The holiday season gives businesses many opportunities to improve their sales by adjusting to expected user behavior.
While marketing during the holiday season is still very much a game of getting the greatest amount of user attention possible, there are some basic techniques you can use to improve the odds of your campaign’s success. Below we offer a few general tips and tricks that you can use to win the attention of end-users, and drive click-through rates that lead to higher-quality leads.
Pick a Focus Holiday
The first tip should be obvious – pick a holiday on which to focus your efforts. While it’s tempting to try and corner as much of the market as possible, using the same messaging focus for Christmas, Hanukkah, and harvest festivals is not likely to be very successful at generating quality leads. Generic “holiday” targeting like this definitely improves the audience you can reach, but while you will have more eyes on your ads the lack of specificity in your message will increase the challenge of writing an effective call to action that speaks to the largest possible segment of your audience. Focusing on a specific holiday that is important in your market will necessarily reduce the visual footprint of your ad campaign, but at the same time give you more tools to write copy and calls-to-action that improve the efficacy of your marketing as a whole, resulting in more leads and more revenue. See how Starbucks does this so well:
Know Your Market
Advertising focused on the US holiday of Thanksgiving is not very likely to be successful abroad. Similarly, advertising Christmas in an area where the holiday is not often celebrated will lead to a lot of ignored ads and unread emails. You can greatly improve your ad targeting and relevancy by recognizing these regional differences in holidays observed. This applies to the keywords you bid on with your advertising as well – by making intelligent keyword choices, you can more effectively leverage customer segmentation to ensure that the messages delivered to your users are more relevant.
Tailor Your Content (and Products!)
Once you’ve captured a user’s attention, the most crucial thing you need to demonstrate is that your products are relevant to their needs. One of the techniques you can use to improve this relevancy is writing multiple versions of copy for your ads, which change based on the geographic location of the reader. By tying these to keywords relevant to the content of each version of your ad, your ads will seem more relevant to the users browsing them, leading to better click-through rates and improved leads.
Building on top of this keyword segmentation, you can further improve the success of your campaign by tailoring the products you’re offering in your advertising to the general theme of the advertisement. This is as simple as ensuring the products you’re presenting to the user are relevant to the holiday that captured their attention in the first place. Scan your product catalogue to ensure the keywords you’re bidding on appear in the metadata of your products, as this will give you the crucial tool you need to modify your catalog presentation based on the desires of the users that have clicked the ad to reach your landing page. By presenting the user with content that is immediately relevant to their interests, you’ll improve the quality of the leads that come out of your advertising campaigns.
Conclusion
Holiday sales and specials are a tried-and-true method of improving a business’ bottom line during the holiday season. By focusing your advertising efforts, you can see greater success among a smaller target user base than you would with a more general approach. Coupling this with customer segmentation will improve your click-through rates by ensuring only the users that care about your ads will see them. Once you’ve nailed down the audience, you’ll then want to tailor your content to that audience, ensuring that users are seeing relevant content all the way through the sales funnel. By applying these simple processes at each step of your content funnel, you will drive higher-quality leads that lead to you winning more business.
