‘Tis the season of giving… and your business can be the one providing people with great gift ideas. Let us face it, no matter how depressing the autumn sales season was, you can save it during the holidays. It is just a matter of sending out the right message, to the right people, at the right moment.
To be fair, although people are primed for buying before Christmas, they are also highly selective. They want to make sure that they found the best, the most special and the highest discounted offer. Most of all, they want to feel comfortable doing the purchase, not pressured by aggressive advertising.
This odd mix of contradictions makes the social media the perfect place to deploy your holiday marketing strategy. People are at ease and curious to discover great gift ideas, especially if they carry the endorsement of being also chosen by their friends.
Here are some of the most useful ideas you should apply to end your sales year with a major boost during the Christmas shopping period:
- Deck Your Copy
Christmas ads should sound festive, like a cheerful carol appealing to your prospects’ generous gene. The possibilities are endless: from rhymes to letters to Santa, your ads should sound like anything but ads.
Once people are caught in the feeling while reading them, they will have enough goodwill towards your business to click on the CTA button. So get into the Christmas spirit and start preparing copy you would love to read and take action to.
- Consider Your Prospect’s Shopping Roadmap
The last few holiday seasons should have taught you already how your prospects respond to your ads. If you keep an eye on your analytics, then you have already understood your customers’ journeys from the moment they visited your website to the place where they clicked on your ad and, finally, the manner of completing the purchase.
This roadmap will help you place the “traffic signs” in the right places. For instance, your customers may become interested in your products by looking at a high quality photo or ad on Instagram. However, they will click on a Facebook™ ad and follow through with the purchase. Knowing this, you can plan your marketing and remarketing campaign effectively.
- Listen to Your Followers
The key to a successful holiday sales campaign is to give people the kind of gifts and benefits they want. Listening to the social trends in your niche will give you an accurate idea of what your followers expect to see in your special offers section.
You may be surprised, for instance, that they may prefer free gift wrapping or an extended warranty instead of same day delivery, or that a gift card is a more appreciated bonus than a loyalty price discount.
- Be a Secret Santa
The concept of Secret Santa appeared in large companies, where co-workers leave gifts for each other without writing down their name. The trend has become more and more successful and has spread throughout the world, from corporate offices to online marketing.
How can you be a Secret Santa for your customers? Simply by telling them, once they are ready to complete a purchase, that they can get a free gift if they add more products to their cart, up to a specific amount. This is an upselling technique, in fact, but in this form it works perfectly for Christmas shopping.
- Be Creative
All the advice, tips and tricks in the world are trumped by one thing: a specific trend you notice among your followers in your niche. Maybe you have observed that your prospects respond to a specific type of message or marketing approach, which you haven’t read about in any of our articles. This does not mean that you should not try using the specific knowledge you have to your advantage.
No one can ever comprise all the marketing tactics which work all over the world, in all industries. Your own creativity is that special something which sets you apart from your competitors and makes your customers stay loyal to you.