Social Media
Social media is a great content distribution platform so you should utilise it to gain its full potential over the Christmas period. If you have built up your following on social media over the year then Christmas is a great chance to show your followers that you mean business.
There’s a range of features on social media that you can use to help you take full advantage of your followers. You can use sponsored posts also known as adverts and also boosted posts to help increase engagement and conversions over the busy festive period.
Sponsors posts and boosted posts can help retailers advertise their services and products to a larger audience and for a smaller price than other advertisement placements. It’s also great for using it to retarget users who had been on your website previously, you can set up ads to target these users specifically which is great for the Christmas period for shoppers looking at Christmas presents.
Plan, Plan, Plan
The key thing to remember about Christmas is that it only lasts for a short period, so planning is essential! Your Christmas strategy should be planned well in advance for every industry whether that be retail or a local service.
Strategy for Christmas should be put in place so that when the time comes, you aren’t rushing to get everything completed in a short time.
One thing to remember is that social media posts can be scheduled on Facebook itself but also with a range of tools, including Sprout Social. The majority of social media platforms allow users to schedule posts up to 6 months in advance, meaning in reality you can schedule your posts for to show in December in June, saving you time when you’re busy.
Align Brand Imagery
Imagery is essential within a Christmas campaign, I mean everyone likes a little bit of glitter every now and then. To ensure that your blogs and social media posts are all aligned and focussed on the same thing then ensuring that your brand imagery is inline with the festive season is one thing that should be done. It can also give a positive brand impression to your consumer and audience, it’s a pretty simply thing to do too, adding in some snowflakes to your logo or even adding a little Santa hat can do the job.
Email Marketing
Give your email marketing a boost with quality call to actions, limited time offers and headlines that will get your emails open and converted into sales or that get the user to contact you.
Email marketing can allow you to offer a one time exclusive offer to your email subscribers, if they are signed up to receive the email then they are more than likely interested in your products or services. Everyone loves discount codes and offers around christmas and receiving an email with one in could be the little push that a person needs to buy something or enquire.
TIP: keep your email marketing campaign in line with the brand imagery, if you have added festive decorations to your brand logo or website then keep them running in the email to ensure that everything flows.
Touch base with clients
Sending out a little something to show your appreciation to the loyal clients can go a long way. It can help build your relationship with them further and can sometimes lead to another sale or enquiry. Lots of business’ use social media to post social interactions about the workplace so it could lead to a post on their own social media thanking you for the kind gift.
This can raise your brand awareness massively. It is always a good idea to gain an idea of how their year has been by reaching out to your clients, as this gives you something positive to pick up on in the new year.
Tailor Content
Tailoring the content you produce across your website, social media and blog can give your brand a friendly persona over the Christmas period to provide the content with an aligned voice.
Having content that flows along with the branding that flows too, it can ensure that a user or client feels comfortable and trusts the brand a little more. Also if you keep the content tailored to a specific Christmas campaign it can give brand reassurance to your clients, plus emphasising the campaign across multiple platforms too.
Compare and forecast
If you have data being tracked on your site or your campaigns that you have ran previously then these can help you predict and plan for the next year’s strategy.
Looking back at past Christmas campaigns can allow you to understand your consumer behaviour as well as understanding what has worked previously and what hasn’t worked for your brand. It’s important to understand that not every marketing strategy works for every brand or business, so defining your own can be essential to your strategy actually working.
Forecasting can be useful too, there are lots of tools out there that enable you to really understand consumer behaviour and align strategy to achieve the best results. It’s all about trial and error, many strategies don’t work perfectly first time round, but it’s important to learn from the results that you have achieved or not achieved previously.
Speed
It’s a fact that Christmas is by far the busiest period of the year for shopping, and it’s also common knowledge that more and more people are turning to ordering and purchasing online. In fact, over 80% of users use mobile devices to search the internet and in 2015 black Friday saw an increase of +95% in mobile shopping revenue.
With this in mind, loading speed of a site; especially a mobile site is so important. Site speed is a key factor that can result in sales or a shopping cart abandonment and losing a customer.
Another important thing to remember is with the increase in mobile sales, it’s always worth looking as the usability of your site and if it is mobile. If 80% of users are searching on a mobile device then they will be expecting to see a mobile friendly when they click through to it.
Christmas Gift Guides
We all know one person that is impossible to buy for when it comes to Christmas presents. Adding a Christmas gift guide related to different genres can help users search and buy the perfect present for that one picky person, you can do gift guides for her, for him, for couples etc the list is endless. This also allows a fast and simple process for users when they are on the site or for users who are in a rush too.
This is a great way of improving the customer journey and can help convert sales too.
Optimising for Christmas terms
In 2013, Google Analytics showed us that there was 30 million searches for the abbreviation ‘Xmas’. This shows that it is worth doing a little bit of keyword research to find out what users are actually searching for, as there are a few abbreviations for Christmas terms.
This allows you to then optimise your site and products/pages to include these Christmas terms and abbreviations. For exact match product searches it’s also worth remembering your product page’s meta description are the cheapest marketing tool around, while they might not affect your rankings, you can optimise your product descriptions to increase engagements and clicks.
TIP: remember to include your Christmas offers within the meta descriptions to help increase clicks as this is the first thing users see.
If you have any questions or queries regarding your social media strategy or your site’s optimisation do not hesitate to get in touch.
