The web experts since 1999
The web experts since 1999
Between the everyday hustle and bustle of running your business as well as finding time for your personal life, it's sometimes challenging to plan seasonal content and adequately prepare for upcoming holidays. Without thought and proper planning, you may find yourself feeling as green as the Grinch who stole Christmas.
Find out how you can guarantee your business is blessed with Christmas cheer this year by following our six tips for creating a strong holiday content strategy for your business.
Have you started to plan for this year's holidays? If not you're probably already a little late to the table. The earlier you begin to prepare for the seasonal peak, the less likely you are to be disappointed come Chrismas day.
Most people avoid planning for seasonal events because they think it will take up too much time; in reality, planning for seasonal events doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming. Start with a simple template like the sample provided below and allocate yourself as little as 15 minutes per week to work on it throughout the year. You'll be amazed at how quickly things start to come together, and before you know it, you'll have your very own seasonal content 'advent' calendar to ease the countdown to what could be the best event of all-time for your business.
After you've worked out the basics, you can start to collaborate with your in-house gurus or an external agency and prepare your content and campaigns early to avoid a last-minute dash to save Christmas. You'll find this approach also relieves the stress and strain on your business around the holiday period and allows you to remain focussed on your normal day-to-day operations.
As the adage goes, "if it ain't broke...", and it's important to remember that line during the seasonal peak. Your website traffic should be at its highest, meaning now isn't the time to be implementing change, whether it be design, layout, or coding. A code freeze is a point in which you decide no more modifications should take place on your website. But why should you implement a code freeze at all? There are many reasons for implementing a code freeze, such as:
As a general rule, we'd advise you to implement a code freeze around the fourth quarter of the year (1st October - 31st December). Still, you may also wish to extend this to January due to the busy January sales. Ideally, you should make your own decisions based on past trading history and the analytical data available to you and your business.
If you do have changes planned, it's easy to work with your preferred developer during the holidays, just ask them to schedule your system launch for after the peak period has ended. You'll also find this methodology allows you to focus on more critical tasks such as coordinating your seasonal marketing efforts across your website, social, and email marketing platforms.
The battle for customers during the peak holiday season is intense. How is your business going to stand out from the crowd? Each snowflake may be unique, but when the sky is full of them, it's hard to tell one from any other! Merely adding a seasonal image to your regular newsletter or tweeting a funny gif from the movie Elf won't cut it with the modern Christmas shopper.
Luckily if you focus on content-driven campaigns that offer value and information that interests your audience, you'll be well on the way to a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Content-driven campaigns promote a content-first approach. Simply put, if you wish to succeed, you need to have the right content to meet your goals. Forget the fluff; make your content the present everyone wants to open this Christmas.
Identify trends and keywords that people will be searching for this year. Make sure you integrate these into your content on your website and also use them to create hashtags on social platforms.
Make a connection with your audience, do your research, and find out what your users like and dislike. Align your marketing efforts with this information.
It's easy to get carried away with the moment and forget about your goals. Still, an essential part of implementing a strong holiday content strategy for your business is aligning your efforts with your goals.
If your goal is to generate more social media followers, an ad in the local newspaper may not be the best way to go!
It's important to stay grounded and focussed on your goals. At each stage of the marketing process, ask yourself the question, does this action help me get closer to my goal, or could I be doing things better? If this answer is no, it may be worth taking a day to think about an alternate strategy.
Brainstorm with your team and marketing partners for ideas on how to meet your goals, if you don't have a team, invite family and friends to help you come up with ideas. You'll find most people willing to help you out.
Ask a friend or family member to describe the magic of Christmas, and you'll be inundated with suggestions driven by emotion. From sights, sounds, and smells, the holidays for most people is about how it makes them feel. Until the invention of smell-o-vision, the only options accessible to you as a brand to help evoke emotion and feeling are text, images and video. Having taken care of the former, most people rely on stock photography sites for the latter, but when all of your competitors rely on stock photography, your company may have a hard time standing out.
For those that have the budget, think about ditching stock photography altogether and hiring a professional, the generated images or video can be repurposed and used across social media, newsletters and your website. Depending on what's needed, a team member with a keen interest in photography may also be able to help feature your company or products in a festive light.
After you've set your seasonal campaigns in motion you may think it's time to break out the mince pies and a bottle of bubbles, but don't relax too soon, it's essential to review your campaigns and refine.
Just like a proper British cheddar, your campaigns should get better with time, and making sure you have the data to review your work is an essential step in this goal. Google's very own URL Campaign Builder (https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/) can help you make this task a simple process and allows you to track the results inside Analytics or other analytical software easily. Email and social platforms also usually have some form of analytical data you can monitor as well.
Once you have data at your fingertips, it's easy to start making little changes to your campaigns that can have a significant impact. Remember to log your data for later review; you never know when you'll need to go back and use it.
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