When the holidays start approaching, you should begin preparations for the season as well – every e-commerce store knows that. You supplement your inventory with limited edition products and create tailored newsletters and campaigns, as is customary. Everyone loves a good holiday deal. And that all well and fine, but if you want to go one step further, you need to think about tailoring your content marketing strategy accordingly as well. It’s been said – and proven – that the holidays are the ideal time to create engaging articles surrounding the season. Shoppers are eager to consume this type of content and are expecting to see it prominently featured on sellers’ websites. So, here are 5 ideas on how to adjust your content marketing to the holiday season.
1) Summary blog posts
With the year coming to a close, you can commemorate it by gathering in one place and sharing a summary of sorts of the most-read articles and other pieces of content. This is the perfect time to highlight the special news your company’s shared over the year, as well as mentions and other accomplishments. If your brand was worn by a celebrity or the company was featured in a magazine you find important, for instance, you get to highlight it for the holiday season. Showcasing your pride in something like this will help inspire conversions and grow brand presence during the busiest shopping season of the year.
This type of content is usually formatted as a list with each point referencing an article you find important to feature. When you have your content ready, use images to illustrate your points. Shortlists are a good way to generate a good amount of website traffic with a low bounce rate – a win-win for an e-commerce store.
Aside from highlighting the best-performing content, you can also choose to focus attention on the top products of the year – something like “the year’s best-selling products”. A list like this could help your new visitors decide about buying the products in your store and provide context for the most popular items there. The final touch here would be to show how your existing customers interact with your products to shorten the path to purchase.
2) Announcement posts
Tease your customers – and avid blog readers – about the content you have planned for the next year. In a sense, this is your chance to lock pre-sales or RSVPs to any future launch events you might have in store. Moreover, this might also be a good opportunity for you to get feedback from your customers on a product you might be unsure whether to unveil by gauging interest over a particular item.
Give your customers – on Social Media, for example – a list of products you are considering for launch next year and ask for feedback information. This data will not only help you be better informed in your buying decisions, but also in avoiding wasting money on items that may have questionable success in the long run.
3) Holiday gift guides
The busiest time for e-commerce stores is a holiday season – and it doesn’t even have to be the Christmas-themed one. Why, you ask? Because everyone is looking to buy gifts for the holidays, but not everyone knows what to buy. With so many different “categories” of people in a person’s life, it’s a pretty difficult task. You have family members, partners, kids, close friends, co-workers, and where does the list end?!
Help your customers shop efficiently by meeting them half-way – provide a detailed guide of what to buy for each person on the list. The more detailed the guide is, the more useful it will be to customers. For example, you can filter it according to the budget available, interests, age, type of relationship, etc. Moreover, you can use the starting price of $25 if that is your average order value and then include some higher-priced items or add-on products to raise the AOV.
4) Holiday style guides
The holiday season is always full of celebrations what with parties at work, home, friends’ houses, neighbors, schools… How to decorate your dwelling in Christmas spirit? What to wear to an occasion of this type? Help your customers in making a decision by providing a style guide for home decorating or choosing an outfit for each of these events.
Make a selection of furniture and accessories – or complete outfits – and feature all the products in a style guide. For instance, if your e-commerce store sells clothing, showcase multiple outfits by varying your products intended for different holiday occasions – give customers solutions to the question: Which outfit is better for a family gathering rather than a company party?.
What you mustn’t forget to do is add links to the products you are displaying to make it easier on customers to visit product pages for the items that pique their interest and add them to cart. Moreover, focus on different demographics as much as possible (as with holiday gift guides) to see better results to your marketing efforts.
5) Holiday promotions of the day
The content used for daily promotions should be largely the same as that for the previously mentioned guides – only in a different format. With holiday promotions of the day, you could have a countdown to Christmas or New Year’s Eve, with each day highlighting a different product or a combination of them. Furthermore, you can also choose to feature specific deals on different days. By using this tactic for multiple holiday seasons, you can encourage customers to return to your e-commerce store on repeated occasions and eventually transform them into lifetime customers over time.
You must agree, these content marketing ideas are pretty nifty, but they only represent half of the effort necessary to drive conversions during the holidays. The rest of the work has to be invested in distributing and promoting content to reach as many potential customers as possible. Without those additional efforts, your content will just get lost in the crowded marketplace.
In case you are experiencing troubles with maintaining an engaging Social Media presence or some other aspect of digital marketing, we are here for you. Contact TheIuvo today and let’s talk!
