From New Year’s and Labor Day to Christmas, Boxing Day, and beyond, holidays are the busiest times of the year for marketers. Planning holiday and seasonal sales and marketing efforts should be a top priority.
Here’s a look at five content marketing tips, along with studies and statistics, to evaluate which seasonal sales strategies will work best for you this year.
1. Identify your customer niche and media consumption patterns
Globally, people from all age brackets and ethnicities use various digital platforms for various forms of information, education and entertainment. It’s vital to identify your ideal customer and target their media consumption via channels, interests and behaviors.
The graph above depicts the shrinking gap between internet users in the U.S. Most age groups are now active on social media, so there is no reason to not engage in content and social media marketing. Your target audience will form the core foundation of your digital marketing plan.
To illustrate:
Let’s say you are the owner of an online game rental store and you would like to capitalize on a seasonal sales opportunity tied to a public holiday. Your target audience will be teenagers, kids, and online streamers. For this audience, you would focus on niche-specific platforms where they hangout. In this case, consider Twitch, Reddit, TikTok and Discord.
This is just one example of identifying your customer niche and the media platforms they regularly use. Depending on your business model, you can then choose a path and platform that works best for you.
Seasonal content can play a huge role in driving site traffic and astronomical sales. According The Conversation, people spend a significant chunk of their time reading articles and blogs on the internet, reiterating the importance of content sharing and distribution in marketing campaigns.
2. Take a data-driven approach
Analyzing your year-to-date (YTD) sales numbers can help you plan your content marketing strategies moving forward. Which products are bestsellers? Which services deliver the best margins and/or higher average order value (AOV)? Use these insights to decide what products to highlight in seasonal marketing campaigns.
Leverage additional data (such as social media analytics) into your marketing plan by implementing relevant tracking pixels on your company website. Implement the Facebook Pixel to understand the behavior of Facebook users on your site. Leverage Google Analytics tracking codes to collect valuable visitor data. Google’s stack of technologies, such as PageSpeed, KeyWords Planner and WebMaster can help you optimize your content for search engines and conversions.
After each holiday season, measure, analyze and learn from your campaign data to understand what worked and what needs to be tweaked.
3. Leverage new trends
Trending topics have always edged past regular content. And there is a good reason behind it. Psychologists suggest that “Hot Topics” garner the attention of an ordinary person more quickly.
In theory, integrate your content with trending topics around the world. Recent news topics such as U.S. post-election coverage, the global rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, and the dawn of 2021 are some of the most searched keywords right now.
Collaborating with social media influencers can deliver a significant boost to your content, with Instagram Posts and Instagram Stories being the dominant influencer marketing content formats.
In fact, the top five most effective content formats for influencer marketing include:
- Instagram Post: 78%
- Instagram Story: 73%
- YouTube Video: 56%
- Instagram Video: 54%
- Blog Post: 36%
Meanwhile, TikTok has become a juggernaut and goldmine for Gen-Z marketers as new trends appear on the platform daily. Remember: Successful content on TikTok is all about creating videos with the right tone of voice.
Content marketers also have the option to use holiday relevant visuals and hashtags. Source high-quality stock photograhpy on platforms like Shutterstock and Unsplash to ensure your visual content resonates with your target audience.
4. Plan seasonal content
The dire urge to stand out from competition is such that even seasoned marketers often fall into the trap of compromising quality during seasonal sales pushes.
Content marketers often think they can increase frequency to keep up with competitors. However, this approach can easily backfire, as no amount of content matters if it’s average, irrelevant, and misses the mark.
To avoid this, plan your content resources in advance. Mark the important seasonal dates on your marketing calendar so that you can create and distribute targeted content accordingly.
Pro Tip: Online forums such as Reddit and Quora can serve as a data goldmine for trending topics on the internet.
5. Analyze the market
Each seasonal holiday is unique in many regards. Firstly, the market scenario will change and it’s hard to predict a fixed outcome for any marketing campaign. Also, your competitors will also look to make the most of each seasonal sales opportunity.
Pay close attention to shifting market trends. For example, focus on e-mail marketing and mobile-first content initiatives.
Studies suggest users are opening a lot more emails on their smartphones compared to laptops or PC. Today, 81% of all emails are now opened and read on mobile devices. Irrespective of content genre or industry, your content must be mobile-friendly.
As the CEO and co-founder of Traktion, Saher Shodan is passionate about helping businesses scale with the right growth talent. Having started his career as part of the Uber launch team in India, Saher has 5+ years scaling marketplace businesses across 3 countries. He is also the co-founder of P2P events platform, Lemonade.
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