The holiday season will be here before you know it, and now is the perfect time to map out your digital-marketing campaigns in order to maximize your sales during this festive time. Everyone is out looking for the perfect present, and you want to get a piece of that pie while it’s still up for grabs. Here are 5 ways you can get your business ready for the holidays:
Create a Marketing Calendar
To have a successful holiday season, you need to make a plan of action. Add meetings, calls and tasks to your 1CRM Calendar to stay on top of your goals. Assign teams to those tasks, and 1CRM will send them an email notification. Here are a few things to consider adding to your calendar:
- Upcoming promotions and associated content
- Email campaigns and auto-responders
- Social media campaigns
- Holiday-related content for your website and social media
Consider looking at your trends for previous years. What worked and what didn’t? What was the most popular item or content on your website? Was there a high and low point in traffic? Did you have enough inventory or staff to match the demand? By answering these questions, you’ll be able to improve your results year-to-year.
Clean & Organize Your Home
The holidays are a time for people to get together, and that usually includes getting your house in order for guests. You might tidy around, and put out some decorations and food to show people a good time. Like your physical home, people will be visiting your virtual home too – your business’ website. It needs to be ready too! You don’t want guests getting lost when they visit it, hitting dead ends, or thinking the place could do with a tidy and renovation. Here is a checklist of items for you to get ready:
- Make sure your FAQ page is up to date
- Contact information is visible on your website’s homepage
- Return and shipping policies are clearly displayed
- Check there are no broken links on your website (a plugin like Broken Link Checker can help you find them)
- Consider adding extra security to your website too. With more visitors, there is a greater risk of someone visiting with ill-intentions. You could add a firewall, make sure your passwords are secure, remove old users, possibly upgrade your server, and upgrade or delete unused plugins.
While you’re at it, add a bit of holiday content as well. Perhaps a themed blog post and maybe a seasonal slider or image for your website. Lastly, consider adding customer reviews or testimonials and a press section to show off your praise. The more information you provide, the more trustworthy you’ll appear.
Promote your Business
During the holidays, every business is vying for the attention of customers, and you want to get your name out there and on their Christmas lists too. Here are a few ways you can draw some attention to yourself:
Landing Pages: Try a one-pager to show off a holiday collection or to promote a sale. Use Lead Guerrilla to build mobile-friendly landing pages for each of your offers, programs and campaigns with full tracking capability that allows you to measure and drive conversion.
Email Marketing Blasts: Send a coupon to your customers or let them know about your latest blog post.
Paid Advertising: Create engaging ads and target your audience in order to bring in new business. Popular avenues include Facebook and Twitter advertising, and Pay Per Click ads on Google and Bing.
Blog Posts: Use blog posts to communicate with your followers on a social level. Make them feel that there’s a person behind the screen. Anyone searching the topic you’re discussing may stumble upon your website through a search engine, and you can share your posts on social media too.
Your Website: Why not refresh some of your important pages? This is a great time to fine-tune your front page in order to really hook your visitors.
Automate your Business
The holidays can be a busy time. Cooking, wrapping gifts, buying gifts, and just soaking up all the fun of the holidays. The last thing you might feel like doing is tearing yourself away from a party to go and send some emails. Fear not! By using tools like Lead Guerrilla, you can automate many of those time-consuming business management processes. Here are a few tasks you can set to auto-pilot for the holidays:
- Email marketing automation. Automatically respond to a variety of requests, and send follow-ups to nurture your customer relationships – all while you’re hitting up the eggnog! Every interaction will also appear in your 1CRM, so that you have a complete profile of every customer.
- Social media and blog content publishing. Create enough social media and blog content for the holidays and then set them to automatically publish on certain days. That way, when the holidays are getting busy, your social media presence won’t suffer.
- Monitoring mentions of your brand online. Create Social Monitors and scan for Twitter mentions and hashtags to collect client activity data.
- How did those marketing campaigns do? Track your success during the holidays using Lead Guerrilla’s generated reports.
Run Holiday Sales
In this season of giving, businesses also tend to give major discounts! To get in on the action, you can run a “buy one get one free” sale, offer 50% off on your entire store, give free shipping for 24 hours and so much more! When planning your sales, keep in mind that you want to create a sense of urgency. You want people to commit to buying your product, not go and browse at other options.
Whether you sell online or in person, you can package your product or service in such a way that you are taking the holidays into account, and are thereby increasing the chances of it becoming someone’s Christmas present. You could put multiple products or services together into a bargain holiday package. Offer a limited edition version just for the holidays – whether it’s a new look for a current product or offering one you don’t usually.
Keep your business running smoothly during the holidays into the New Year with 1CRM and Lead Guerrilla. Working together, they make it easy to do more every day – including the holidays – with essential CRM and Marketing Automation features at prices that won’t cut into your holiday shopping! Give your business an extra little gift by getting 1CRM + Lead Guerrilla today.
How is your business taking part in the holiday season? Share your ideas below!
