’ve created a six-step guide for building a festive and effective holiday marketing campaign.
Step 1: Determine Your Goals For Your Holiday Campaign
Before you start a campaign, you need to determine what it is that you need to achieve. For most ecommerce sites at Christmas, this goal is increased transactions. Now you need to focus on your goals to reach your target audience. Setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) goals for your campaign will help you analyze your performance and stay on track. For example, if your campaign will include email blasts make sure you set goals for those emails: open rate, CTR, and how many sales you can attribute to that email are important KPIs. Track those results and start your list for what you’re going to stick with/change for next year’s campaign.
You also need to make sure that you narrow down your target audience and don’t just try to hit everybody with the same message. The more information you know about your audience, the better you can reach out them and ‘solve’ their holiday dilemmas. Finding out where your audience hangs out on social media and how they access information can be helpful in creating remarkable content that speaks their language.
Have your buyer personas in place. If you haven’t already developed your buyer personas, we recommend you read our blog on why buyer personas are important and then work on making sure you do your homework to develop the right personas for your brand.
Step 2: Create an Offer
Your content offer is the bread, butter and jam for you marketing campaign. There are various kinds of offers you can provide with the help of whitepapers, ebooks, blogs, podcasts, webinars and the list goes on. You can also include holiday offers, discounts, deals and contests to drive engagement. The content you decide to offer solely depends on the needs and wants of you customers.
Step 3: Create an Amazing Landing Page
Your offer needs to reside somewhere – a landing page, so your customers can see it. A compelling and convincing landing page will help your holiday offer stand out. To drive traffic to your landing page, make sure you have:
- An eye-catching headline that grabs attention
- Impactful images and videos that will help your visitors read through your page
- A clear bulleted list that will help your visitors find the importance of the offer and why they need to take action
- A form to get information from your audience in exchange for the offer
Step 4: Design a Promotional Plan
Now that you have created your landing page, it is important to decide the channels that you will promote your holiday campaign through. You can promote you offer through a blog, an email or on social media.
Blog – Your blog can either be a long or short and simple that describes what your holiday offer is all about. Don’t forget to drop in some CTAs into these posts to push your readers to read your content.
Email – Another way to reach out to your potential customers is through an email. Crafting an email with an excellent subject line that outlines the details of your offer and its value is essential. Including a CTA within the email copy is critical as it can get your readers to subscribe to your holiday offer. Once you have crafted an email with a subject line, a CTA and an email copy, you can send it out to the list of people in your contact list.
Social Media – Social media channels are the easiest ways to promote your offer to large audiences. Sharing your links and blog posts regarding your festive offers can help your readers access your holiday content. Look for ways to incorporate images and videos that are impactful and helps drive attention to your holiday offer. Social media channels allow you to boost your offers, so you can reach a larger audience more effectively.
Step 5: Create Lead Nurturing Paths
If your landing page includes a form, it would really help your sales team set up lead nurture paths before you launch your holiday marketing campaign. Use your marketing automation platform to set up email nurtures to stay in contact with your leads.
You’ll need to determine a goal for your lead nurture — do you want contacts to view specific content, reach out to a sales rep or maybe make a purchase? From here, you can write the copy and CTAs for each email within your lead nurture and set up a schedule.
Step 6: Launch & Measure Your Holiday Campaign
Now that you are ready with an amazing landing page, an email and a social media strategy, it’s time go out there and promote your holiday offer to your customers! Once you campaign has gone live, you can measure your campaign to see how it performs. It’s essential to tweak your content if you find that your offer is not that engaging.
Dive into the analytics of your promotion and see what you could learn from it. Keep a note of what worked and what didn’t and make sure you optimize better for the next campaign. That’s it! These six steps should help you while you promote your holiday offers.
We understand that the process of creating and promoting your offers online isn’t a cup of tea and it can be overwhelming! Don’t worry, we can you help you. Contact us today!
