‘Tis the Season To Be Jolly (And To Get Your Digital Marketing Hustle On)

Holiday e-commerce sales are set to see a 10-percent year-over-year growth rate with retailers and e-commerce businesses experiencing the single biggest days of sales on the 22nd and 23rd of December. This means there’s still a bit of hope left for you to make some changes to your holiday marketing campaign in order to benefit from this years expected $678 billion to $682 billion in holiday retail sales.

Don’t let the Grinch ruin this holiday season for your business. These 6 fantastical holiday marketing strategies from Cobalt Digital Marketing will have you grinning from ear to ear like a child on Christmas morning.

A Mobile Mistletoe

The ease and comfort that mobile devices provide is increasingly driving holiday shoppers to do their research and shopping on mobile phones and devices. Smartphone commerce is expected to rise by an estimated 57.8% in 2017, which means your site and online ads should be mobile optimized.

A few enhancements and tips to turn website visitors into customers include:

• • Load Time - Regardless of whether potential customers are visiting your site on a laptop, desktop, mobile phone, or tablet, your website’s loading time can make or break you. Nobody wants to wait around for a site to load.
  • Localized Mobile Ads - Take advantage of locational data by using it to push your store locations and inventory to customers who are in search of your products.

• Call-to-Action - Try to keep your CTA as high up on the page as possible to better encourage potential customers into making a purchase.

Unwrap Urgency

The holiday season is all about time management. You can tap into that pressure to create a sense of urgency. There are a number of steps that you can take in order to push hesitant site visitors into action and conversion:

• Create offers and promotions that are time-sensitive. Everybody loves to save a few dollars and a time-sensitive sale can encourage customers to make the purchase immediately rather than hold off.
• Create landing pages with attention-grabbing headers and banners that include specific offers, discounts, sales, products, and dates.
• Add countdowns to your website or landing page to motivate potential clients. Seeing time running low on a special offer is sure to increase the urgency.
• Consider using copy such as “Limited Quantity”, “Sell Ending Soon”, “Seasonal Sale”, etc., to push purchase urgency.
• Offer free shipping on certain days or through a specific time frame.

Think of this portion of your holiday marketing strategy as another opportunity to persuade buyers to purchase now.

Secret Santa SEO

Your SEO strategy should be ever evolving and the holiday season is the perfect opportunity to revamp it for a few months. Capitalize on seasonal searches and trends by utilizing the right tools to identify new keywords that can spice up your holiday SEO campaigns.

A few secret Santa SEO strategies to keep in mind and ensure everyone finds the gift they’re looking for include:

• Use meta tags effectively to help crawlers reidentify your holiday content.
• Organize all your digital marketing campaigns to ensure that everything runs smoothly during the holidays.
• Remember last year - what keywords did you run campaigns for? What worked? What didn’t?
• Use clickable headers to effectively direct individuals to specific shopping categories (i.e. gifts for your co-workers).

The right SEO strategies should guide holiday shoppers like Rudolph guides Santa’s sleigh.

Don’t Let Your Copy Turn To Coal

Website blogs, ad copy, and seasonal messaging across social media should help to convey the emotional aspect of the season and not just that your business is having sales. This is essential to remember during the holiday season as many people make their purchasing decisions based on what they feel rather than a merely logical decision.

• When writing copy remember to focus on family, friends, “home for the holiday”, thanksgiving, goodwill, time of thanks, loved ones, and other sentimental terms.
• Don’t forget the importance of blogging: businesses that blog get 67% more leads than businesses that do not.
• Don’t forget that retargeting ads should make specific suggestions based on a consumer’s browsing and purchase history. This should include personalized offers with guiding copy that will motivate a potential client.
• Don’t forget to mention the “holiday rush” when it makes sense.

You can really build an emotional bond with customers with the right ad copy and blogs. This connection is sure to carry on and into the following holiday season.

Even Elves Use Social Media

E-commerce orders from social media grew by 202% in 2015 and that number is expected to increase this year as well. That’s a stat definitely worth keeping in mind as the holiday season approaches.

Because of the medium, social media platforms provide a variety of options and opportunities to draw in potential consumers.  Promote your products by:

• Creating alluring visuals and provocative CTAs with “shoppable posts”.
• Contests are always a great social tool and that’s not any different during the holiday season - especially because everyone loves free stuff during what can be an expensive season.
• Campaigns should be easy to share. Make sure that social icons are easily accessible.
• Take full advantage of Facebook ads. They should be aesthetically captivating and have straightforward text.
• Video marketing is key to engagement. Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.

As stated about copy, don’t forget to make your posts touch on emotional aspects of the holiday. Not every post has to be a tearjerker but play on the sentimentality of the season.

The Grinch's Heart Grows From Retargeting Ads

Retargeting is one of the most effective tools that you have in your arsenal. Most website visitors will pay your site multiple visits before making a  purchase; these leads simply need to be converted and targeting ads are just the thing.

Current stats say that 3 out of 4 online consumers now notice retargeting ads. Facebook offers a retargeting service known as Dynamic Product Ads but they aren’t the only kids on the block with a fancy tool to provide you with a retargeting solution.

Make sure to budget some funds for this particular marketing strategy; potential clients are 70% more likely to convert if they’ve seen retargeted display ads. You might not be able to catch a distracted client on the first go-around but the more they see you the better the likelihood of a sale.

Are you ready to get your holiday hustle on? If you already have more responsibilities than Santa on Christmas Eve and not enough elves to help, then contact Cobalt Digital Marketing today!