It’s that time of the year again when we start to pull out our favorite heavy-duty coats, sprinkle our homes with the most festive decors, and shop for gifts (and yes, shop for thousands of holiday gifts that is!) With just a week away from Thanksgiving and one of the biggest shopping frenzy that we dive into annually, it’s only right that we share the effective digital marketing strategy for this holiday season so you can implement them in your marketing efforts whether you have an e-commerce, brick & mortar, or both. But before we do so, despite of us sharing this list in the month of November, we do hope that you have already assembled your holiday marketing strategies back in August and executed them by September. With the continuous rise of e-commerce, we highly recommend that you start as early as July to brainstorm strategies, finalize them by August, and begin the execution right after. Why? Because the competition is as aggressive as ever! Ask yourself, does the Black Friday sale still occur after Thanksgiving anymore? The answer is a solid NO. Sales and sales and lots of sales are popping up as early as 7 days before Thanksgiving, capturing the eager shoppers’ attentions before we even get down to take our first bite from our Thanksgiving plate.
But enough of the breakdown, we know that as a SMB and/or entrepreneur, you’re eager to know what we have to share from our digital marketing strategy vault. Let’s start with Instagram shop and influencer marketing. If you haven’t set up your Instagram shop and integrated it to your e-commerce yet, don’t wait any longer. Millions of people are now shopping directly from Instagram and with the huge help of lifestyle ads (usually a partnership between the brand and creative influencers), capturing and growing your customer base just from one platform alone is highly possible. Here’s the reason why: customers are enticed to try out new brands when their favorite lifestyle influencer is promoting it. If you have a loyal customer base, perfect - you’ve got their business. If you’re partnered with an influencer and they have their own loyal following, then even more brilliant! Put yours and theirs together, you’ve now cross-marketed and for each end, you both gain new customers and new following. Anyway, circling back to Instagram shop, let’s take it up a notch and top it off with paid social campaigns. Paid social campaigns exists so it can deliver your brand’s presence right under your target audience’s nose. These platforms allows you to create campaigns and find more of your lookalike audience and help you discover new groups of consumers who would be interested in what your business have to offer. All of this are achieved because the social channels that consumers love to use are able to collect information on the demographics such as age, job title, income level, education, location, and behavior.
Our holiday marketing strategy doesn’t just revolve around social media and affiliate marketing. E-commerce must also be ready meaning the landing page should be updated, your sales and promotions are visible to the shoppers, and your e-commerce marketing and development team should have their armors on and be ready at any given time just in case there are any technical malfunction and such. Let’s also not forget your loyal email subscribers. Sending a warm greeting through all of your digital platforms during the holiday season is one way to let your customers know that they are a part of your “thankful for” list. But here’s a golden rule of thumb, rewarding someone’s loyalty is very important. Show your loyal existing customers that they are special by sending them a VIP-only email campaign. A private sale or additional discount would definitely do the trick!