7 Tips on Rocking Holiday Content Marketing
The holiday season is approaching and so are your chances for a fresh marketing idea. People love holiday shopping, but they are also very demanding and challenging when they do their picks. With that in mind, your task as a content marketer is to create a rocking strategy, one that reduces the holiday stressors and make people fall in love in your offers.
‘’Take a step back to smell the pine that comes with the holiday season, but only for a minute. Once you are done, it is time to do the hard work. Tie up the loose ends, prepare for the New Year, and manage your holiday campaigns. To achieve it, work on your content strategy.’’ – says Rebecca Eagle, a content expert at EssayOnTime.
So, if you were focusing all of your content efforts on a single event or made them general in order to use the same throughout the year, take a step back to look at the bigger picture. Holidays are a critical window of opportunities for online businesses. The consumers’ shopping habits are significantly increased and active at this period, especially after the Internet opened up the chances of being able to shop from the commodity of one’s home. Frequent holiday weekend purchases of one-third of shippers were found to be driven by promotions. With that in mind, your content strategy is now the fiercest tool you have to attract customers, and the holiday season is your top period to boost sales.
To help you with this, we came up with seven amazing content marketing ideas that will help you rock this holiday season and make more sales than ever.
#1. Tell a Story
Your holiday marketing is the same as any other strategy but emphasized. It’s not something you plan for and execute for months. Instead, it is condensed in this tight timeframe and the preparations are extremely short. All your resources move to a single goal and that is to attract the customer’s attention.
Most businesses will have the same idea and task in hand. So, you are expecting a variety of strategies and approaches, and many of them in the same industry you are in. That’s why you need something extremely effective, a strategy known to retain the affection of customers.
Thanks to the holiday spirit, there is something that is guaranteed to tug at your consumer’s heart stings – a holiday story. Holidays are all about emotional expenditure and people want everything that is related to it.
Just think of Coca-Cola – who doesn’t love their stories? Every year, for the holidays, this giant of a business makes a heartwarming story and sends it out to the world as a commercial. We can all agree that this is a great success and goes viral within hours after it is published, not days.
Now it is your turn to touch the heart of your customers with the help of the holiday spirit. If you get the right story out there, your business will reap the kinds of sales you always aimed to get. It only takes one story to go viral, and you’ll be facing huge brand recognition and an increase in sales.
Of course, it all depends on how engaging your content is. This demands creativity and writing skills, and content that connects to the audience through the common holiday spirit.
Once you have the story ready to go viral, you can make use of social media to promote it. Thanks to the wonders done in the technology industry; you can now use social media to get your story out there fast and as widespread as possible. People use platforms like Instagram as their discovery tools, so getting your story out there is eventually going to convert the views to sales.
#2. Run Contests
Contests are all over the Web, especially during holiday seasons. With the right content and design, you can make a contest that is highly effective. All it takes for you is to lean into the holiday spirit, work your ways to drawing the audience in, and let the contest do its magic.
Contests are known to incentivize people to engage. Any reward will do – you don’t have to make grand awards that put you at a risk of losses, but it sure has to be something enticing. You can use it on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, which will let you reach a wide audience that has shown interest in the products and services you are offering. With the help of AI, your contest will get to the people that will be genuinely interested in your offers.
Work on the award as an incentive, but also the content that convinces people to engage. A contest boosts the adrenaline and makes people want to join the holiday hype, so why not test this strategy for the holiday season?
#3. Opt for a Sense of Urgency
People are stressed over the holidays, but they are also enthusiastic. With the finite amount of time both you and your customers have, a sense of urgency is the perfect approach. People will expect and appreciate it. They will buy their Christmas presents and finish with the holiday shopping, and you’ll get your new customer and increase the number of sales. It is a win-win! By the way, there are many more occasions to leverage content marketing going beyond well-known holidays.
Be aggressive about turning interested visitors and readers into sales. If you don’t create a sense of urgency, they are probably going to purchase the same product from one of your competitors. Then, no matter how great your content strategy was, you probably won’t get many new customers during the holiday season.
Thankfully, there are great ways to make a sales pitch during the holidays. People are much more receptive to sales pitches during this period due to the lack of time. They literally expect companies to promote their products and services because active shopping is exhausting and overwhelming, and they really want to get the products they need as soon as possible.
So, you are in luck. You can use discounts and limited sales offer that last until a certain point in the holiday season. With the right content that pushes people to want to buy from you and the added push of having limited time to do this, consumers will jump right into and buy your products before they even have the time to think or look around.
#4. Feature the Best Blog Posts of the Year
If your content has been consistently good, you’ll have plenty to choose from. To give your customers a recap of the great content you published, highlighting and featuring the top blog posts is an excellent idea. On the plus side, this also boosts the readership to the most popular posts.
Many marketers use this trick during holiday seasons, so you might want to think of a unique way to make your repurposing stand out from the crowd. Add a summary to the most popular posts you’ve decided to feature, link them to new articles with about the holiday spirit, and add interesting comments from your readers to the equation.
Look into the reports you already have, especially the ones from the previous holiday seasons. Are there any popular posts from that period? If you have a good number of popular blog posts during holiday seasons, you can repurpose and refresh these without the extra effort you have to put into the other posts from other periods of the year.
You can apply this approach to virtually anything. If an e-mail had a high click-through rate last year, that’s the email you can tweak and use this year, too. Improving it will yield even better results, and it will cut down your work hours at the same time.
Then, look for holiday coupons and codes you previously used. Which ones were used the most? Use the available information and statistics to pinpoint the best campaigns and improve them to boost your sales. You can gather this data from sales reports, Google Analytics, social media, etc. Remember that most Internet retailers look for new approaches to attract attention before holiday seasons, so you’d better think outside the box.
#5. Connect the Content with Holiday Symbols and Themes
This applies to the old posts and the new posts. Whatever you are publishing near and during the holiday season, connect it to a good holiday theme. One fine idea is to connect it to the most popular happenings that the audience is most likely to hear about. For example, LinkedIn Marketing Solution created the ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Story’, which highlighted the most popular songs of top industry influencers for that holiday season.
When it comes to this tip, it is all about your creativity. Think about what makes your audience tick this year and try to include it in your holiday story or the repurposing of the old content. In other words, use this trick in combination with any other we’ve introduced in this article. The more holiday-spirited your strategy is, the higher are the odds of it attracting an audience and reaching more people. Holidays provide you with a perfect opportunity to turn your employees into brand ambassadors and leverage their influence in sharing the holiday spirit with your existing and potential customers.
#6. Provide Tips and Insights for the Upcoming Year
During the holiday periods, people love to make plans for their upcoming year. They measure their accomplishments and successes, check their to-do list for that year, and work on a new list for the year that follows. People are ambitious, which means that most of them will want to think of professional and personal goals to work on in the coming year. Maybe they will and maybe they won’t, but this still makes it a great tool for your holiday strategy.
Help people with their resolutions by providing insights and tips through content. Create your fair share of quality content that includes helpful insights and tips that aid people in keeping their resolutions. You can also reach out to some popular influencers and ask for help and contribution. Such advice should inspire and reach a wider audience, therefore connecting your business with value. It is a grand step toward building your business upward.
#7. Use Friendly Characters
Do you have some friendly characters in mind? A nice character such as the reindeer Rudolph LinkedIn used, or Santa and the polar bears used by Coca-Cola are a great example of how well this can work. Think of it as your little fictional helper – one that will assist you through the holiday seasons.
When you come up with your friendly holiday character, make their story. The polar bears behind the Coca-Cola stories were inspired by a dog that, according to his owner, looked like a polar bear. Inspiration can come from anywhere, so don’t be afraid to explore your creativity.
Choose carefully and work your way toward developing your brand’s holiday character. This character should emphasize the holiday campaign and reinforce your brand, but if it succeeds, it will probably be its signature for years to come. So, take your time and choose wisely. People love friendly characters, especially during the happy holiday season.
The Bottom Line
Thinking that you can use the same strategy as always and go through the holiday season is wrong. This will work, but because of the grand competition, you’ll hardly make use of the shopping craze that happens in this period. If you want to boost sales and make the most out of this year’s holidays, you better start working on your holiday strategy before it is too late.
Serena Dorf
Latest posts by Serena Dorf (see all)
- 7 Tips on Rocking Holiday Content Marketing - December 7, 2018
Holiday season is best of all to get our business to next level as we can acquire more potential audiences with productive ideas. I am obliged for these effective points, it will help to boost holiday campaigns and get profitable output of it.