I realize it’s still August and a long way from Black Friday, Cyber Week and the gift-giving season, but it’s definitely time to start thinking about the holidays (much like Costco already is), and how to be the hero and start driving traffic to your site.
Even though this is typically a time of year with lower conversions, it’s also a good time to drive more traffic that has a better chance of converting later in the year.
Here are some holiday ad strategy ideas to think about to have a better, more organized plan for your holiday sales.
Think about your sales goals.
Obviously, everyone is trying to sell as much as possible this holiday season, and with ecommerce making up $211.7 Billion over the 2022 Holiday Season, you definitely want a piece of that pie.
So, what are your goals? Are you going to try to sell your whole catalog? or just a part of it? Do you have enough product in stock? Or do you need to order more?
What were your sales last holiday season and do you think you can sell more or less based on your YTD and year over year sales? How much you think you can sell may depend on previous performance and how you plan to market yourself this year.
How do you plan on getting your product or service to the right people who can really benefit from it?
We don’t see BFCM as some sort of major land grab, we see it really as trying to find the right people for your product. Who needs what you have and how can you best help them?
How are you going to drive traffic?
Consumers spent $211.7 billion online over the 2022 holiday season (from November 1 to December 31), growing 3.5% year over year, per Adobe Analytics. Insider Intelligence
How are you going to drive traffic?
There are 5 main avenues that we see drive the most traffic and revenue for most brands. They make up by far the bulk of traffic to any website. They are organic SEO, organic social, paid ads, email marketing & SMS marketing. We recommend having a solid plan for each. This is where we can help.
Organic SEO. This is one of the best, strongest, longest-lasting marketing efforts you can do. Whether you’ve started your own SEO or not, it’s always a good time to do more research and add more content to your site for SEO.
Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs have free versions you can use to find more keywords and phrases to add to your site. The first few pages to optimize, would be your home page, your product pages, your category pages, blog pages that talk about your products/services and then look for opportunities for new content pages to write and optimize.
Organic Social. Anything you post organically on social media can also be very strong and have a more immediate response. This is where you can easily promote your product/service and encourage some action. However, this is not the time to only hard sell.
This is a place where you can build more community, relate to people, tell some stories and encourage people to comment and open up. If all you ever post is selling your products, then you won’t build a following and this won’t really work.
But, you do want to show how you can empathize with what people are dealing with and how you can help them. Back to the piece about your audience from #1 above.
Where is your best audience? Are they on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, SnapChat, etc? And, do you have the interest, desire, skills to post organically to these sites? What’s your bandwidth for posting look like? If you don’t have the bandwidth or resources to post everywhere, then pick your top 2 or 3 for which you do have time and resources and make them really good.
Use some scheduling software that will allow you to create several posts at once and schedule them out.
Paid Ads. This can also be one of the most direct, revenue-generating mediums available. But, over the last few years, this has become more complicated and challenging to get right. We specialize in Facebook ads, Google Ads and Pinterest Ads (in addition to other platforms) and have been working in these platforms, providing value to our clients for more than 15 years.
Whichever platform you’re interested in, make sure that your audience is in that platform too – Similar to Organic Social above. You don’t necessarily need to be in every social channel, just the ones in which your best customer exists.
Whether you have ad campaigns running right now and need and highly detailed audit with recommendations, or looking for someone to completely take over and manage your ad campaigns, we’ve got you covered.
Email Marketing. This is also one of the best ways to get traffic and conversions. Paired with sale messaging, stories, testimonials and good content to a good list, you can see a significant bump in sales.
Make sure you don’t sell all the time in every email though. The goal is to provide quality content that will encourage, educate and inform. then some sales mixed in. If all you do is sell every time, people will unsubscribe. (check out our article on adding UTMs to emails)
Also, think about your frequency of emails compared to the frequency of how often you want people to purchase. If people buy your product once/month, then more emails might make sense. But if your product is one that people buy only once or once/year or longer, then your strategy should be more informative on how people can use it, and maybe promote some accessories or additional services or free stuff.
Anything to add value and keep them subscribed until the next time they purchase.
SMS Marketing. It’s time to start cross-promoting your SMS list to get more signups across all your marketing channels. Create dedicated landing pages to encourage sign ups for text with specials and incentives to get them to sign up. Using 2 tap signups in social media like instagram stories, can definitely improve sign ups.
Start planning now, to be increasing message frequency long before BFCM. Get your triggered message in place to welcome new subscribers, session, browse and cart abandon messages, post purchase messages for reviews, recommendations or loyalty programs, etc.
We have a broad and deep understanding of online marketing and can help answer any/all of your questions. We’re not all hype, but we are definitely results-oriented and keep your goals in mind. We’ll tell you everything we know, so you’re informed and we can make the best decisions together.
We’d love to help with anything you need to help you get your holiday ad strategy ready for the holiday season. Please contact us to for a no obligation initial meeting.
