During the holiday season, you can see a lot of marketing campaigns everywhere. Consumers are probably asking themselves how they can find the best deal.
But for entrepreneurs, the biggest question is how to make your business stand out from the competition?
In this roundup, you will find creative marketing campaigns that will boost your sales this holiday season.
Brian Sheehan, Marketing Manager at Hollingsworth
We prepare for a successful holiday season 3-4 months before the season begins. We utilize social media and lead generation marketing within LinkedIn to connect with thought leaders and decision makers. We begin the conversation between managers and executives.
We also ramp our website up with holiday top funnel content that delivers holiday logistics/supply chain advice and news. All these efforts drive brand awareness and increase traffic to our website. We saw a 200% increase in traffic after we included a blog section on our website and began a content management cadence that was focused on supporting retail/e-commerce and manufacturing businesses.
Ian McClarty, CEO and President of PhoenixNAP Global IT Services
For the busy Q4, dropping hints early or having current subscribers receive early offers is always exciting. Maximize pre-sale offers so that your business is not cannibalized in the surge of promotions that are attacking everyone’s inbox.
Utilizing social media to garner new signups or users is an often inexpensive way to reach people. Moreover, respecting your audience’s inbox is essential. Be careful not to pester people with repeated reminders.
Lisa Porter, Wiideman Consulting Group
At Wiideman Consulting Group, our favorite holiday marketing campaign idea used primarily by our e-commerce clients revolves around Top Gift Ideas related to their cornerstone products. Every year, thousands of search engine users query terms such as top 10 Christmas gift ideas and similar terms that can drive significant traffic if optimized and socialized well. The content creation process is relatively simple:
We first start by leveraging a keyword research tool, using top and {your_industry} as seed keywords. We may also modify the search using holiday, Christmas or for her/him. Here is an example of what SEMrush offers when drilling into the Christmas specific list under top and ideas.
Once we’ve identified the target search terms, we prioritize them within a content outline, giving the most-searched keyword in the set visibility within the HTML title tag, the second-most searched term may be something we recommend for the primary heading (or H1 tag).
We will provide recommendations on the URL, title, meta description, headings, image attributes, video attributes and structured markup to utilize on the page. High definition images are an absolute must for these campaigns to be a success. Avoid stock images at any cost.
Another way we will collect data to help with the creative process is through crowdsourcing. Our favorite tool is Amazon Mechanical Turk. We simply create a one-question survey at $0.05 per answer to between 1,000 and 5,000 anonymous users asking them, “What is your favorite {product type/model}.”
Employ the help of Upwork and Freelancer.com, in getting someone to help us categorize the answers is fast and affordable. When done, a simple pivot table reveals the top 10 list we are looking for, accompanied by a pie chart for image link bait and a humorous answers list, Mechanical Turk provides the perfect way to source enough data for an incredible content marketing piece.
Depending on resources required, we may even pull in a team member to perform outreach to well-known industry influencers, authors and subject matter experts, in the same way that DevriX got me as a contributor for this article.
When prioritizing, we often sort our outreach list by the maximum engagement potential; not just followers, but social signals such as the average number of shares, comments, and sentiments. These influencers play an important role in the overall reach of the content.
Once live, we will have our clients share the Top List content across the obvious channels:
- YouTube
- and anywhere else our customers look for this type of content.
We then fast-follow with boosted or sponsored content, which typically costs pennies on the dollar when compared to Google or Bing Ads. The end game is getting the user to our website (or client’s website), where we emphasize email opt-ins, seed remarketing and continue to touch the user as much as we can until they have subscribed, followed, Liked, or somehow put themselves in our future marketing reach audience.
Below are a few of our favorite examples of holiday marketing ideas that incorporate SEO, social media, and data to drive brand awareness, attract links, and boost long-term sales when refreshed each Holiday Season:
- 10 Best Gift Ideas According To Ashley Alexiss (influencer-enhanced)
- These Are Going to Be the Hottest Toys of 2018
- 60 Romantic Gifts for Your Wife
Whatever your Top 10 List is going to be this year, we hope you will dive deep in Google Search Console and your analytics platform after the campaign to learn what you can to improve the content for next year. There is much to be learned in the data, and a lot of potential traffic coming your way once you apply what you learn from your first deployment.
Mike Khorev, SEO Expert and Digital Marketing Consultant at I Know SEO
One of my favorite marketing campaign ideas involves running contests and giveaways. Giveaways and contests are awesome because of how cost-effective, engaging, and practical they are.
Whether you’re giving away gift certificates for your services, big gift baskets containing some of your bestselling products, or completely-unrelated items such as a holiday getaway or a brand new car, this marketing tactic can serve a variety of objectives.
For example, if you want to give your brand’s social media presence a boost, you can require participants to share their entries on their personal pages. If driving more sales is what you’re targeting, encourage your customers to shop by offering extra entries with every purchase. You
can also boost web traffic by creating a special landing page on your website and hosting the giveaway or contest therein.
Contests are also a great way to gather lots of user-generated content. You can take the opportunity to let people design a special logo or submit ideas for new products. This lets you save a lot on in-house resources. At the same time, you can connect with your audience on a deeper level because user-generated content will always give you an exclusive sneak peek of what your customers really want.
Shane Barker, Digital Strategist at Shane Barker Consulting
The holiday season is a time when marketers and brands are at the peak of their marketing and promotions. It becomes all the more important for them to make their content stand out amidst all of the competition. Here are some holiday marketing campaign ideas that you should try this holiday season to stand out from the crowd:
- Create a specific hashtag for your brand’s holiday marketing campaign and use it to promote all of your holiday marketing initiatives.
- Keep your marketing campaign focussed on a few holiday-themed products or promotions. Trying to do multiple things at once might cause confusion and not yield the desired results. So, focus on holiday-themed products, holiday gifts, or holiday-specific promotions to get the best results.
- Even if you are not planning to launch holiday-themed products, you can still promote some products as Christmas gifts.
- Run holiday-themed contests promotions or giveaways to drive sales. Also, remember to add calls-to-action to drive conversions.
Elika Dizechi, Marketing Technologist at Campaign Creators
There’s no better time to spread holiday cheer and increase your engagement than at the end of Q4! Customers are hungry for deals and promotions and with the right tactics you can successfully trade in a good deal for some good ol’ brand loyalty. Some ways we encourage our clients to delight their customers are with witty promotional offers through SMS.
With more than half of all internet traffic coming from a mobile device, SMS is a really valuable channel to utilize, since customers tend to be very busy and on the go during the holiday season. Outside of discount codes, we recommend hosting giveaways and sweepstakes! This way you are giving your customers a creative way to share stories about your business.
Ask them to submit how they like to use your product/service during the holidays in return for a bundled gift! This will not only weed out uninterested leads but motivate everyday users to give you quality information on how they interact with and love your business.
Team DevriX
This article is crafted by DevriX's seasoned marketing team, boasting over four decades of collective expertise in crafting sophisticated marketing funnels, devising comprehensive content frameworks and pillars, implementing engaging email campaigns, and creating impactful social media content designed for scalability.
Our marketing experts specialize in the complete spectrum of inbound marketing strategies. As an accredited HubSpot Agency Partner and a Semrush Partner, we engage in meticulous research, blending our extensive experience with the unique insights of our highly skilled team.
We set benchmarks in content creation by incorporating cutting-edge marketing trends, leveraging in-depth industry research, and utilizing state-of-the-art AI tools for data segmentation and captivating content hooks. Our proficiency extends across a diverse range of sectors, including working with SMEs, Fortune 1000 companies, global B2B brands, major publishing entities, WooCommerce platforms, business directories, and affiliate networks.
