Beat Out Your Competitors With These Tips for the Holiday Season

As business owners, we’re heading into the busiest time of year. Black Friday, Boxing Day and Christmas can seem like looming events to ‘get through’ rather than being an opportunity to maximise sales and customer loyalty. While nobody can predict what a COVID-Christmas will look like, we do know that for the most part of 2020, customers have increasingly shopped online. By planning your festive campaigns early, you can avoid the chaos of this period. While shoppers seem to leave their Christmas shopping later and later, the early bird gets the worm when it comes to catching those qualified leads.

Get Into the Spirit

Did you know, WordPress offers a free special effect to make it ‘snow’ on your website? This is just one of the ways that you can get into the spirit, which customers love to see. Here are some of the other opportunities that this season offers:

• Update your branding, theming it to the season. Whether you enlist some design help or do it yourself, creating a new website header banner or cover photo for social media should include a call to action and link.

• Offer Christmas promotions, gift certificates, discounts and competitions. This is a great way to target any last minute shoppers looking for bargains online. Some ideas for this incentive include a special gift, free gift wrapping or free delivery/shipping. You can do this at any time of year, but people love winning prizes and are desperate for deals when the funds are low. For the user, little things add up!
• If you offer a range of products or services, consider bundling them into a one-off trial. Digital options are a great option for last minute shoppers.

Google My Business

Google has just launched a mini-site of holiday marketing resources, all to help business owners connect with users in a COVID-era festive season. The Small Business Holiday Hub can help you target customers across Google Search, Shopping and Maps, with personalised tools designed to help customers find your business online. Here’s a deeper look at the lessons, live streams, guides and tools available in Australia and New Zealand.

Grow My Store

Grow My Store is made for businesses with an online store. If you have a physical store, Google has launched a separate tool for brick and mortar stores; this is unfortunately not yet available in the APAC region. If you’d like to capitalise on this tool from Google, the Vine Digital team can help you create a digital presence in time for the festive shopping season. Grow My Store analyses your site’s UX, comparing your site’s performance to competitors in the same retail category. To use it:

1. Enter your business’ URL.
2. Grow My Store will generate a full report of tailored recommendations for improvement. This may take several hours.

Google does not ask for you to verify ownership of the site in order to get a report, meaning you can analyse your competitors’ sites as well.

Marketing Lessons

Google wants you to succeed in search results – that’s why the holiday hub has a range of short marketing lessons, all under 16 minutes in length. Some of these lessons include:

• How to list products for free on Google
• How to make it easy for users to find you
• How to create an effective social media strategy
• The best practices of SEO
• Existing guides on how to utilise the various features of Google My Business

Offer End of Year/New Year Advice

If you’re publishing SEO content, this time of year is rich in topics to choose from. From the perspective of your business, it’s a great opportunity to write a ‘wrap’ style piece that positions your business’ successes, adding a personal touch to your messaging to customers as well as there being many keyword opportunities.

SEO content is all about writing useful and authentic content: when you focus on writing applicable content, speaking to the customer’s desire to improve themselves and their lifestyle, there is much opportunity for your brand to connect with the user. From New Year’s resolutions to gift ideas, get creative and start brainstorming!

Say thank you!

Christmas is a time of reflection and gratitude. As a business owner, you’ll agree when we say that our customers give us much to be grateful for. They are an important foundation for your business! This time of opportune for saying thank you to these loyal, long-term customers. Whether it’s via an e-Christmas card or some other form of greeting, it has some tangible benefits:

• It keeps you front of mind.
• It encourages repeat purchases, as the customer feels valued and connected to your business. It rewards their conversion with positive reinforcement.
• It reminds the customer why they supported you to begin with.

Try linking up with customers and prospects on social media – request and respond to questions, engaging with them authentically.

Customise Your Advertising

Paid advertising is a great way of targeting your strategy to reach new customers as well as remarketing to past customers. Through some urgent language to draw clicks, you can drum up excitement and get noticed among a sea of contenders! You can do this through:

• Running Facebook ads
• Running PPC ads
• Running display banners

Our PPC team would love to help you do this, soaring your sales into next year and future-proofing your digital presence with it.

Give Vine Digital a call today to find out how we’re helping our clients prepare for the festive season, and how we can help you grow and make the most of the opportunities these holidays too.