While others are sprucing up their campaigns with explosive deals for Independence Day, why not take a step back and start planning for something bigger and better! Right now, there are two things on my mind - celebrating and the holiday ecommerce season. For me, they go hand-in-hand, because I know that at the point I start talking celebration, it’s time to get holiday marketing in gear. I also grew up in a neighborhood where each July brought a Christmas block party complete with Santa, gifts, holiday lights, and turkey.
You might be thinking to yourself, “They don't even have the Halloween candy out in the stores...Do we really need to start thinking about things like the Holidays and end-of-year shopping?” The short answer is yes, and the long answer is yes! If you'd like to increase visibility during the holidays and have some semblance of a stress-free winter season, then planning early is essential.
Plan Ahead for the Holidays
While discussing holiday marketing with some clients, they seemed shocked that I was bringing up the topic in the sweltering heat of summer. However, when I pointed out that in the past they weren't paying attention early enough in the year, they were equally surprised. If you're going to be busy, you need to plan ahead to ensure great visibility and traffic at the right time. This is true any time of the year, for holidays, the summer season, and fall. If you depend on a seasonal spike in traffic, you must plan ahead.
Use the Right Data
Increase visibility in the search engines doesn't happen overnight. Being proactive can help your holiday terms and specials show up in front of the right audience during the holidays – not after. Start NOW, and make sure you've optimized some of your text, page titles & meta descriptions, and headers based on the keyword research you did last Christmas and any projections you can formulate based on current research.
Here's the kicker - most keyword research tools will show data from the last 30-90 days. You're not going to see accurate holiday shopping keyword data from July’s and August’s numbers; data from your last holiday season is probably a lot closer to what's going to happen this holiday season.
I can hear you out there: "Yeah, yeah – it’s still too early – I'll think about it in November." Sure, you can think about it in November and do things in a rush at the last minute, but you'll see little to no return on your valuable time and design investment. It needs to happen now, not later.
Don't worry – there's hope. We have put together a timeline for ensuring your holiday specials are well thought out, marketed, and primed to be both visible and profitable come Christmas.
Over the next few months, we will be posting a biweekly blog to offer a few thoughts on how to set up a stress-free and successful online Christmas promotional campaign. We will include a few suggested timelines, but if you prefer to work to other dates, that’s fine - just remember, your online Christmas marketing may become more time-consuming (and stress-inducing) the later you leave it. The topics that will be covered include:
- Brainstorming
- Establishing Customer Relationships
- Being Different
- Stress-free Shopping
- Promotions that work (free shipping day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday)
- Staying Fresh
- Simplicity
The goal of this series is to better prepare you for the end-of-year holiday shopping season. Knowing what to do six months out may seem insignificant when the sun is shining brightly and everyone is heading to the beach, but the holiday rush will be here before you know it!
At sixth months til Christmas, you can begin to give yourself a little boost by increasing visibility using the following:
- On-site content optimization and SEO (title tags, meta descriptions, blogging, etc.)
- Offsite Distribution (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc.)
We’ll call that your homework for this session - look forward to seeing you out there on social media!