Here’s How to Get Your Digital Marketing Holiday Ready

Holiday season is upon us, and in digital marketing circles, it’s seen as the busiest and most competitive time of the year for marketers.  Now is the time to make sure all your planning and implementation strategies for holiday marketing are in sync and locked down.  

Here are some of the ways to make sure you’re fully prepared for the 2018 holiday marketing season.   

Are You Using the 45-Day Rule Strategy?

If you’ve got content marketing as a key driver, then you need to know about the 45-day rule. Essentially, this rule states that an online business must look ahead and intentionally plan its web and social content 45 days ahead of important activities and promotions to drive user activity and search traffic. If you get your content posted later, it can hurt your overall search traffic. Adding your content two weeks before a significant event might result in only 25 to 50 percent of the traffic needed on your site. Think more long-term to 45 days, and you might achieve up to 90 percent of your intended traffic.  

Determine the Right Channels for Your Focus  

Choosing the right marketing channels for your product or service is something you’ve likely been thinking about for a while – make sure that you have determined the right course of action by reviewing and analyzing past performance and incorporating into your overall strategy. It starts with your product, its uses, its benefits, and how it impacts your target audience. Are you selling to consumers or businesses? How do you reach this target audience? On which channels are they receptive to your product?  

Create a Detailed Schedule of Campaign Activities

By now, your marketing team will have put together the range of your planned activities, including the timeline/schedule of promotions, in-store rollouts, online advertising campaigns, and other activities. This schedule must be detailed and exact. Your public relations team must be in sync with your product team, your customer success team, and other entities in the organization.

Developing Holiday-Specific Landing Pages

Your web development team should be offering frames for landing pages by early November. It should have already noted which year-round landing pages achieve high ROI so you can use that information as a jumping off point for your holiday landing pages. Some tips include:

●      Make sure your landing pages are optimized for mobile.

●      Make sure your page loading speed is high.

●      Use graphics to tell your story; make them high impact.

●      Use a strong, clear CTA; offer a premium to gain more attention.

●      Measure the journey of page visitors and follow up with retargeting efforts.  

Start to Build a Larger Retargeting Pool for November/December

The holiday season brings marketers a great opportunity to broaden reach and audience targets with retargeting. Your brand might be targeting a certain audience most of the year, but now you can retarget to others with a gift option. For instance, if you market golf clubs to mostly dedicated golfers for most of the year, you might be able to expand that with retargeted ad efforts to a broader audience that may include non-golfers who are comparison shopping for the golfer in their life.

Even though your company is putting its efforts into holiday season selling, remember that customers will look to your product or service during the following year too. So make that important first impression count.

Don’t be afraid to increase your frequency of emails or social posts about special holiday sales during these weeks. By now, most customers are more engaged with your promotions and might actually be looking for your promotions.  

Lastly, track your results, define your success measurements, and keep a log of how your efforts are working for this year in order to replicate the same for next year or switch the offerings.