Ring in the Holiday Season with a Polished Digital Marketing Plan

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Holiday retail sales are likely to increase between 1% and 1.5%, resulting in sales between $1,147 billion and $1,152 billion from November through January. A variety of external factors impact how your customers make purchase decisions this season, such as the pandemic, cultural issues, and the upcoming election. As a result, your brand would be wise to take steps to ensure your marketing plan is prepped and polished to reach your customers across all of your channels, no matter how different the holidays look this year. What will people care about when shopping for their loved ones? What should you consider when designing creative and writing copy? Three main things:

1. Urgency: Consumers will shop earlier to make sure what they want is in stock
2. Safety: 72% of Holiday Shoppers report interest in shopping online this season more than visiting retailers in person
3. Availability: 55% of shoppers tried an alternate brand during the pandemic

Although this holiday season is causing a lot of uncertainty, you can take steps as a marketer to handle it with ease. Our digital marketing experts have gathered the following tips to help you get started!

General Holiday Checklist

We’ve compiled a short checklist that applies to all of your marketing channels. Get your planning started by checking off the following:

• Confirm budgets for each of your channels
• Stack hands-on holiday goals and KPIs
• Finalize your promotional calendar and cross-channel strategy
• Review any learnings or challenges you had last year and be prepared to tackle them this year. For example, did you have issues with fulfillment last year? How will you handle those issues this year?

How to Prepare Each of Your Marketing Channels for the Holidays

Dive into each of your channels to ensure you aren’t overlooking anything outdated, like budgets or messaging.

Search

• Update ads with holiday copy. Consider if customizer ads are right for your messaging, such as promotional countdowns or geo-targeted ads
• Make sure your feed optimizations are up-to-date for any new products that have come in
• Ensure you have holiday keyword coverage
• Take advantage of extensions and clean up your existing extensions
  • Check for broken landing pages or anything else outdated
• Perform keyword optimizations
• Experiment with up-and-coming ad formats like Google Discovery Ads

YouTube

• Check audiences and placements
• Upload holiday-centric video creative
• Change your headlines to holiday-focused CTAs, and call out promotions in your headlines during sale periods
• Take advantage of the following TrueView ads:
  • TrueView for Reach for awareness: optimize toward reach and impressions
  • TrueView In-Stream for consideration: optimize toward views
  • TrueView for Action for conversions: optimize toward conversion action set

Amazon

• Include holiday messaging in your campaigns and review your performance from last year to see what products did well
• Build out campaigns for any new products and any new keyword coverage
• Are some of your products seasonal? Be sure to boost bids on those campaigns!

Programmatic

• Have various sets of visually appealing creative that highlights your biggest holiday value props and captures the spirit of your brand
• Experiment with improving brand awareness through YouTube and general prospecting in the months leading up to the holidays 
  • Follow up with dynamic remarketing ads to focus in on your lower-funnel efforts

Social

• Prepare your campaigns with holiday-specific creative
• See if there are any campaign types not currently in use that would make sense for your company
• Do a cleanup of your audiences
• Take advantage of Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram to give your customers a seamless shopping experience

Now that you know what steps you can take to improve your marketing strategy, you can begin implementing relevant updates for the holiday season. If you are looking for more in-depth strategic guidance, download our recent white paper with 13 ROI-driving digital marketing tactics, you can try out this quarter.

Fill out the form to download the white paper!

Marisa Mohn