Expert Digital Marketing Tips & Tricks for the Holidays

How to Maximize Your Holiday Marketing Efforts

The holiday season is officially here! And while that can mean presents, shopping and festive celebrations for many, for businesses, it also usually means it’s time to ramp up and rollout marketing campaigns for the holidays.

From email and content marketing to social media marketing, there can be a lot to do — and trying to manage everything can get overwhelming, especially considering the limited time available during the holidays.

To help you take care of all of your business’ marketing needs during the hectic holiday seasons, here are some proven tips and tricks from the experienced marketing professionals at Digital Authority.

Incorporating these tactics in your 2016 holiday marketing efforts can be integral to helping you:

• Keep track of everything, without missing a beat
• Save time while effectively managing your holiday marketing campaigns
• Position your campaigns for the better results, which can mean more new leads (and growing profits) for your business.

10 Essential Holiday Marketing Tips

1. Plan ahead

The holidays are no time to just ‘wing it,’ procrastinate, or take your marketing campaigns day to day. If you really want to maximize results and not waste your time (or other resources), make a plan now, and figure out your goals and objectives ahead of time. Then, establish a process for measuring the results so you know what is more (and less) effective.

2. Build (& test) your landing pages now

Taking the ‘plan ahead’ tip one step further, get your key landing pages in place ASAP. These pages can be key parts of your online sales funnel, and waiting until the last minute to put them together can increase the chances that mistakes will be made or that landing pages are just not as effective, compelling or successful as they could (or should) be.

3. Look for ideas everywhere

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it’s time to develop and rollout a digital marketing campaign for the holidays. Instead, save yourself some time by figuring out what has worked in the past and what may be working for your competition (or even businesses outside of your industry). Then, put your own spin on it and carefully monitor the results.

4. Automate what you can

Take advantage of scheduling (and other) tools to automatically execute various aspects of your digital marketing campaigns for the holidays. For instance, you can use Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and/or Mass Planner to manage your holiday social media posts. For your email marketing needs, try using the scheduling options provided by Active Campaign or Mailchimp. With these (and other) tools, you can get a number of different campaign elements set up days — or even weeks — in advance, leaving more time to focus on clients and sales as Christmas (and other holidays) fast approach.

5. Stay focused on your deadlines

Whether you’re working with campaign deadlines, publishing deadlines or shipping deadlines, make sure you knowexactly when each of your deadlines is. If you’re going to be juggling various deadlines, set up a tracking system, and consider creating “alerts” for yourself so that you know precisely when your next important deadline is just around the corner.

6. Don’t forget to leverage your positive reviews

According to HubSpot, more than 90 percent of people trust online recommendations about products and serviceseven if they are made by complete strangers. So, take advantage of this, and include your positive reviews, testimonials, etc. in your holiday marketing campaigns whenever possible. Whether you feature these on landing pages, include them in social media posts or find another way to get them out there, make sure your target audience knows that your business has great things to offer, has made others’ happy and can do the same for new clients.

7. Offer dynamic deals or specials

While it’s great to have Black Friday (and/or Cyber Monday) deals, why not keep your specials going so that, whenever prospects are interested in your offerings during the holiday season, you have a deal that they take advantage of — and that sets you apart from your competitors. Some options can include offering:

• A new or different deal for the 12 days of Christmas (or for every day or week in December)
• Special offers sent exclusively via email (to encourage your audience to sign up for your email blasts)
• Extended offers for New Year’s (and possibly beyond).

8. Consider whether to expand and/or limit your efforts over the holidays

While many businesses heavily step up their digital marketing efforts over the holidays, few (if any) have unlimited resources. This means that it’s important to determine whether you should expand your digital marketing efforts over the holidays and, if so, which ones in particular you should focus on. In some cases, it may be necessary to scale back some efforts so you can focus on others. For instance, you may want to increase email marketing and social media marketing on Facebook and Pinterest over the holidays while scaling back your marketing efforts on Twitter and Instagram.

9. Pay attention to staff levels and capacity

Not only may your staff dwindle during the holidays as people take time off, but the staff who do remain may be overloaded with more clients and more work to shoulder. So pay attention to vacation requests, and have a strategy for offsetting surging workloads (like hiring temporary holiday staff or outsourcing certain efforts), which brings us to the final tip which is to….

10. Hire a pro to step in when necessary

Whether you’ll be off for an extended holiday, you want to have a marketing professional at the helm, or it’s simply time to entirely revamp your digital marketing strategies for the holidays, the guidance of a pro can be your key to success (and better results!). And that can mean more new leads and more new clients for your business.

Take advantage of Digital Authority’s holiday specials! We’re offering:

• $200 off content or social media plans
• $400 off of the Combo Authority package
• $400 off of a new, custom designed website.

Top 10 Holiday Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Knowing what NOT to do as you plan, rollout and manage your holiday marketing campaigns can be just as important as understanding what you should do. To help you avoid some of the most common mistakes (that even big, established companies make), here are the pitfalls to be aware of and steer clear of:

1. Leaving planning to the last minute — Poor to no planning can lead to failed campaigns, which can mean wasted resources (and lost opportunities).

2. Rolling out campaigns too late — This can cause you to essential give business to your competition, especially if competing business are able to get their campaigns out early or on time.

3. Sending campaigns to an inappropriate audience — Targeting the wrong audience can mean that your efforts fall flat and you see minimal (if any) returns on your holiday marketing efforts.

4. Failing to prepare for an influx of clients — This mistake can cause you to lose business. It may even turn clients permanently off your business, spur them to give you negative reviews online, etc.

5. Failing to have landing pages for corresponding ads — Poorly designed landing pages can let prospects fall through the cracks, causing you to lose business.

6. Sending people to cluttered, poorly drafted or off-putting landing pages — This mistake can end up having the same effects as the above, breaking your sales funnel and letting viable leads slip away.

7. Failing to respond to questions or comments on social media — Social media can be a forum for customer service, and failing to respond to clients in this forum can lead others to believe that your business offers a poor customer experience.

8. Failing to send out a consistent, regular message — Haphazard messaging can cause a loyal audience or interested prospects to lose interest in your messaging, misunderstand your calls to action or even just overlook them (because they don’t recognize or remember your business).

9. Not sending any holiday greetings or offers to clients — This is a big mistake because, the chances are, your competitors are reaching out during the holidays. Simply ignoring your clients or failing to offer them anything special can mean that you’re, again, just handing business over to your competitors.

10. Sticking to a sinking holiday marketing campaign — Rehashing tired, poorly performing holiday marketing campaigns of the past can be a set up for failure, especially in highly competitive industries (like retail).

Take the Worry & Stress Out of Holiday Marketing: Contact Digital Authority

When you are ready to take your brand’s holiday marketing to the next level and start seeing better results, it’s time to contact the marketing professionals at Digital Authority.

Skilled at enhancing brands’ exposure and authority online, we can identify holiday marketing strategies and solutions to maximize your ROI — and help your business get more leads and clients this holiday season (and beyond!).

To get started and find out more about how our pros can help you, let’s talk.

(This article was originally published on the Digital Authority Blog)