5 Tips to Craft Engaging Marketing Strategies This Holiday Season

The holiday season has just kicked in, and everyone’s gearing up to look their best. With the advent of cooler weather, hot cinnamon lattes, and excitement all around, it is the perfect time for marketers to delight their target audience with visual treats.

A study shows that around 78% of marketers saw an increase in engagement during the holiday season. To fuel your holiday marketing campaigns, it is essential to strategize and devise plans well in advance. But before you start your quest to achieve marketing efficiency this holiday season, let’s quickly understand all there is to holiday marketing.

Why is Holiday Marketing Important?

Holiday marketing can be defined as the process of curating marketing strategies and undertaking aggressive promotion across multiple social channels. It is done to garner the attention of the audience and strike a chord with them which persuades them to make that final purchase and help you generate profits.

Many B2B organizations hibernate during the holiday season and shelve their marketing activities until the holiday fervor ends. However, this is the ideal time when marketers can unleash creative ideas and offer something unique to the audience by launching effective holiday campaigns that convert.

Holiday marketing is the perfect way to offer valuable offers to users while capitalizing on the ROI. A recent report projects that sales during the holiday season will go up by 25-35% between 2020-21. It is, thus, the perfect time for marketers to attract new customers and keep the existing ones hooked.

How to Align Brand Tone With Marketing Initiatives?

Here are 5 key steps to follow that will help you spice your holiday marketing campaigns and keep them perfectly aligned with your brand voice.

• Curate a plan of action: A plan for holiday marketing should be prepared well in advance before the season starts. It helps brands identify the most profitable opportunities and use them to gain maximum advantage.
• Select the right marketing channel: Amidst the holiday season, the chances of increased engagement via social channels rise considerably. Therefore, it is essential to project which channels will reap the maximum reach. For instance, email marketing is a great way to attract customer attention and market effectively.
• Adopt a proactive approach: It is important to address the queries and issues of the customer promptly, especially during the holiday season. Ensure that your marketing team responds to them diligently for increased engagement.
• Use a content-driven holiday marketing strategy: A content-driven approach enables brands to innovate and deliver a more personalized experience to users. With content marketing, marketers can offer shopping guides, brochures, and much more eye-catching content to customers.
• Identify the right time to hit launch: A major benefit of planning early for the holiday season is that the marketers can study the shopping behavior of consumers and identify the right time to roll out holiday campaigns.

Although the penultimate objective of launching a marketing campaign during the holiday season is to earn profits, the human intent should always be kept in mind. The connections built amidst the holiday season help bring repeat business off-season as well.

5 Tips For Effective Holiday Marketing

Holiday marketing is all about establishing long-term relationships with your target audience. Let’s take a look at the most effective marketing strategies that lead to better customer engagement and increased profitability.

1. Study your target shopper closely: Statistics show that in the year 2019, around 40% of holiday shoppers aged 65 years and above used at least one social channel to make purchases. It is essential for marketers to closely monitor the sections of the audience interested in their products and services. Gone are the days when targeting millennials alone would reap profits. Brands should invest time in creating strategies that feed the interest of the customers irrespective of their age, gender, and location.

2. Leverage the small events: There are plenty of opportunities for brands to align their offerings with the holiday season. While celebrations like Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most focused events, marketers should not ignore the small events such as Cyber Monday, Black Friday, etc. This would make your holiday marketing strategy consistent.

3. Customize content and design: Holiday imagery is an aspect that customers gravitate towards automatically amidst the seasonal celebrations. Marketers can customize content and use visuals to make existing content look more appealing.

4. Personalize promotions: Marketers can use data collected in the past to quote the expectations of their customers in the holiday season to come. Curating offers as per the customer’s needs will make them feel more privileged and bring you repeat sales. To make the most of this opportunity, keep the messaging short and crisp, so it is easier for the customer to skim through the content and make a purchase.

5. Nurture customers post the holiday season: Hitting snooze once the holiday season ends might cause you to lose an opportunity to generate additional business. Don’t forget to nurture your customers post the holiday season as well. Keep sending them information about ongoing offers, product updates, etc.

Holidays are the best time to develop an emotional bond with the target audience and maximize profitability. Through unique marketing campaigns backed by solid strategies and offers that convey gratitude, you can assure your customers that you care for them which, in turn, and in the long run, help you gain a competitive advantage and build stronger customer relationships.

May the force of holiday marketing be with you this season. Happy holidays!

Want to add the perfect hint of marketing cheer to this holiday season? Let’s talk!