Christmas is less than a month away and Black Friday and Cyber Monday have already whizzed past us, but there’s no need to panic. If you haven’t started doing any holiday-related marketing, there’s still time because online shopping continues to happen right up until Christmas and then spikes again immediately afterwards. So, there’s still time to get going and bring in those seasonal sales. Here are 6 holiday marketing ideas that you can get up and running in no time at all:
Paid Search Advertising
PPC is a cost-effective way to get your products/services in front of interested buyers quickly. With the right keywords, you can target your ads specifically to people who are ready to buy exactly what you sell.
Resources: PPC Holiday Keywords, Keywords for Beginners
Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns can be really lucrative, and luckily for you, they can also be launched rapidly if you already have an email subscriber list. If you don’t have many people who have signed up to receive your emails, you’ll have to add this one to your long-term to-do list and revisit it next year.
Using an email marketing software is helpful when it comes to creating and saving email templates so that you can keep brand consistency between all the emails that you send out. This kind of platform can also provide you with rich data to help you refine your email marketing efforts after the holidays are over.
Resources: Contact us for a recommendation on which email providers we recommend.
Remarketing Ads
Remarketing ads are a special kind of PPC ads that follow users around as they visit other sites after viewing yours, resulting in increased brand awareness. Remarketing ads (aka “retargeting ads”) make your business look like a prominent industry leader and help boost site traffic. Customized remarketing ads are a valuable tool for increasing conversions and can be accomplished with special coding.
Resources: Remarketing for Beginners
Product Listing Ads
Ecommerce sites use PLAs to get their products on Google Shopping for more exposure. If you already have a Google Merchant Center account and Google AdWords account, you’re good to go. Otherwise, you’ll need to open both types of accounts (which isn’t hard) and then create your product feed. After you set up your product feed, Google will pull your product information (names, descriptions, prices, availability, etc.) onto their shopping platform automatically. The result is that you can sit back and wait for sales to come in without doing any extra work once your feed is submitted.
Resources: Google PLAs tutorial
Mobile Advertising
Whether people are shopping from home, on the go, or in-store, they have their phones with them to do product research and complete purchases, mobile advertising has become so important. If you’re already running PPC ads, increase your mobile bid modifiers to get your ads in front of more mobile shoppers. If you’re not currently doing PPC, you can always choose to run ads solely on mobile devices, if you choose.
Resources: Mobile-First Marketing
Free Promotional Gifts for Customers
As 2016 comes to a close, you might want to consider giving away small gifts with each purchase. If you have anything laying around with your business name on it, you can use this to add a special bonus for shoppers. Otherwise, you can have some promotional items created to give away (tip: local companies tend to have pretty fast turnaround times during the holidays so that they can stay competitive with big name brands). As you ship products to customers, include an unexpected promotional item that will encourage customers to return and make subsequent purchases after the New Year.
Resources: Check your local small business directory.
Kate Pierce is the owner of LionShark Digital Marketing LLC, a West Michigan internet marketing company. Her areas of expertise include Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Business Blogging and Web Copywriting. She lives in the Grand Rapids area with her husband and son and enjoys cooking, watching sports, and spending time together as a family. Like a true digital marketing expert (i.e. geek), she loves talking about current marketing trends… so don’t say you weren’t warned!
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