Get Your Online Business Ready For The Holidays In 6 Steps
Now that Halloween has passed, the holidays will be here before you know it, and there’s no better time than now to create your digital marketing campaigns. You have the perfect opportunity to capitalize on the increased traffic and consumers that are ready and willing to click that buy-it-now button. These 6 steps will ensure that your online business is ready for the up and coming holiday season.
- Analyze Last Year’s Holiday Season Data
This sounds like a no brainer, but you’d be surprised at how many businesses completely ignore this gold mind of data that’s available. Finding where the majority of your lead conversions came from last year is vital. Was it PPC, email marketing, social media, organic? You want to identify the best channels and build campaigns around them this holiday season.
- Create Holiday Specific Landing Pages
Split testing landing pages is always a good idea, so build out a few now instead of waiting until the last minute to create new ones to test. This way you have a large group to pull data from when you start your holiday marketing.
The sooner you can identify the highest converting landing pages, the sooner you can push most of your traffic to those pages. Make sure you identify the best performers before the peak of the holiday season.
- Set Up Your Email Marketing Campaigns
Consumers are in buying mode around the holidays, so taking a slightly more aggressive approach with email marketing will work in your favor. If you typically send an email offer to consumers once every 10 days, you will want to send them more frequently now. You don’t want to lose potential customers because your competitor reached them sooner.
Take the time to plan out all of your auto responders ahead of time. Think of the best ways you can convert your email traffic. Waiting until the last minute to throw something together is a recipe for disaster.
- Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
You’ve probably heard it a million times before- every business needs a mobile friendly website. Running your website through Google’s mobile friendly test is a good place to start, but you also need real users to test it and give you feedback. You can plug your URL into Google’s Test Site and see if there are issues.
Ask friends, family, coworkers and even strangers to navigate through your site, access your offers, and submit any forms. Tell them to give you honest feedback. If something isn’t right, you need to know. Since many users are in the buying mindset over the holidays, you need to make sure there’s no possibility of them getting frustrated or annoyed while on your website.
- Mapping Out Your Holiday Content Marketing
Start working on your holiday content as soon as you can. It’s never too early to start. By doing so you can have all of your blog posts scheduled ahead of time. Also consider increasing the frequency in which you post during the holiday season. Often times you will want to create content around holiday specific keywords. The person handling your SEO would be able to assist with this.
- Schedule Your Holiday Social-Media Posts
Automated social media tools are a time saver when it comes to posting to all of your accounts. Not that you will automate all social media, but it sure is nice to know that you have posts scheduled that can spark interest and drive website traffic
During the peak of the season people will be searching for deals, so don’t be afraid to throw offers out there. Holiday specific images, hashtags and keywords will be key in helping attract customers that are ready to purchase.
The holiday season is the perfect time to drive revenue for your business. What is your marketing strategy? For brainstorming ideas, contact the RAWR marketing experts.