The holidays are by far the time when the most sales are made as consumers shop for Christmas-related gifts and products. It’s a time of year that you should be prepared for if you want your brand to benefit from this busy season. To completely take advantage of the holiday period, it’s important that your content marketing is geared up and ready to launch when your ideal customers will be online and searching for your products or services.
Here are some useful tips to help you get this right.
Tip #1: Get started ASAP
The festive period is when you will have to compete against other brands the most for consumers’ attention as you can expect your competitors to amp up their content marketing to make the most of this time. The best way to stay ahead of the game and to make your holiday content marketing a success is to prepare well in advance.
You should start researching, developing, and scheduling or automating your holiday content marketing several months before it is intended to go live. In this way, you can avoid a last-minute frenzy to disseminate content for the holidays.
Tip #2: Anticipate the trends
It’s a good idea to look at the trends you have seen throughout the year and determine how your content has been performing up until this point. What can you do to improve your content marketing and optimise it for the holidays? You can anticipate that there will be high volumes of traffic generated by your content during this busy time of year, are you fully prepared to deal with the influx of attention you’ll be getting? Do you need to freshen up your content or provide new promotions and discounts?
Consumers are always on the lookout for the best deals. Anything you can do to reduce the price of your products or services will go a long way towards increasing sales. Ensure that your content is in-line with any discounts and that any perks you are offering are communicated through what you are publishing.
Tip #3: Ask your audience
The content you produce should always be on par with what your audience wants. If there is no interest in the content you are publishing, it becomes a pointless exercise. The best way to create holiday content that will be well-received is to understand what your audience wants and needs. Do they need information on your brand? Do they want access to promotions?
One way you can find out what it is that your audience wants is by reviewing your previous analytics. Go over your past content and see what has performed well in prior holiday seasons. You will want to look for content with a high engagement and conversion rate. Use this information to optimise your existing content for the holiday season or to create new content to echo content that has performed well in the past.
You can also gain more information about your audience by sending them surveys via emails or posting polls on your social media channels. This gives you access to your ideal customer’s exact needs. For this to be effective, though, you must get a significant number of responses. Your data will not be reliable if you’ve only received a handful of responses.
Tip #4: Create a calendar
Now that you’ve done your research and you’re ready to develop some powerful holiday content, it is a good time to put together a realistic timeline based on how much content you need and how often you are going to publish it. For example, if you need at least one piece of content per week of the festive season, you will need to develop your content well in advance so that you have enough time to review, revise, and schedule.
To maximise conversions over the festive season, your calendar will need to include when you will be writing blog posts, your deadline for your email copy, and when you need to have visuals finalised. This is the most effective way to pull off an impactful holiday content marketing strategy.
Tip #5: Outsource your content marketing
There is a lot of pressure to research, plan, and produce effective holiday content. It may not be a task you can handle entirely on your own, depending on the scale of content you will need to make your holiday marketing a success.
Something that could especially help you in this situation would be to hire a virtual marketing manager. Usually, virtual marketing managers are highly skilled marketing professionals who can provide you with expertise at a significantly lower rate than hiring an in-house marketing employee.
To help you create the volume of content you need for the holidays, an extra set of hands can really help, but there’s no need to hire a new staff member to assist you. A virtual marketing manager can strategise, develop, and even publish or automate your holiday content marketing for you.
Creating high-quality content is essential to making your holiday marketing successful. Without it, you can expect to see lower results in Christmas sales. It’s time to start planning and preparing for the upcoming holidays by getting feedback from your audience, setting up a calendar, and even hiring virtual help to get everything done.