While the holidays are unquestionably a time of merriment and cheer, we all have certain pet peeves that come up specifically during the holiday season – the inevitable discount offer mail blasts, having to buy seasonal lights every Christmas, the great annual home cleaning affair, and of course – holiday small talk. While most of these occurrences are sadly unavoidable in our personal lives, there’s some that are just as glaring, but luckily are totally manageable at the work front.
The holiday season is a busy time, and for all the right reasons – for businesses and their customers alike. Many brands anticipate and plan for this time through the year, but not everyone manages to shine through.
Whether it’s a hastily planned Paid Ad campaign or not improving on the checkout experience, we’ve made your job easier by listing a few commonly made holiday marketing blunders which you can steer clear from to make your mark this season.
Happy marketing!
Table of Contents
1. Don’t just Sell, Give –
– To put it in the simplest of terms – don’t be the Holiday Grinch. Freebies go a long way when it comes to creating a positive, long-lasting impact on your audiences. Tis’ the season for giving after all, so don’t make this time just about forced sales and mechanical pitches.
A free of cost item, or resource would also go a long way in generating leads. You don’t always need to measure your marketing campaign’s effectiveness in terms of discount percentages, a shift of perspective, and investing in shareable, useful content brings in a great deal of customer satisfaction in the long run.
Generating options like personalized coupon codes, helpful look-books and user-friendly tutorials, or even a practical info-graphic will be far more beneficial in setting your brand’s goodwill apart and above from the rest who aren’t doing so.
2. If you don’t pre-plan, you’ll miss the boat –
Well prepared collectives start planning their seasonal marketing and sales strategies starting in the months of July-September. This not only provides more time to test the waters before going ahead with an idea and it’s execution, but also leaves more scope to evaluate the results of the plan afterwards.
While the holidays are undoubtedly a time of joy, they can also be a frustrating period when it comes to devising an effective marketing plan that truly leaves behind an impact. Since we’re all figuratively drowning in advertising, discounts offers and voucher deals – it’s crucial for brands to note that the audience isn’t going to be as patient or forgiving during this time.
To get things in order, it’s essential to do some research on your audience’s behavioral and buying patterns, and only then move forward with introducing your advertising prospects to them.
3. Don’t miss out on leveraging the ‘Social’ in Social Media –
Don’t make the mistake of taking this time as just “business as usual”. If your business has stuck to it’s comfort zone of a minimal social media presence so far, now’s the time to make the big leap.
A recent report by Salesforce on holiday marketing predictions stated that –
“Social media will be the most important emerging platform for engaging with consumers.”
– A more in-depth look into the report suggested the following :
> Up to 30% of global retail sales were made through
digital channels in the last holiday season.
> 10% of mobile orders will take place on social media channels.
> As much as 15% of mobile orders will take place during peak shopping days, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
4. Be Original –
Taking in case the theory of Brand Archetypes given by renowned psychologist Carl Jung – every brand identifies with certain values and principles which reflect in everything a brand does, and goes a long way in deciding how the audiences resonate with its identity. No brand can be everything to everyone, so it’s essential to decode what are the traits your brand associates or wishes to associate itself with, and try to mold your campaigns along the same lines.
The archetypes taken into practice by Jung segregated each brand by its core value, going by which – collectives like Disney, Apple would be considered to be a Magician archetype – which is a brand that considers innovation and creating something new and impactful as it’s foremost identifying motive. On the other hand, brands like IKEA, and e-bay would fall into the Everyman archetype – brands which are recognized for seeking connections and providing assistance, support.
5. Evaluate your performance –
There really is no excuse for not tracking how your campaign is performing. After all, what’s the point of planning, investing and dedicating umpteen amounts of human time and effort into a marketing plan when you’re not even measuring it’s results?
There are a number of metrics that can come to your aid when you sit down to evaluate how your content, ads, e-mail marketing and other tactics are going down with your target audience. For content, A/B testing comes in handy when you’re trying to see which lines get the most open and click-through rates. Similarly – to measure your reach, impressions and engagement, there are readily available automated mechanisms which can be fairly advantageous to assess how your marketing campaign is performing.
If you haven’t yet invested in these monitoring systems, you’re falling behind.
