A carefully crafted holiday marketing strategy can propel your brand to new heights. As the holiday season approaches, businesses must prepare for the season’s competitiveness beyond the holidays’ festivities.
Strategically revamping your marketing approach can help you survive this competition and thrive, ensuring your brand outshines others in the marketplace. Through an inventive blend of marketing strategies tailored to your customer's holiday preferences, you can engage your audience, achieve stand-out appeal, and incentivize sales. Ultimately, the key to holiday marketing success is to create a fresh approach that resonates with and reaches your target audience.
Let's unwrap some innovative strategies for taking your holiday marketing to the next level.
Innovative Strategies for Holiday Marketing
Implementing innovative holiday marketing strategies that blend traditional and digital channels helps reach customers in surprising ways. It’s even better when tailored to your customers’ approach to each holiday. Whether it's the spooky vibes of Halloween, the gratitude expressed during Thanksgiving, or the winter holidays' joy, your marketing campaigns must adapt and resonate with the seasonal mood.
You can use a mix of different channels to tap into these feelings. Utilize social media and email marketing for flash sales. Email marketing is also great for nurturing customers with ongoing personalized messaging. Meanwhile, you can use SEO strategies to reach customers with holiday-themed keywords. Your SEO strategy can help you reach local or national customers, depending on the scope of your business and marketing goals.
These diverse tactics enhance your brand visibility and help build a loyal customer base who appreciates your holiday cheer. Furthermore, they provide analytics about engagement and impressions, giving you crucial insight into how your customers act around the holidays.
Design Messaging Around Customer Preferences
Holidays are paradoxically broad celebrations that are also very personal. Creative branding and messaging should help you tailor your holiday marketing to your audience and their intent around the holidays.
Knowing your audience, their holiday customs, and their pain points can help you design messages that feel personal and genuine. Some customers might go all out for the holidays and others may be more low-key in their celebrations.
Each holiday will also shift customers’ intent surrounding them, which your marketing should reflect. Holidays like Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day tend to be shopping holidays since people will likely have a day off. Halloween or Valentine’s Day may focus more on decorations or candy and use ads that encourage store traffic or quick sales.
It’s crucial to learn how your customers feel about the holidays and if they feel more strongly about some than others, as that can give you good insight that can make its way into your messaging.
Communicate through Various Channels
An orchestrated marketing strategy taps into multiple channels to engage customers. Customers approach these channels with different mindsets. Weaving different formats together helps you reach customers at varying levels of attention.
Visual and audio marketing, through online video ads, streaming/OTT media services, or digital audio increases your brand presence, offering rich information to customers. These formats allow you to share information about your products and your brand, helping you better appeal to your customers.
Pairing these channels with standard digital marketing, like display ads, SEM, or email marketing, can help brands stay top of mind throughout the holiday shopping journey. They allow you to provide more direct information as customers seek it out, so they find it when they’re ready.
Plan Ads Around Customer Intent
What’s crucial is aligning your marketing efforts with customer intent surrounding each holiday.
Brand awareness campaigns might be more prevalent earlier in the season, balanced with call-to-action messages as people prepare for holiday purchases. For instance, using video marketing or digital audio to increase trust and brand awareness helps spread your name early in the season as people start to think about the holidays.
As it gets closer to the holidays, display and SEM ads become more beneficial. They encourage clicks and sales at crucial moments when customers decide what to purchase. However, companies can run holiday SEM all year because people will look for holiday decorations or gifts at any time. People look for holiday deals early or on the offseason, and these ads help you earn their business.
Incentivize Sales with Discounts, Rewards, or Memberships
The holiday season is synonymous with shopping, making it a prime opportunity to entice customers through discounts, rewards, or exclusive memberships. These can make your brand stand out amidst the competition by either being the extra perk that tips someone into buying from you instead of a competitor or encouraging your loyal customers to return.
Consider offering exclusive deals such as free shipping weekends or memberships that provide access to special discounts or shipping perks in exchange for customer information or a small fee. Providing outstanding customer experiences builds a foundation for a lasting customer relationship beyond the short-term gains of individual sales.
During the holiday season, people are more open to trying new things – seize this opportunity to impress and earn long-lasting customers.
Take Control of Your Holiday Marketing with McClatchy’s AdManager
Navigating the various campaigns and holidays can be tricky, but with the proper tools and planning, you can seamlessly launch campaigns with precision. McClatchy’s AdManager empowers business owners to launch ongoing, targeted campaigns however and whenever they want – putting you in complete control with an accessible, informative user interface. That means that for every holiday, you can personally ensure your brand connects with the right audience at the right time.
With AdManager, you're not just advertising, but building meaningful relationships with your customers, wrapped up in the joy of the holiday season. Start your holiday marketing journey with McClatchy’s AdManager today.
