As we enter the holiday season, marketers will have to adjust their inbound strategies to drive audience engagement and ultimately sales. Since there are so many elements of inbound marketing, we’ve created tips for each to help you build an effective and comprehensive holiday marketing strategy for your business.
Content Marketing
Content creation and distribution remains a vital element of inbound marketing during the holiday season as a way of keeping your products and services in the minds of your customers. Check out our tips to maximize yours:
- Make it easily digestible. No one wants to read a long block of text when they could be listening to holiday tunes instead. Create highly visual content like videos or infographics to capture your audience’s shortened attention spans.
- Make it holiday-themed. Get in the spirit and add some holiday flavor to the content you distribute in the forms of copy tweaks and fun images.
- Create blog posts for publishing during the last weeks of December. Since businesses all but shut down during the second half of December, many marketers forgo publishing content, thinking it will go unseen—but this is a missed opportunity. Loads of people still hang out online during the holidays, so create a few extra blog posts now to distribute during that time.
SEO (for ecommerce sites especially)
Ecommerce sites especially need to optimize their SEO to drive sales during the holiday season. Customers doing product searches during the holidays generally use more holiday-specific keywords in their queries, and that’s what your business needs to target to get found. Our SEO tips for the holiday season include:
- Target holiday-related keywords in your content. Post content on your website that centers around holiday-related keywords your customers are searching for.
- Optimize for local search. The rise of mobile search and shopping has made targeting local keywords more critical than ever for businesses. Check out this article for everything you need to know about local SEO.
Lead Nurturing via Email Marketing
The holidays are a busy time and you’ll have to get extra creative to convince recipients to open your emails. We recommend the following tips:
- Send holiday-related discounts and coupons. Nothing is more appealing to a consumer during the shopping season than a product or service discount.
- Keep it short and sweet. People have less time to check their inboxes let alone read their emails during the holidays, so keep your content to the point.
- Don’t forget about the weekends. A report showed that during Q4 of 2013, emails sent on Saturdays and Sundays boasted some of the highest open and clickthrough rates.
Social Media
Though your customers may not be checking their inboxes as often during the holiday season, you can be sure they’re still active on social media. Use your social media accounts to post creative holiday-related content that engages your audience. We provide tips for some top social networks below:
- Pinterest: Create a visual pinboard list of the best holiday gifts for the season
- Instagram: Share a photo of your company engaging in holiday-related fun.
- LinkedIn: Share a story about the charitable acts your business made to give back this holiday season.
We hope these inbound marketing tips help you drive sales this holiday season. Happy holidays!
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