The holiday season is underway and whether you’re an e-commerce business or retail store, it’s a busy time of the year. Marketers are put in the perfect position to relish in the seasonal merriment and promote our products and services through creative, fun, and festive campaigns that can reach new customers. The holiday season provides the opportunity to tackle each aspect of your marketing strategy whether it’s improving your click through rate via email, partnering with influencers to promote your products, or building your brand awareness through branded links. While Black Friday and Cyber Monday are always universally celebrated amongst marketers, there is plenty of opportunity to leverage holiday marketing trends to boost your strategy past December into the new year.
Below are five holiday marketing trends that have gained plenty of traction in 2021 that you’ll want to include in your upcoming strategies this season.
Embrace Email Marketing With Buyer Personas
Email marketers have one of the biggest challenges during the holiday season to create compelling campaigns that set them apart from the sales and spam that infiltrates customers’ inboxes. One of the key factors that can help differentiate your emails will be to build your campaigns around buyer personas using data that taps into your target audience. Buyer personas can be sourced by working with your marketing and sales teams to help establish where your customers stand within your sales funnel. Whether it’s the digital marketer working for an enterprise company or a small business owner building an e-commerce store, these personas can help you communicate with your customers through personalized emails that are unique and relatable.
Use the holiday season to conduct market research that can help you understand your customer demographics, behavior, and economic status which you can then apply to an email marketing strategy that’s individualized for each persona. When you are intentional with your email marketing your customers will want to read, engage, and click on your content. The holiday season is going to be jam packed with businesses looking to upsell, bundle, and snag those last minute conversions, so this is a great opportunity to consider how your email marketing can break the mold and actually connect with your customer.
Leverage Branded Links to Boost Engagement
Holiday marketing can feel like stuffing your campaigns into a confetti cannon with your competitors and hoping that you will have the right combination of allure and engagement to be seen by customers. Branded links have been in high demand this holiday season as more brands and businesses are diving into digital marketing and harnessing the power it brings to their customers. Links that are branded with your brand or business help to create trust, communicate a message and share where the link is pointing to. As your marketing and sales teams scramble to create resourceful, engaging, and festive content this season, investing in a link management platform can help to differentiate your content from competitors by solidifying your brand with a multitude of features.
Use Remarketing to Reach an Engaged Audience
In the world of e-commerce, the goal is always to create new leads and convert shoppers to generate sales. But what happens when your customers are leaving more products in the cart than completing checkouts? Aka – shopping cart abandonment. We’ve all been there, we see something we like, we add to cart, hesitate on the purchase or forget altogether and the next thing you know it’s a missed opportunity. For businesses this can add up to become a big loss of revenue if there is no strategy in place to lead customers back towards completing the transaction. This season, retargeting your audience is a crucial strategic component to add to your marketing endeavors to bring stray customers and visitors right back to your website. In order to lure customers back towards completing the purchase you can create tailored ads that reflect their activities on your website.
Partner With Influencers to Build Authority
Influencer marketing continues to reign the social media hemisphere and that only increases during the holiday season where brands and businesses are partnering with the most popular personalities to promote their products. Going into the holiday season you’ll want to start researching, planning, and setting aside a dedicated budget just for influencers. While micro and macro influencers are readily accessible and available to partner with your business, you don’t want to partner with just anyone. Influencers should be approached strategically based on similar interests, audiences, and if they are a good fit for your business.
Developing a multichannel digital strategy for your influencer partnerships can help you to capitalize on social media marketing with a dedicated influencer for each channel that connects organically to your audience. All social media platforms are not created alike and your approach to using influencers shouldn’t be a “one size fits all” mentality because you will not have the same results across each social account. Research the strengths of each influencer candidate and how they can fit into your marketing strategy whether that’s amplifying your presence on TikTok or creating new leads on Facebook.
Stay Updated on Social Media
Social media show no sign of stopping as customers continue to flock towards these platforms for everything from their daily news to trends. Staying up to date with the latest social media updates, emerging platforms, and popular apps can help your marketing team to create dynamic campaigns that are relevant and builds on the strengths of the platform. For example, if you’re looking to rollout a new product this holiday season, consider if a video campaign will perform better on YouTube or TikTok.
If you plan to promote ebooks, webinars, or a virtual conference, are you leveraging Instagram’s story feature to enable more traffic by sharing your links? The worst mistake you can make during the hustle and bustle of the holiday’s is to miss out on developing an amazing marketing strategy because you are not being mindful of the power social media can bring to your brand. As social media evolves, marketing content and strategies must become more flexible and open to out of the box ideas and creative assets that don’t fall within the traditional marketing model.
Embrace the holiday trends coming your way and start implementing them into your marketing strategies this season!