We’re back with part 2 of “How to Prepare Your Business for the Holidays.” In part 1 we talked about website health, social media, sales and discounts and how to strategize these areas of marketing to ensure your brand is ready for the holidays.

In today’s blog we’ll be discussing how using SEO strategies, paid ads, and email and SMS marketing can help you increase your brand’s success for the holidays and the upcoming year. We also cover why it’s important for your products/services to be up-to-date and flawless for this season.

SEO Strategies

During the holidays people are looking for stuff: Christmas presents, house decorations, and more. This means a lot of Google searches, social media searches, and asking friends for recommendations. Naturally, you want your brand to be found first because you want to broaden your customer base and increase sales for your next year.

To accomplish this you’ll need to ensure that your SEO strategies are optimized and performing well. This means checking your keywords and any website glitches or errors that could be dragging your SEO score lower. Using software like SEMrush is a great way to find the updates that you need to make for your website. Check out our blog, “On-Page SEO Checker by SEMrush” to see how you can use SEMrush to update your SEO strategies.

Paid Ads

Another great way to help your brand appear at the top of search engines is to run paid ads. Combined with an effective SEO strategy, this will help increase your sales and brand awareness. Google ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, and TV ads are popular and effective advertising methods.

Choosing the exact platforms to display your ads will depend on who your target audience is and where the best place is to reach them. You can use your sales promotions and discounts, or new product launches as content for your advertisements.

Ads are one of the best ways to market your business because you can choose who sees your ads, how much you want to spend, what kinds of ads you run, and more. Using analytics from past marketing campaigns will help you update future campaigns so they can be more effective. It’s not a hard process, it just takes time, research, and consistency.

Email & SMS Marketing

Email marketing is a tried and tested method of marketing that proves to be successful even in today's modern world. The first step to improving your email marketing strategy is to clean out your email lists and only send emails to people who have intentionally signed up for your company’s emails.

Email campaigns are an easy way to promote your sales and discounts, new product/service launches, events, or company updates that your audience may be interested in around the holiday season. Your emails can be designed to reflect the holiday spirit, attracting the attention of your audience, and hopefully building excitement around your products, sales, or events. It’s important to include clear CTA’s in your holiday emails so that your audience knows what the next step is.

If your company uses SMS Marketing (text messaging), you’ll also want to make sure that you only message contacts who have clearly opted-in to your SMS marketing. It’s also important to have clear opt-out options for your contacts in both email and SMS marketing. The content you use for your SMS marketing can be similar to your email marketing content, just designed and optimized for mobile use.

Products/Services

There’s several things regarding your products that you’ll want to consider when it’s coming to the holiday season. First, you need to make sure that you have enough of your products in stock so that you can meet consumer demands and not deal with any delays that could result in late Christmas presents, returns, and frustrated customers.

Depending on your target audience, the holidays can be the perfect time for a new product launch as well. This creates an opportunity for more content for your website, social media, and email/sms marketing, along with increasing buzz around your brand. Consumers may see this as the perfect time to purchase your products as gifts for their loved-ones.

The same strategies can be applied to the services you offer. However, since services take time to complete, you may want to remind your customers to book their appointments early so that they don’t miss the service over the holidays, and so you won’t be overworking yourself trying to accommodate your customers.

In Summary

There’s so much that goes into marketing for a business, and the holidays are the perfect time to attract more customers and grow your brand. Every brand is different, including products/services they offer and who their target audience is. Using statistics from past campaigns along with current target audience data, you can create a marketing strategy that will resonate with your audience and drive results. Optimizing each area of your digital marketing strategy will help your holiday marketing efforts be successful.