It might seem crazy to start thinking about the winter holiday season before Halloween… Unless you’re thinking like a business. Some businesses plan their content marketing strategies for the holiday season up to a year in advance. Why? Because regardless of what your audience celebrates, December is a time where people typically spend a lot of money on gifts for friends, family, coworkers, and other members of their community.
But you don’t have to spend a year planning to get your business in the seasonal spirit with a marketing plan to help convert as many customers as possible.
Give your website a makeover
Just as you might decorate your home and a physical store, you can dress up a business website for the season. Depending on your business and what you might safely assume about your customer base, adding holiday-specific touches like free Christmas stock photos can put your customers in the mood for buying Yule gifts from your company. It probably won’t offend your audience if you choose to stick with your holiday of preference. But you can always stick with a general wintry theme if you’d rather not link your business with a specific holiday or religion.
Write a seasonal message
At the start of the holiday period, it is a good idea to write a blog post wishing your customers happy holidays. This could be a brief 500-word post, but you should also use it to mention some of your most popular products at this time of year and offer any special deals and discounts for the festive season as a gift to your customers. When shaping your message, keep in mind what your customers are likely experiencing this time of year. They may have many people to buy gifts for, travel expenses cutting into their gift budget, and limited time to wait for order processing and shipping. Making a special deal that makes things easier for your customers this season can be the deciding factor that makes them patronize your business instead of another.
Update your SEO
One way to tap into the winter holiday demand for gifts is to use holiday-friendly search terms. You can update existing content on your site, create new content, or do both. Think about holiday gift guides, seasonal decor, recipes, travel ideas and advice, activities, and so on.
Write a gift guide
Speaking of gift guides… Writing a gift guide is a great idea no matter the season. There are always reasons to get someone a gift, so someone is always looking for recommendations online for birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, promotions, and more. Ideally, it should be a long-form blog post with plenty of links to the relevant sections, so people can find the most appropriate gift ideas for the person they are looking to buy for. This should cover as many bases as possible from the best gifts for moms, dads, brothers, sisters, and friends, etc.. to budget, mid, and luxury goods.
You can also make a gift list for people with certain niche interests, like foodies, bookworms, music-lovers, horror movie fans, fishing, etc. Whatever matches your brand and makes sense.
In the interest of sharing the holiday spirit, consider supporting fellow businesses by including some of their products in your gift roundup lists.
Focus on special promotions
If you want to make the most of the holiday shopping season, it is a good idea to run a handful of special promotions. This could be something basic like giving away a free stocking filler with each purchase or something grander like the chance to win all of your holiday shopping for free when you shop with the store.
Whatever promotions you decide to run, it is vital that you create lots of buzz about them. You can do this by creating blog posts on your business website, but you should also be posting about them on social media, creating videos to show the customers what they could win, and sending out emails about them too so that as many people who fit into your target audience as possible will be aware of them.
Naughty or nice
A really good way of encouraging clicks on your website and in your emails is to have a pop-up with two buttons. You can stick with “naughty/nice” as your options, or maybe “one for you/one for me,” but each one offers a different treat. If they click nice, maybe they could be offered a selection of your best products with money off and if they click naughty, you could direct them to gifts for them, rather than for other people, so they can treat themselves during this time too. It just adds an extra level of intrigue that will encourage people to click.
