The ultimate guide to digital marketing over the holiday season

What’s the best way to advertise during the holiday season? How can I use digital marketing to promote my business over the holidays? These are some of the questions that will be answered in this guide on how to effectively market your business over the holiday season, from Black Friday to Christmas Day and beyond. 

According to this insights paper by Facebook, Gen X and Boomers are jumping on the bandwagon and shifting their shopping habits online. Around the holiday season is when online spending goes through the roof especially on days like Black Friday and the lead up to Christmas. For many businesses it can be the difference between an average year and a great year.

A lot of retailers are learning the importance of digital marketing around this time and in 2022 those who find the most success are the businesses that have a strong digital marketing strategy. It can be hard to keep up with and understand digital marketing. So without further ado here are some of the best tips for driving traffic and sales through digital advertising channels during one of the busiest retail seasons of the year.

Which social media platforms work best over the holidays - Santa’s naughty & nice list

The holiday shopping season starts around the middle of November with Black Friday being the first important date on the calendar. With a social media platform list as long as your arm and the shopping season fast approaching, the platforms you should focus on will depend upon your goals, your audience, and quite frankly what already works well for you. 

Each year digital advertising costs increase during Q4 (last quarter of the year), if you have advertised in previous years and have checked your charts, you’ll have noticed the rise in cost starts bang in the middle of November (remember that date we mentioned for the holiday shopping season ☝ ). The best way for you to minimise the impact of cost rises is to use audiences and tactics you know have served you well earlier in the year, and scale-up. 

You can of course try new platforms but you’ll be going in blind. By using the platforms already in your arsenal, you have access to insights from past campaigns and can create custom and lookalike audiences of those who have engaged with your business and ads before. 

Dive a little deeper into the pros and cons of popular platforms

“It’s not even December, I don’t need to think about this yet, right?”

Wrong, now (September/October) is the time for businesses of all sizes to plan out their social media strategy for Christmas and beyond. For most, holiday marketing is about more than getting on people’s good side—it’s about making money. So, have you got your Christmas campaigns planned out? If the answer is no, you need to seriously consider this now. Good campaigns take time to plan and execute. Give your team, internal or external, time to create campaigns that will convert. If you work with an agency or freelancer, their time leading up to the holidays can book up fast and you don’t want to be left DIY-ing your creative and campaigns during the most wonderful time of the year. 

Conversion campaigns are important, but they’re not everything

Yes, in an ideal world people will buy your product or service the first time they see an ad from you, but that’s not usually the case. You’ve got to warm your audience up first, grow brand awareness and build trust. That takes time, but boy is it worth it. In a recent study trust was the second most important factor when purchasing from a new brand, coming second only to price. Having different layers to your campaign can aid you in achieving your overall goals.   

Let’s get creative

We’ve said it before, but it’s so important - consider your audience. If you’re advertising for an audience in the southern hemisphere, images of snow-covered villages may not be right for getting your message across, unless you’re selling snow machines. And vice versa, marketing images of sun-drenched beaches and togs-clad swimmers may be the final straw for our northern hemisphere cousins in the midst of winter. If you market to both, make sure you align your creative with a geographic layer to your targeting. 

Is there a pain point or problem associated with the holiday that you can solve? This will be an important part of your messaging and is also the reason why you should choose wisely which holidays you want to advertise for. If your product or service isn’t aligned with Halloween, you don’t have to push it because you feel every other business is, allocate your budgets wisely and double down on what works for your business.   

Make it easy 

Nobody likes friction, least of all, online shoppers. You can have the most show-stopping campaign in the world that is driving traffic, but if your landing page is slow to load or your website is difficult to navigate, it can all be for nothing - ensure that your website is ready to receive your new prospects and convert them into customers. 

It doesn’t end as soon as you’ve packed up the decorations

You’ve put in the hard yards planning and executing your holiday campaigns, and you’ve gained new customers - now don’t let them forget about you. Nurture existing customers by providing them with useful and engaging content via email. For how long, you ask? Until they no longer want to hear from you. For email nurturing, that can be if they unsubscribe from your marketing emails or they are consistent non-openers of your email campaigns. 

Email is so important here and is one of, if not the most important channel for getting your message across to your customers, it’s a direct line to their inbox. Email marketing is cheap and can have a super high return on investment (ROI) when done right. According to HubSpot email generates $42 for every $1 spent, which is an astounding 4,200% ROI! When was the last time you checked and optimised your customer nurture journey? 

Now you’re ready to go out and nail your holiday marketing campaigns

If you read the above title and thought “no way, I’m not even sure what this all means” - we can help with that, get in touch with us if you have any questions or want to discuss your year-round digital marketing strategy.