Key Marketing Strategies to Prepare for the Peak Holiday Season in 2021
The holiday season is approaching fast, so it’s time to start planning and executing holiday marketing strategies for your business at the most bustling time of the year. With so much going on this year, it is not sufficient to just convert the same old marketing strategies you have used in past seasons. Instead, try thinking outside the box by coming up with a new strategy that will attract and engage clients throughout the holiday season.
Everyone has spent over a year adapting to new norms. As many physical locations are looking to open again, it has become obvious that not all new behaviours, seen in the past year or so, will remain. Analysis by Google and Kantar indicates that even though e-commerce has been on the move, the majority of people still choose to shop in-store for multiple reasons, including the availability of items and the ability to see and experience products in person.
Since we aren’t sure of how the ‘new normal’ will shape up, it creates a challenge for retailers to understand holiday season marketing, which normally demands months of planning. So how can retailers make the upcoming peak holiday season this year a success? Through this article, we look to explore and answer this question.
Enhance Omnichannel Experience
The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the expectation of customers and their communication with businesses. During the lockdown, people learned to navigate connections and interactions across multiple platforms. As people continued to adapt to these “new norms”, their experiences with these new forms of communication solidified their opinions and expectations of online communication through e-commerce.
Today, clients expect a casual omnichannel experience when they connect with businesses, with a preference towards reaching out through social media, the ability to browse product catalogues online, and the potential to choose items at a favourable location.
Regardless of what you sell, it is essential to implement a quality omnichannel experience before the hectic holiday season kicks off. What that experience looks like for your brand will have a lot to do with your distinct sales funnel. But, for every brand, it should comprise of:
- Multiple channels for your clients to communicate with your team — consider social media messengers, phone calls, texts, chatbots, emails, etc.
- Seamless transmission of client data — if your client connects to your team through one channel, that communication requires to be moved over to other channels. No one enjoys going through the experience of repeating an issue or request at each new touchpoint.
- A steady experience — whether you’re inside your physical store location or connecting with a sales team representative online, ensure that your clients receive consistent messaging and that your business is evidently identifiable.
Personalised Marketing
Transform your brand with extremely personalised shopping experiences, both online and via physical stores. In the current world, APIs link retail apps, web, and mobile applications, along with social platforms to ensure that clients can experience seamless and personalised experiences.
Additionally, you can use the AI Building Blocks of Google to blend appearance, language, communication, and structured data into multiple apps. For instance, developers can adopt Vision Product Search and Recommendations AI to enhance product recommendations for both first-time users and loyal clients.
In addition to enhancing the shopping experience, the 360˚ view provides retailers with more productively personalized communications like email and ads and establishes highly targeted holiday marketing campaigns based on real-time insights.
Personalised content marketing strategy can also be much effective during this holiday season.
Brand Awareness
What exactly is brand awareness? Holiday marketing campaigns are all about getting an audience to recognise your brand. Typically launched during the initial phases of a business or when bringing in a new product, brand awareness marketing campaigns should address a considerable pain in your normal vertical. They run beyond your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Clients need to be familiar with you: what you stand for, your logo, products and offers.
Contrary to familiar belief, brand awareness isn’t just about ensuring potential clients can recognise your business wherever they go; it is about connecting your brand’s values, identity, and unique mission with their personal experiences.
Targeted Campaigns
While it is important to run digital ad campaigns, don’t depend on them during the peak holiday season. Ensure to run individual, targeted marketing campaigns for the holiday season. You will need to set up ads that extend all of the following:
- Specific holiday copies and images
- Exclusive deals and promotions for the peak holiday season
- Product highlights that are compatible with the holiday season
Not only is it far more impressive to execute a holiday-specific campaign at this time of year, but it can also make sure that your metrics do not fall flat. During the peak holiday season, you should instinctively notice an upsurge in sales. By running your holiday ad campaigns, you can check the efficacy of your holiday campaigns year-over-year. This will become fundamental in helping you understand and accustom for next year.
Planning for the peak holiday season is crucial to your success. By investing time into the preparations seen within this blog, you can make sure that your brand makes the most out of the holiday shopping season this year. Make sure that you are not making any common holiday marketing mistakes, otherwise all your efforts will be wasted.