Christmas can be a busy time for online businesses, as most people are off work for the holidays and have more time to spend researching and looking at different products or services to spend their money on. Here are some tips that you can implement ready to ensure your website maintains a good level of traffic over the festive period:
Research
Making sure that you complete research about previous performance is important as you want to ensure that you are improving your strategy year on year. Analyse the days that had the best traffic and the days that had the worst, so that you can plan when to be posting content over the Christmas period to keep people talking and engaging with your website.
You can do this by using Google Analytics and adjusting the dates to view previous years statistics. This will enable you to see what you are doing well and how you can improve on certain areas of the website. It will help you to identify the top performing landing pages during Christmas period and will give you a better understanding of when to target promotional campaigns and offers that can result in more traffic and sales.
Competitor Analysis
While completing your research, you should also look at competitors and the campaigns they run during the Christmas period. It can also help to see what others competing businesses are offering which can give insights into new ways you can adapt your strategy to create content and campaigns that will be more attractive to your audience.
Subscribing to some of your competitors email lists is a great way to get as much information over the holiday periods about the company. Analyse the emails to identify the sorts of offers they have running and the style of content they are sending out to their target audience.
Get your Marketing Scheduled
Scheduling posts over Christmas is important because you want to make sure that traffic still arrives at your website so sales and enquiries do not drop.
Social Media
Making sure that your business’ social media is still posting over the Christmas period is key because it means that people are still seeing your brand and messaging, even when no one is working.
To do this easily you can use a free scheduling tools such as Buffer. Buffer is a social media platform tool that lets you link up all of your social media platforms together and schedule posts to go out across them all. This means that if you were to use Buffer to post a message it would propagate across all of your social media platforms instead of you having to manually input the same post into each platform.
Buffer also allows to you queue posts up so that they can be posted on a certain date. For example, you can change the date and time that the post is published on each platform individually depending on when you want the viewers to see it. This can be extremely helpful when it comes to scheduling content about specific offers you have running over the Christmas period.
Festive Imagery
Using festive imagery can be really good during the holiday period because it can often make your content more memorable and also encourages your audience to interact. Using festive style imagery can help to get people engaging with your business online through them sharing your content.
“When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.” Source
GIFs
GIFs can be a great visual aid when it comes to getting your audience to engage with your online content. They not only generate a lot of interest, but they will also stand out amongst the saturated social feeds of your target audience. GIFs will be quite eye-catching in a twitter feed for example, so your audience are much more likely to click through to view the related content you are posting attached to the GIF.
“Tweets with GIFs generate 6X more engagement than basic text updates.” Source
People are interested in posts when they include visual cues because it will get them engaged and more interested in the content that has been posted.
User Generated Content
User generated content is content created by your audience that you can incorporate into your own online strategy. This essentially means handing over the sharing to the audience and watching them share their opinions and photos of your products and services. This content can then be reshared on your own social feeds, creating easy yet effective brand awareness among your target audience.
This way of generating content is often very successful as it helps build credibility for that product or service, meaning your audience are more likely to engage and hopefully continue through the sales cycle.
User generated content can be a great time saver when you don’t have the time or resources to create your own content over the busy festive period. Just ensure that you have permission from the individual whose content you would like to reshare.
Seasonal PPC
Making sure that your seasonal strategy extends to your PPC is also important. Things like keywords might need to be changed during the holidays to accommodate special offers and sales. Factors you might want to identify could be things like seasonal focused keywords, campaigns and ads.
Making sure that your PPC campaigns are relevant to the landing page is still important because you don’t want to be directing your audience to an irrelevant page, as this will cause the website’s bounce rate to increase rapidly and waste the money you are paying to direct traffic to the page.
