Ah, the holidays are coming, it’s time to warm up by the fire, spend time with your family, and eat a lot of delicious home cooked food! It’s also a time where everyone exchanges gifts to their loved ones. It’s one of the busiest shopping times of the year and people are looking to buy. So, many businesses are pushing their products harder than other times of the year. Which means you will have even more competition. As an inbound marketing company in Brooklyn, we think we know what it takes to get through the holiday season and come out on top! Here is our guide for digital marketing for small businesses during the holidays. Be sure to check out our answer to the question: What is inboud marketing?
Offer a big discount and start early
Everyone is offering discounts. Everybody. From the top companies like Amazon to smaller businesses just starting out, people are offering big discounts to set themselves apart from the competition. So you know what means? It’s time to cut down your prices. Create a limited time offer throughout the holiday season and make are you start it early. Companies often start Thanksgiving week and kick it off with a big black Friday or cyber Monday sale. Usually, companies continue the sales leading up to Christmas. So this means, you should also offer a big discount or holiday deal. It’ll help your sales during the holiday season, and maybe build a relationship with your customers that continues for years to come.
Create a holiday PPC campaign
Once you create your big discount, it’s time to start spreading it to as many people as possible. Start off by creating a big holiday PPC campaign. This may take some time so make sure you start early. Research all of the keywords you think are relevant to your product, and then add all of the keywords associated with the holidays. A PPC campaign can be one of the big inbound marketing strategies to help you with your holiday promotion. If you want to avoid some of the novice mistakes, check out our guide to 5 mistakes to avoid in your PPC campaign as well as how to succeed in PPC marketing.
Remarket Remarket Remarket
Remarketing is extremely important, not only during a regular inbound marketing campaign but it’s especially useful for the holidays. A majority of people who make a purchase, take more than one visit to purchase a product online. Most do it after a series of visits that could stem from multiple reasons. Maybe they see a facebook ad and check out your site, then maybe a see a twitter ad a day later and then go to your site. It can sometimes take two weeks of visiting and being reminded of your site before they actually commit to a purchase. So it is important to set up a remarketing campaign. Make sure you make some cool banner ads to go along with it. A remarketing campaign is going to help you out in the long term so make sure you put some time into making good ads.
This is a screen shot from Google Analytics that shows some conversion paths for an ecommerce company. As you can see. Some people need to vist the website multiple times before they can make up their mind to make a purchase. Remarketing gives you the opportunity to bring them back tot he website and get a conversion.
Start Email marketing
When you start a remarketing campagin, it is important to also target the people who placed one of your items in their cart and left the page. If you have their email address, you can send a personalized email reminding them they have something in their cart. It’s important to remind these people because they are already almost there, and just need a little push. Perhaps, you can offer a special discount code to those who have abandonded their cart, to give them an even bigger incentive to purchase. Make sure you make that extra push through email marketing, to learn more check out our page on how to convert leads.
Promote through social media
Now is the time to promote everything you have to your existing followers. Promote your offer all the time and make sure you make it known that your offer is only available for a limited time. There are a lot of ways you can do it but social media is going to be your bread and butter to helping you push sales for your holiday offer. So make sure you do it right and get a little creative with it. This will not only help you in the short term, but you may get more followers out of your social media campaign, and ultimately support your digital marketing strategy.
To learn more, check out our guide on five ways to optimize your search engine ranking as well as the anatomy of an effective landing page. Contact your local inbound marketing company in Brooklyn, Park Slope Softworks, and request a free consultation today!
